Seeking sustainable pathways for land use in Latin America

Achieving sustainable development goals in Latin America, and doing resilience research for that matter, has its own challenges. The Global South is faced with different types of problems, and therefore solutions, in achieving global sustainability ambitions (Nagendra 2018, Nagendra et al. 2018). Although each country has its own particularities, the region shares a recent colonial past that focused on natural resource extraction, weak government institutions that do not prioritize the environment, and in many cases recent dictatorship regimes that have diminished social mobilization toward equity. Not surprisingly, Latin America is a hot spot for environmental conflicts, but also the home of many grass-roots movements that put the environment at the forefront of their agendas (Scheidel et al. 2020).