Empowering Climate Leaders in Frontline Communities with Flávia Neves Maia of Filha do Sol

Trailblazer Interview with Flávia Neves Maia, Founder and CEO of Filha do Sol, October 2022

Flávia is the founder and creative director of Brazilian Nonprofit Filha do Sol, an Obama Scholar and Dalai Lama fellow, empowering frontline communities and women to become climate leaders.

Hi Flávia, great to meet you. Thank you for the opportunity to talk. What are you currently working on?

I'm building Filha do Sol, an organization working on climate justice and restoring tropical nature. I'm fundraising for our first year of operation and a mangrove restoration project. I’ve also been working on my leadership skills, which are interrelated to my work on climate action and empowering women in climate leadership. We want to create a collective of climate coalitions to develop an area of environmental protection in the Brazilian Northeast and support communities by organizing to restore the mangroves in the region.

Can you tell me more about Filha do Sol?

 Filha do Sol has three entry points that complement each other:

• Our work serves climate and mangrove restoration, nature-based solutions, reducing emissions, and supporting climate adaptation. 

• Our work is about women's empowerment. We promote gender equality by educating girls and women and elevating them to become Climate Leaders. We are creating women-led climate coalitions. 

• Finally, we tap into the power of the tropics, one of our first lines of defense against multiple climate crises. Preventing tropical deforestation and conserving tropical ecosystems is one of the most powerful strategies to avoid the next pandemic. Also, some of the hottest regions in the world are in the tropics. If we don't limit global warming to 1.5 degrees, we will reach the limits of human adaptation. Currently, we have more than three billion people living in the tropics. Some predictions show that for every single degree increase in average global temperature, 1 billion people will be pushed beyond liveable conditions. It will be too hot to live in the tropics if we don't do something. So Filha do Sol also envisions a network of tropical communities working together to avoid cascading effects of the climate crisis in the Tropics and the world.

At Filha do Sol, we fundamentally help communities get organized around issues that matter to them. When you go to a frontline community like mine, you won’t see many people talking about climate change. Even if that community is among the most impacted by climate change, climate change is often seen as a distant issue. So Filha do Sol talks about climate change in a way that it's relevant to people's daily challenges and connects their local challenges with the global conversation. In the process, we are promoting climate justice, including gender justice.

What are your goals for the organization in the near future? 

In 2023 our main goals are to get the funding to restore at least 200 hectares of mangroves, and we want to elevate 300 women to become climate justice leaders. We also want to create the first Climate Coalition in the APA Delta do Parnaiba region in the Brazilian Northeast to connect stakeholders from different communities to create and undertake a climate mandate for our region. By advocating for a climate mandate in the region, we can put the region on the map of climate action. Our work is to ensure that people know about us and that climate-related resources, such as knowledge and funding, flow to where they are most needed: frontline communities.

How do you decide which communities to work with? 

We go where people are the most impacted by climate change. We started our work in the Brazilian Northeast, a global hotspot for climate change. We work with local organizations already doing relevant work and form groups for environmental restoration. This work can be planting trees, cleaning waste from mangroves, educating kids, and valuing cultural and traditional knowledge and our Brazilian culture. We work with organizations to show them that they are already Climate Leaders. A collective of grassroots organizations can drive real change. 

Filha do Sol recognizes that mangrove restoration is not simply about planting trees. It's about creating the right social and governance conditions to make our natural and community systems healthier. 

Can you tell me more about your fundraising efforts?

Fundraising can be a challenging and beautiful process. I'm learning that fundraising is about building relationships and connecting people with your mission and the emotion behind your vision. I am currently fundraising primarily in the US. What we are doing in Brazil has a global impact. It's not simply about restoring mangroves for our community but restoring mangroves that help the world because mangroves are carbon sinks, and the resilience of the tropics is key to preventing multiple crises like the next pandemic and climate migration. I have been finding that it makes a lot of sense for US donors to invest in building climate resilience in Brazil. It is not only the most ethical decision to make but also makes sense from an economic perspective, considering that conservation and regeneration of tropical ecosystems are key in preventing climate migrations and the next pandemic.

Can you tell me about your background and how you got into this work?

When I look back, I see now that climate was always very present in my heritage, family, and community because I live in one of the hottest regions in the world. I live in the Brazilian northeast, a global hotspot for climate change and a very poor region where more than half of my country's poverty is concentrated. There is an ongoing desertification process and a desertified area greater in size than England. Now I understand that my ancestors were climate migrants. Although they didn't refer to themselves as climate migrants, they had to migrate because of drought. Climate and an awareness of how climate impacts people were always in my DNA, so to say. So I now see that I got into this work and created Filha do Sol because I know what climate change does to people, and I want to alleviate the impact of the extreme heat on people. 

