This archive collects solutions-journalism stories and milestones from Colombia — covering environmental protection, community-led initiatives, public health advances, and other measurable progress. Each entry highlights what’s working and why it matters.
Since taking power last year, leftist President Gustavo Petro has enacted a slate of new policies aimed at protecting Colombian forests, including paying locals to conserve woodland. The recent gains in Colombia mirror similar advances in the Brazilian Amazon, where leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has cracked down on forest clearing.
“This is really dramatic,” conservationist Rodrigo Botero told The Guardian. “It’s the highest reduction in deforestation and forest fires that there has been in two decades.”
Since last August, thousands of Awá have been forcibly displaced or suffered threats, intimidation, torture or forced recruitment by organized crime groups participating in drug trafficking and illegal mining.
Heritage Colombia is one of the most significant conservation investments the country has ever made — pooling $245 million from governments, international institutions, and private donors to protect nearly 80 million acres of land and sea over the next decade. Colombia holds roughly 10% of the world’s biodiversity, making it one of the most ecologically critical places on Earth to get this right. Crucially, local communities are central to the design, not an afterthought. If it succeeds, Heritage Colombia could become a replicable model for how nations fund lasting, community-rooted conservation at scale.
Colombia’s reef restoration effort is one of the most ambitious marine recovery programs anywhere on Earth — a government-backed push to plant one million coral fragments across 494 acres of degraded Caribbean seafloor. It pairs underwater nurseries and scientific method with indigenous and coastal communities whose knowledge of local waters runs deep. That combination matters: restoration ecologists consistently find that community-rooted programs outperform purely technical ones at scale. If it holds, this project offers a replicable model for reef recovery across the Caribbean and beyond.
Francia Márquez became Colombia’s first Black woman vice president on June 19, 2022, winning alongside Gustavo Petro with just over half the national vote. A former housekeeper and single mother from Cauca, one of Colombia’s poorest provinces, she rose to office through years of grassroots organizing against illegal gold mining — work that earned her the Goldman Environmental Prize and, along the way, death threats she refused to back down from. Now leading a new equality ministry, she’s focused on women’s rights, rural health care, and education for communities long shut out. Her election doesn’t undo generations of exclusion, but it changes what’s imaginable — for Afro-Colombian girls, for environmental defenders, and for movements everywhere insisting the overlooked belong at the table.
The Future Seeds facility will not only safeguard tropical crop biodiversity, but also serve as a living laboratory for some of the world’s most advanced agricultural technologies.
Since 2015, Belgium, Luxembourg, Canada, New Zealand, Spain, the Netherlands, Colombia, Germany, Austria, Portugal, five Australian states, ten American states, and D.C. have legalized assisted dying.
Panama, Ecuador, Colombia, and Costa Rica announced the Eastern Tropical Pacific Marine Corridor, a fishing-free corridor that will cover more than 200,000 square miles.
Mayor Claudia López announced that the city will add a total of 280 kilometers of bike lanes to the existing 550-kilometer network over the next four years. The long-term goal is to have half of all trips made on bikes or other micromobility alternatives such as scooters.
