INTRODUCTION OF JUAN FRANCISCO DIAZ

“My participation in the ISA program will allow me to cooperate with diverse environmental organizations to empower ancestral communities through environmental monitoring. Thus, community processes seeking for climate change mitigation and nature conservation will be strengthened.”

Juan Francisco Díaz (29 years) is a Geologist and a holder of an M.Sc. in Landscape Ecology from Greifswald University. His professional experience focuses on ecosystem protection in nature protected areas as well as supporting communities defending their territory from environmentally harmful activities. He co-founded TERRAE, a Colombian NGO led by geo-scientist committed to nature conservation by integrating scientific and community knowledge.

His ISA project aims at strengthening community base conservation by empowering the local community with relevant environmental monitoring skills. In this sense, the environmental community-based monitoring centre is based on two principal pillars: first, environmental education on key environmental aspects for communities that have been or could become affected by activities such as mining or petroleum exploitation. Second, the development of field skills for collecting independent environmental data assists communities to track their ecosystems’ state.