Catalina Riveros-Gómez is a PhD student whose work examines environmental justice, critical agrarian questions, political ecology, and biodiversity and biocultural conservation in Latin America. Her research project, “Living in and with the Forests: Partnering with Campesino Communities to Protect the Colombian Amazon,” focuses on Colombia’s northwestern Amazon, a biodiverse, culturally rich, and contested territory. The project examines how campesino communities navigate the agrarian, legal, political, and ecological dynamics shaping Forest Reserves, including agricultural expansion, cattle ranching, land speculation, unequal access to land and resources, and conservation policy. While these pressures are widely recognized, local knowledge, forms of stewardship and care, and community decision-making are often overlooked in debates about forest protection. Using a political ecology, environmental justice, and biocultural conservation lens, Riveros-Gómez connects high-level conservation policy with the lived realities of forest communities and broader debates about land, conservation, and environmental governance. Her work seeks to support strategies for protecting forests that are socially just, culturally grounded, and ecologically effective, with the people who inhabit these forests at the center.
Department and Institution:
Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, UC Berkeley
Bio/CV:
