Edition: 12 August 2026
Theme: Community Solidarity
The climate responses that work best come from communities working together. They come from those on the ground with firsthand knowledge, experience and heritage to protect. This week we look at five stories from communities around the world that have responded to climate change not with resistance but with solidarity – building a Good Life and a Good Planet, together.
1. Community groups in Bangladesh turning knowledge into government action
In flood-prone northern Bangladesh, Community Resilience Action Groups aided by Concern Worldwide are helping villages turn local knowledge into practical climate action. Meeting monthly in Hatibandha and Sundarganj, these groups identify risks, set priorities, and advocate for them in union budgets and development plans. Their work has already helped improve early warning systems, flood-resilient infrastructure, and access to climate-smart agriculture, showing how resilience is strongest when government planning is shaped by the communities most exposed to climate risk.
Source: Concern Worldwide / Zurich Climate Resilience Alliance — July 2026
Buen Vivir connection: Climate resilience is built when communities have the power to identify their own priorities and see them reflected in the decisions that shape their lives. The CRAGs in Bangladesh are a model of what locally led adaptation can look like.
Why it matters: Bangladesh’s flood-vulnerable communities face some of the sharpest climate impacts on Earth, with the least historical access to the decisions that determine their safety. A model that channels their knowledge directly into local government budgets is both more effective and more just than any top-down alternative.
2. Indigenous Women in Guatemala are remaking food systems
In Guatemala’s highlands, Indigenous women are strengthening food security by combining traditional Mayan farming knowledge with practical climate adaptation techniques. The programme now involves more than 1,000 families across 12 municipalities, with women making up most participants and leading community gardens that use intercropping, seed saving, soil care, water management, and nutrition training. With poultry farms added in 2025, many families now have surplus produce and higher monthly incomes, while women’s regular gatherings have become a vital network for sharing knowledge, solving problems, and sustaining community self-determination in the face of climate stress.
Source: Climate Home News — July 2026
Buen Vivir connection: Food sovereignty and security — the ability of a community to grow, access, share, and control its own food — is a vital aspect of Buen Vivir. These Guatemalan women are building solutions from the inside, using local traditional knowledge.
Why it matters: Women-led community food systems are among the most durable and equitable forms of climate adaptation available. When the people who feed communities are also the ones designing the food system, the result is both more resilient and more just.
3. Mutual connections in Philadelphia
In North Philadelphia, Rutgers University researchers are partnering with the mutual aid group Homies Helping Homies to rethink how climate science engages with vulnerable communities. By joining trusted food and supply distribution events instead of relying on conventional surveys, researchers learned how flooding, heat, and resource scarcity are experienced alongside housing insecurity, language barriers, health access gaps, and distrust of institutions. The collaboration has reshaped the research itself, showing that mutual aid networks are not just sources of data but essential infrastructure for locally grounded climate adaptation.
Source: Rutgers University — December 2025
Buen Vivir connection: Knowledge is relational. The Rutgers and Homies Helping Homies collaboration is an example of what happens when researchers stop extracting data from communities and start co-designing and building understanding with them. That power shift changes everything.
Why it matters: Climate adaptation that does not reach the most vulnerable communities is not adaptation. Mutual aid organisations are already doing the relational work that makes outreach possible. Partnering with them, rather than building parallel systems, is both more effective and more ethical.
4. Minneapolis community centre rewiring itself for the climate era
In Minneapolis, Sabathani Community Centre is marking 60 years as a neighbourhood anchor by transforming itself into a climate-ready resilience hub. The centre is replacing ageing systems with geothermal heating and cooling, rooftop solar, and battery storage so it can stay powered during outages and continue offering food, shelter, medical-device charging, and support during extreme weather. The project is also creating clean-energy training opportunities for local young people, turning a trusted community institution into both emergency infrastructure and a practical investment in the neighbourhood’s shared future.
Source: Sabathani Community Centre — July 2026
Buen Vivir connection: A community that invests in its own capacity to care for its most vulnerable members, across whatever conditions come, is practising Buen Vivir in one of its most essential forms. In doing so Sabathani is deepening the social fabric that makes climate resilience and recovery possible.
Why it matters: Community resilience hubs, spaces that are trusted, accessible, and climate-ready, are increasingly recognised as among the most cost-effective climate adaptation investments available.
5. Community-owned solar changing the balance of power
Cooperative Energy Futures in Minneapolis is showing how the clean energy transition can benefit the people it serves by building community-owned solar systems that deliver bill credits to members, including renters and low-income households without access to rooftop solar. Its Lake Elmo Community Solar Garden is part of a wider movement proving that locally owned renewable energy can build trust, share economic benefits more fairly, and strengthen community agency. Similar projects, from UK community energy groups to People Power Solar Cooperative in Oakland, show that solar can be more than infrastructure, it can be a tool for collective self-determination.
Source: Cooperative Energy Futures — Lake Elmo Solar Garden, 2025
Source: Earth.org — Community Energy Overview, August 2025
Buen Vivir connection: Energy that is owned collectively, governed democratically, and whose benefits stay in the community is not just cleaner, it is an expression of Buen Vivir. That is the belief that the systems that sustain life should be local commons, not extracted for profit.
Why it matters: The clean energy transition will only be just if the communities who have historically borne the costs of fossil fuel extraction are among those who own and benefit from what replaces it. Community-owned solar is one of the clearest available models of what that looks like in practice.
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