Latin America faces multiple, intersecting climate crises. The region is highly vulnerable to extreme weather, including droughts, floods, heatwaves, and glacial melting, which severely threaten biodiversity, food and water security, and the lives and livelihoods of rural and Indigenous communities. In 2024 disasters forced the displacement of an estimated 3.5 million people across Latin America and the CaribbeanIDMC Global Report on Internal Displacement, 2024. Massive deforestation and the authorization of oil exploration in the Amazon are accelerating climate impacts and undermines global mitigation efforts. Historic injustices such as colonization, land dispossession, structural inequality, and debt burdens, exacerbate vulnerabilities – as unjust debts and extractivism continue to progressively erode countries’ food, energy and climate sovereignty.
Underrepresented groups such as Indigenous Peoples, Afro-descendant communities, rural women, and youth experience the harshest impacts. Rural and Indigenous communities often live in territories rich in agrobiodiversity but receive no compensation for ecosystem services or stewardship. Environmental racism systematically exposes these communities to greater environmental harm while denying them equitable access to protection, resources, and decision-making power. Climate impacts deepen existing vulnerabilities, for example increasing care burdens, worsening health outcomes, and creating barriers to education and employment for women and girls. Women suffer gender-based violence in addition to the inherent risk to their activism. Shrinking civic space, criminalization of protest, and state repression remain critical barriers to community-led climate action.
The push for a low-carbon economy in Latin America and the Caribbean increasingly takes the form of green financialisation and climate colonialism, where global climate goals are pursued at the expense of local rights and sovereignty. For example, the expansion of clean energy and mining megaprojects, such as wind farms in lands of Indigenous, Afro-descendent and traditional communities, and lithium extraction in ecologically sensitive regions, often proceeds without free, prior, and informed consent. These projects, framed as “green solutions,” displace communities, degrade ecosystems, and drive conflicts – reproducing extractive, colonial dynamics under the guise of sustainability. Such trends highlight the urgent need for an energy transition grounded in justice that centers community leadership and safeguards territorial rights.
Latin America has a strong tradition of organized social movements and community resistance at national and regional levels. Pan-regional platforms such as the Foro Social de los Pueblos Amazónicos (FOSPA), the Foro Social, the Amazonian Initiative, and ACAFREMIN provide powerful convening spaces and advocacy platforms. At the national level, grassroots movements are driving legislative change – for example Bill 1594/2024 on climate displacement currently being processed in Brazil, which was built from grassroots organisations and human rights collectives. Similarly, in Guatemala, the process led by the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources to draft a legal framework for water provides opportunities for dialogue and consultation to ensure the proposals and knowledge of communities are included.
Across the region feminist, Indigenous, and Afro-descendant knowledge systems offer transformative alternatives for ecological governance and climate resilience, especially in agro-ecology, the care economy and territorial defence.
Progressive leadership in countries such as Brazil, Mexico and Peru is advancing inclusive narratives on climate finance, just energy transitions, and fiscal reform. Upcoming elections in Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador and Honduras may also bring new political momentum on climate justice (but may also negatively affect progress on the issue). Innovations in agroecology, food sovereignty, care economies, and movement-based approaches are growing across the region. National and regional processes on adaptation planning, green fiscal policy, and energy reform provide entry points for advancing climate justice agendas. Analysing these processes from a reparations and compensation approach as well as a critical decolonial lens presents opportunities for international cooperation, donor engagement, and scaling of locally led solutions. For example, the Escazú Agreement is an instrument that promotes the protection and participation of human rights defenders, and is the priority for mobilization and advocacy in the region.
The upcoming COP30 in Brazil and events leading up to it including the Leaders’ Meeting and Pre-COP provide significant influencing opportunities with particular emphasis on the impacts of climate change on LAC countries and to strengthen the participation, voices, and leadership of Indigenous women defenders and youth in key spaces for climate advocacy and action.
1) Strengthening Movements and Activism
The environmental movement is one of the main drivers of change in Latin America, defending life, territories, and people’s rights in the face of the extractive model and the climate crisis. However, civic space across the region is increasingly under pressure due to surveillance, legal restrictions, and violent repression. Civil society across the region is limited by a lack of resources, safe spaces for interaction, institutional recognition, and tools to influence public policy. Yet Latin American movements are resilient, intersectional, and well-organized. Indigenous peoples, communities and authorities play a key role in the management and protection of natural resources and are leading advocacy on key issues such as the ratification and implementation of the Escazú Agreement. Women’s movements focused on economic rights, justice, and care work are entry points for broader community organizing. Youth leadership, including through LCOY events and networks such as Reacción Red and SSF, is expanding.
Oxfam and CAN are partnering with diverse movements across Latin America, including public universities, feminist networks, platforms for cooperation among indigenous peoples, and the Alza la Voz por la Amazonía Campaign, as well as working on strengthening of the agrarian movement, such as with GRISEN (Grupo Impulsor de Semillas Nativas). We are also developing a Youth School with the International Land Coalition (ILC), strengthening the Platform for Defenders of Territory and the Environment (ILC) and women’s participation in Escazú Agreement forums, and supporting Indigenous women natural resource defenders in Guatemala.
