Three Cairns Climate Program for the Global South

Goal: Restore degraded forest habitat to combat desertification and achieve carbon neutrality goals

For the past seven years, Baboucarr Joof has worked as a forest ranger — surveying rivers and mangrove health, advancing community forestry initiatives, and measuring indicators for the UN Convention to Combat Desertification. Known as the global voice for land, the UNCCD promotes practices that avoid, reduce, and reverse land degradation, an issue to which Joof is deeply committed.

Goal: Create more sustainable supply chains among multinationals working in the Global South

As a sustainability and climate change senior associate at PwC in her home country of Perú, Lucía Castellares Tello '25 MEM acquired a range of technical and leadership skills. She helped measure and audit corporate sustainability indicators, conducted assurance of annual reports, crafted sustainability initiatives, and ran materiality and climate risk analyses.

Goal: Engage in sustainable business and development projects that empower local communities

Ever since she was a child, Mahica Iyer ’25 MEM has straddled two worlds: She grew up amid the glittering towers of Dubai, UAE. The community in her hometown of Mumbai, meanwhile, experienced frequent power outages, a scarcity of clean water, and poor waste management. Iyer later attended college in Illinois and then went on to work as a consultant in supply chain sustainability.

Goal: Advancing Ghana’s transition to a net-zero economy

Benedicta Asiedu ’25 MEM has witnessed profound economic transformation in her home country of Ghana. It is one of the world’s largest exporters of gold, and it exports agricultural goods, most significantly cacao, to global markets. Since 2007, when oil in commercial quantities was first discovered, Ghana has also become a producer and exporter of crude oil. These three commodities alone have helped the country move from the edge of economic collapse three decades ago to, as the World Bank declared in 2019, the world’s fastest growing economy. (This growth has since slowed.)

Goal: Promote environmental management strategies in Colombia that conserve ecosystem services and promote local welfare

Jorge Andrés Forero Fajardo ’25 MEM enrolled at YSE with a clear vision. “I came here with the idea of working on the conservation and protection of strategic tropical ecosystems to combat climate change and protect wildlife."

Goal: Help India’s Indigenous communities and smallholder farmers reclaim natural resource rights.

It was natural for Ananya Rao ’25 MESc to study anthropology in college. She grew up speaking four languages. She lived in a city but spent time with smallholder famers, industrial laborers, and native tribes living in protected forests. She has, she says, “comfortably navigated 18 countries across four continents.” The rich cultural tapestry of our world is familiar to Rao—and this is what she wants to protect by empowering local communities and their longstanding traditions in the frontline fight against ecological crisis.

Goal: Merge finance and water management for a more just and secure water future

According to the World Bank, the Global South could lose up to 6% of its GDP by 2050 due to water scarcity, with women and the poor most vulnerable.

Srishti Singh ’25 MEM is well aware of these, and many other, water-related challenges, as she most recently worked at India’s Central Pollution Control Board, where she was the sole social scientist on a team of physical scientists. “I realized I needed interdisciplinary training to become an effective leader in the water and climate space,” she says. “This led me to Yale.”

Goal: Work as a bridge between policymakers and academia to advance climate mitigation and adaptation strategies

Climate change poses a particular threat to island nations. Laura Polanco Valdez, who was born and raised in the Dominican Republic, understands this very well. Her homeland was ranked one of the 10 most affected nations by climate events between 1997 and 2016, according to the Global Climate Index. The pace of these events is only accelerating, and their scale increasing.

Goal: Create legal and social strategies for establishing low-emission agricultural and clean energy practices

Natalia Espinosa Caballero was born and raised in the Cordoba region of northern Colombia, where one in four workers is employed in the agricultural sector. While farming and livestock production are vital to Cordoba’s economy, they are also taking a toll on the environment, Espinosa says.

“My upbringing influenced my particular interest in this issue,” she notes.

Goal: Contribute to comprehensive tropical forest management practices and sustainable conservation efforts

As an officer for monitoring and evaluation in the Philippine Department of Environment and Natural Resources, Aira Mae Tingzon Gavan had a front-row seat to the far-reaching damage caused by deforestation. Small-scale logging of tropical forests, she says, presents one of the country’s most urgent environmental challenges.

Goal: Generate and communicate science to preserve ecosystems and biodiversity

Ecuador, where Sofía Montalvo is from, is one of the world’s most biodiverse countries. Climate change, however, is exerting intense pressure on many of the country’s ecosystems. Forest habitats are disappearing due to local extractive economies. 

“Ecuador has many excellent people and a lot of potential, but we need someone to offer encouragement and support to get different environmental projects going,” Montalvo says. “I want to be that person.”

Goal: Build bridges between UN programs and Indigenous communities in the Amazon

How do you turn high-level climate commitments into on-the-ground action?

This is a question that Felipe Storch de Oliveira has grappled with for some years. A native of the state of Acre, Brazil, he has spent much of his career working to connect international financing from the United Nations to small NGOs within the Amazon rainforest. While he understands the value of this work, he also has seen how it can go wrong — how partnerships fray and how municipalities most in need of aid often struggle the most to secure it.