In Guatemala’s southwest region lies a large lake with a storied history.
Lake Atitlán is one of Central America’s most critical local sources of drinking water, and is surrounded by volcanoes, a thriving tourism industry and an ancient Mayan culture. The Sololá region has long been home to Indigenous communities who have been attracted to its fertile land and pristine natural resources.
But in recent years, this site of natural beauty in Guatemala’s highlands has had to contend with the growing impacts of the climate and nature crises. Climate change is disrupting the rain cycle and significant areas of land show signs of erosion and loss of soil fertility. These changes are threatening crop production and pushing local people into food insecurity.
Elena Wason, co-executive director at Natün, a local non-profit supporting Indigenous people, told Climate Home News that community leaders have “identified deforestation and the effects of climate change in their communities as among their greatest concerns”. Forest cover declined by an estimated 12% in the past two years alone.
Women are often the social group most exposed to these changes and Natün has focused its efforts on reviving Indigenous agriculture techniques in a bid to improve climate resilience and empower female farmers.
How to fight drought
The impacts of climate change on Indigenous communities can often lead to further environmental damage as farmers are forced to rely on unsustainable practices, such as cutting down trees to clear more land. This can accelerate water scarcity, soil erosion and ultimately food insecurity.
An ongoing adaptation project led by Natün has sought to reverse these impacts, working with local people to combine modern climate-smart agriculture and ancestral knowledge. The approach involves the use of drought-resistant crops, organic pest management and soil conservation techniques. This is increasingly recognised as an effective way to strengthen climate resilience.
“Our approach is based on soil analysis and the use of locally resilient, endemic tree species, significantly increasing survival rates and ensuring sustainable water availability despite changing rainfall patterns,” Wason explained.
A US$170,000 grant from the Adaptation Fund-UNDP innovation platform (through the AFCIA programme) also allowed it to scale. For example, Natün established over 300 family food gardens – small spaces with shared resources that focus on growing nutrient-rich crops.
The project was built for the long-term by embedding innovation within Indigenous knowledge systems, organic farming and Mayan land stewardship rather than imposing external solutions. In this way, it ensures that communities remain the architects of their own resilience. Diversified revenue streams, including carbon credits and replicable learning kits, further support its longevity.
Nearly all of the typical Mayan gardens are managed by women, with the project training up to 30 women in climate-resilient practices, such as seed bank management. The approach has paid dividends by bolstering local food security and providing almost 19,000 people with sustainable food sources.
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“The project uses locally led innovation by helping to restore sustainable Indigenous Mayan practices, while empowering vulnerable communities and women to build resilience and adapt to climate change and bolster food security,” said Mikko Ollikainen, head of the Adaptation Fund.
“Community-led approaches like these can have profound positive impacts on the directly affected communities and beyond by creating practical scalable solutions,” he added.
Growing incomes
The programme was expanded in 2025 with the creation of over 260 small poultry farms, further diversifying family incomes. The early results have been positive: two-thirds of families with both a garden and poultry now have surplus produce and incomes that have grown by an estimated $61 per month.
“These impacts especially benefit women, who not only make up 75% of programme participants and have taken leadership roles in managing community gardens, but also generally take on the responsibility of providing nutritious food for their families,” said Wason.
The project follows an earlier $5.4 million activity in Guatemala, also funded by the Adaptation Fund, that focused on honey bee production, forest conservation and ancestral knowledge across Suchitepéquez and Sololá. The aim was to empower vulnerable communities and Indigenous populations to adapt to floods and landslides, while enhancing diverse production landscapes and livelihoods.
Advancing women’s rights and empowerment in climate adaptation
That project resulted in 6,093 hectares under forest management and conservation, nearly 1,500 beehives in operation, and 328 family gardens with the purpose of helping women adapt. Utilising such ancestral practices have helped to increase agricultural resilience in the Nahualate River basin, benefiting some 1,125 people.
Enduring benefits
The long-term benefits of the Lake Atitlán project will be in providing communities, especially women, with practical tools to respond to the environmental challenges of drought, storms and deforestation in the Sololá region. These challenges are becoming more pronounced as the climate becomes more extreme and unpredictable.
Guatemala is ranked among the most exposed countries to climate risk. The World Bank estimates that up to 83% of its GDP is generated in areas prone to disasters. As such, it is not only the people around Lake Atitlán who stand to benefit from sustainable farming techniques.
The Natün project is easily replicable by harnessing local knowledge and offering a practical model that can be adapted across Indigenous communities facing similar climate pressures. In a country with an Indigenous population of over 6 million people, this approach will be of importance to many other communities as they face similar existential crises in a warming world.
Adam Wentworth is a freelance journalist based in Brighton, UK.