Tools like the Gender Action Learning System (GALS) promote diverse masculinities, equality, co-responsibility in care work and the elimination of gender-based violence from communities to local and national public policies., And digital resilience training builds civic capacity in a context of increasing cyber threats. Regional anchors like CAN Latin America help distribute movement funding through trust-based models with built-in safeguards.
2) Mobilizing Climate Finance for Fair Climate Action
Climate finance in Latin America is marked by inequalities in access, with a heavy reliance on debt instruments. Countries like Bolivia see up to 89% of climate finance tied to debt, further entrenching economic dependence. There is also a need for more accessible climate finance mechanisms for local and national actors in Latin America, which include the participation of rural, Indigenous, and peasant communities. Access to these resources often requires technical and administrative capacities that act as a barrier to Indigenous communities and grassroots organisations accessing them. In another example, the Loss and Damage Fund is being tested solely for budget support for governments, and the means for communities to access funding have not been developed.
Momentum from regional and international climate processes, including the operationalization of the Loss and Damage Fund, opens windows for justice-oriented financing. National-level entry points include Bolivia’s Adaptation Agenda, Mexico’s tax and green reforms, Peru’s advancing the adaptation agenda of rural and indigenous women, and their access to financing, and Brazil’s leadership in multilateral forums. Oxfam’s Shadow Climate Finance Report and regional dialogues on debt-for-climate swaps and green fiscal reform show growing civil society leadership. Journalism is an underused tool to make climate finance more transparent and accountable.
In LAC Oxfam has developed a participatory methodology with local communities for measuring climatic Loss and Damages, including a prototype mobile application. We also work together with different civil society organizations towards influencing the mobilization of climate finance based on promoting a fair, inclusive climate focused on the most vulnerable communities.
3) Supporting Local Adaptation to Build Resilience
Adaptation is gaining traction in national planning processes, notably in Brazil’s roadmap across 15 sectors and Bolivia’s increasing water investments and women-led climate resilience efforts. The region promotes agroecological food systems, participatory land governance, and the right to Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) as cornerstones of community adaptation.
In Peru, we work with rural and Indigenous women and their agrarian guilds and to advance key narratives linked to agroecology, climate and gender and native seeds. Similarly, in Guatemala we support communities to diversify their production following agroecological principles, and facilitate spaces for knowledge and learning exchange and access to local markets, and in Honduras, supporting the economic empowerment of women, Indigenous peoples and communities is a key resilience strategy. In Colombia, territorial advocacy processes for informed, effective and collective decision-making have been strengthened. Other innovative approaches include gender-differentiated vulnerability indices in Mexico, and legal frameworks around the rights of nature in Ecuador and Peru. There is also a growing movement to reframe adaptation as a climate mitigation and justice strategy, and highlight the importance of life systems and ecosystems – helping re-prioritize it in public and donor agendas.
In Central America, we have strengthened community-based early warning systems, local risk governance, and climate-resilient livelihoods, led by women and youth. This approach has proven effective in anticipating crises and triggering early action, aligning closely with climate adaptation and social justice. In Colombia, Oxfam has supported community-led disaster risk management by integrating local knowledge and practices to address climate variability. The ECHO Amazonía initiative exemplifies efforts to shift power and resources in resilience-building. In El Salvador, we have reinforced community early warning systems and supported networks of hydroclimatic monitors.
4) Advancing a Just Energy Transition
Fossil fuel dependency, extractivism (including the mining of critical minerals such as copper and lithium as well as the oil industry), fuel subsidies and lack of regulatory safeguards challenge efforts toward a just energy transition in the LAC region. However, there is momentum for change across the region – as seen in Mexico’s debates on mining law reform, carbon pricing, and electricity subsidies, Colombia’s taxation models which aim to directly address energy poverty, and Bolivia’s community support for JET processes offers a strong foundation for inclusive transitions.
There is an opportunity to promote just energy transition agendas that respond to the needs and realities of local communities and indigenous and rural populations. Initiatives like dissemination clean cookstoves, gender and green bonds in Colombia, and parliamentary debates on carbon markets in Brazil are shaping national policies. Nonetheless, the risks of green colonialism, land grabbing, and socially regressive transition measures remain high, underscoring the need for rights-based governance.
Oxfam and CAN promote public debate and social dialogue on alternatives for a just transition in LAC, to ensure that clean energy not only contributes to reducing carbon emissions but also guarantees social and environmental benefits, with a commitment to justice and rights. We are developing an analysis of 33 countries on the just transition within the framework of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and National Adaptation Plans (NAPs), which will allow for a close link between adaptation and just transition agendas. Research will also be conducted on energy transition chains in South American countries.
Oxfam Mexico, together with Publish What You Pay and Fundar, helped establish the Regional Working Group for a Just Energy Transition in LAC (LATEJ) in 2022 with the aim of leading collective actions at the regional and national levels. Oxfam in Bolivia conducted a comparative study of different models implemented in countries with lithium extraction, including an analysis of a possible Bolivian model. Oxfam in Colombia is implementing a project on alternatives for JET from the perspective of peasant and indigenous women’s organizations, a benchmark for the national policy supporting energy communities. It also supports women-led documentation of the human rights impacts of wind and solar energy projects and transition minerals initiatives in local communities.