Ten years ago, after I finished my studies in urban planning, I decided to study climate resilience and completed a postgraduate degree in sustainability. Not many people were talking about climate resilience at the time, so it was very interesting to be one of the first people trying to understand how to reduce emissions and start adapting communities to the already present environmental harm.

My focus has always been on climate work. Being part of the inaugural cohort of the Women's Leadership Network, promoted by the Columbia Global Center in Rio, gave me the knowledge and power I needed to promote gender equality and work on women's empowerment.

More recently, I became an Obama scholar. The Obama Scholars Program is designed by the Obama Foundation to inspire, empower, and connect leaders like me to change their worlds. In this program, we learn how to be community organizers and change our surroundings. At the Obama Foundation, I designed the action plan for Filha do Sol.

How do you help people understand the impact of climate and how can they take action?

You always have to start with real problems. Suppose you talk about the impact of less rain on crops or agricultural production. In that case, you are talking about climate in a way that people on the front lines can understand because they are directly affected by the problem. You can speak with fishermen and communities about how fish are disappearing or becoming smaller, and it's becoming harder and harder to fish and to live from fishing. Two generations ago, a fisherman could raise a whole family just from his income, and now they can't. This is a climate issue. We know now that fish are migrating away to less acidic and hot waters.

Sometimes, if you start talking about climate change to communities facing urgent problems, such as figuring out how to feed their family that day, they may tend to think that climate is a distant issue and should be a concern only for developed countries. Yet when you start connecting the dots and revealing that what communities are facing, such as crop failures and no fishery,  are actually the impacts of climate change, and we can do something about it, you see a shift in perspective – people start to engage in the climate conversation.

At the end of the day, our work is to help frontline communities to see that they are not helpless and they are not alone. There are many people there who can potentially become  climate leaders. Communities are not isolated. We can connect them with the climate movement. We like to say to people on the ground: we are not victims, and we can do something about the challenges we face. Frontline communities have a lot of knowledge because they have direct experience and on-the-ground knowledge and can contribute to solutions.

“We work to elevate frontline communities and help them to see that they already have the power through knowledge and community. I’m not here to teach about climate change. I’m here to show them they are already Climate Leaders and are not alone.”

Can you tell me more about communities’ different perceptions of climate change?

I learned that many communities in the early stages of development that still need basic infrastructure often see climate as distant and something for the elites to be concerned about. What's important to define is that a large majority of the problems frontline communities face are part of a broader issue of climate change. When you think about the intersectionality of climate vulnerabilities, you understand that all the problems have the same root: humans' broken relationship with the rest of nature. It's very powerful when you connect present problems with the climate problem. When you connect racism or gender inequality with the climate problem, you help people to see that acting on climate can be done from a place they already know of; they are already familiar with it because it has to do with daily, concrete challenges, not abstractions. By advancing their own agendas, they are advancing their climate agenda. This change of perception is key if we want to create a grounded and inclusive climate movement.

What inspires you most in your work?

What inspires me the most is seeing so many people working to transform and evolve societal systems that don’t serve us anymore. When I see people across every region, from every background, working to transform the world, I get very hopeful. 

It's easy to become hopeless because we see so much data showing how we are destroying the planet and not even close to limiting global warming. At the same time, when you see how much people can do, I see it's in our hands, and I am hopeful and inspired by what people are already doing.

We also need to talk more about human nature. It bothers me when I hear that humans are only destroying the planet. It's also true that humans are creative and can adapt and restore. 

“We forget that we are nature. We are not only in a relationship with nature. We are nature as well. Climate action is about improving our relationships with ourselves, others, and the rest of the planet.”

What’s next?

We want to make sure that the world knows about Filha do Sol, the Brazilian Northeast, and that the world knows that solutions to climate change don't always have to be high-tech. They can also be low-cost, soft, and social.

We envision a future in which it is obvious that we need to address the social and governance aspects of climate change, not only the environmental aspects of climate change.

Connecting the front lines is essential because creating positive change is about people and empowering their voices. Filha do Sol is proud to be part of this growing global movement for more climate justice. 

How can we support Filha do Sol?

I want to invite people to learn more about us. If you feel connected with our mission, reach out to find ways to collaborate. You can also donate. In the next several months, we need to raise $300,000 from small and big donors. By doing the important work of increasing the resiliency of the tropics, we provide a benefit for the whole planet and direct resources where they are needed the most.