The Urban Gardens Where Gender and Climate Justice Grow

Community-led urban farms in Jakarta empower residents to transform underused city spaces like alleyways and campus grounds into productive local food sources. These initiatives often blend traditional gardening with community organizing, educational outreach, and sometimes smart technology or agricultural research to improve food access, enhance green space, and foster local resilience.

Farmers living near the coast in India are turning to rooftop farming as cyclones lead to flooding that makes agricultural fields unusable. The Association for Social and Humanitarian Action taught local women how to grow food in tubs or sacks with compost, and those farmers trained others.

The Indian government’s Ministry of Environment, Forest, and Climate Change’s new climate adaptation program is designed to enhance climate resilience and rural farmers are adapting new agricultural practices to better resist the effects of climate change. So far, nearly 1,500 farmers across 48 villages have begun implementing these new sustainable farming practices and have seen not only an environmental benefit but financial gain as well.

Vertical container farming offers an innovative adaptation to climate change and soil salinity. In Bangladesh, the nonprofit, WorldFish Center, promotes the practice of vertical farming, providing education and resources to villagers. The practice includes collecting soil diluted after monsoon rains into inexpensive plastic containers. The nonprofit first trained 200 farmers and aims to expand its reach to 5,000 in the next two years.

Bayero University Center for Dryland Agriculture’s Tissue Culture Lab empowers local farmers with advanced research and technology to adapt to climate change and increase food security and nutrition. So far, 22 communities have benefited from the Lab’s expertise, leading to increased food production and fewer health problems caused by inadequate diets.

Transformation, an initiative aiming to end factory farming, is helping chicken farmers who are in debt and looking to transition out of the industry convert their barns into greenhouses.

The nonprofit Group to Promote Education and Sustainable Development teaches women in drought-ridden Indigenous communities across Mexico to use ancestral methods of irrigation and grow drought-resilient medicinal plants. The four-year training program also aims to address gender disparity through empowerment. Participants are encouraged to set up savings funds to increase their financial independence and attend group therapy sessions, among other activities.

The Qachuu Aloom Mother Earth Association is a farming collective bringing together the Mayan Achi people in Rabinal, Guatemala, and farmers in Ithaca, New York, to share and preserve ancestral knowledge of growing amaranth. The ancient grain is nutritious and resilient to climate change.

Researchers are helping communities spread the agricultural practices of outlier, high-performing farms amid food security struggles in Niger. Their approach, known as positive deviance, involves identifying what the farmers are doing differently through surveys and encouraging them to teach community members to do the same.

Kendrick Ransome uses ancestral farming techniques like low-till farming and conservation tilling to improve soil health and sequester more carbon on his farm. He founded Freedom Org to teach youth these practices and help other Black farmers do the same after decades of racist lending policies have dwindled their numbers.