Webinar: Our Land, Our Future.
Thursday 23rd April at 6pm
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Join us as we celebrate Earth Day in conversation with two remarkable Indigenous women. Valiana Aguilar and Xananine Calvillo (pictured above)— both from Mexico and members of the Amos Climate Fellowship — will share how they are reclaiming land that was historically denied to their ancestors, and caring for it as an act of resistance.

Central America is one of the regions most affected by climate change. It is also a region with strong traditional patriarchal societies and where large corporations with little concern for the long-term impact of extractivism and pollution can go largely unchallenged. Women are at the forefront of developing local responses to this climate emergency, yet their rights are often ignored. So women land defenders are left isolated, having to challenge corruption, vested interests and even the cartels in order to safeguard their environments.

The Amos Climate Fellowship is a 12-month programme supporting a vibrant network of young women land defenders across Mexico and Central America. We provide practical training, a community of peers, and a grant to help each fellow implement a climate project in her own community.

Meet Valiana

Valiana Alejandra Aguilar Hernández is a Mayan farmer in the Yucatan peninsula. She keeps bees, ferments food and works to regenerate land that was devastated by intensive farming more than eighty years ago — driving many from the community away. Using ancestral planting techniques, she is slowly bringing back the soil and the biodiversity it once held.

Her Climate Fellowship project brought together 25 Mayan women farmers from nine Indigenous collectives for three days of shared learning in organic and regenerative farming — building both skills and a lasting network for climate action.

For Valiana, land is where memory, history and community are kept alive. She is working to defend it for future generations.

“Each day that I inhabit these ancestral lands, they whisper to me that we must resist, that the Earth can heal if we find ways to regenerate both the soil and our history in the present.” Valiana Alejandra Aguilar Hernández

Meet Xananine

Xananine Calvillo is an Indigenous woman from the Ngiwa people, whose community has lived in the Tehuacán Valley for more than two thousand years. She recently joined the Mesoamerican Caravan for Climate and Life — a grassroots journey of Indigenous leaders and communities travelling from Mexico to Brazil to demand climate justice at COP30 — connecting her community's story to a global movement.

Her Fellowship project creates spaces for young Ngiwa women to reconnect with ancestral knowledge about food, plants and land. Through workshops, seed exchanges and intergenerational gatherings, she is documenting traditional recipes, revitalising the Ngiwa language and restoring native crops — strengthening her community’s resilience from the roots up.

“I believe my land would be proud of itself — proud of its daughters and sons who are reclaiming its value and seeing it as a possibility for the future.” Xananine Calvillo

Your hosts

The webinar will be hosted by Alexia Lizarraga, Climate Fellowship Manager at Amos Trust, who has worked closely with both Valiana and Xananine throughout their projects — and Katie Hagley, Head of Community Engagement, who recently visited fellowship members in Mexico and Guatemala.

Join us to hear Valiana and Xananine’s stories, explore the vital role women play in climate action, and find out how you can be part of it.