Empowering Latin American Landscape Leaders: The Case for Coastal Solutions Fellowship Program


By. Megan Barnes

I was fortunate to engage with the Costal Solutions program relatively early, when Viviana Ruiz-Gutierrez reached out to my organization, the Landscape Architecture Foundation, to learn more about our LAF Fellowship for Innovation and Leadership Program, to inform development of the nascent Coastal Solutions Fellows Program. 

When I heard about this new program, based on birds (a bit foreign to me at the time)…that embraced a truly multi-disciplinary approach…with a focus on actionable solutions…and based in Latin America, no less? I was immediately intrigued and on board. I became a member of the Program’s Advisory Board. 

My background is in landscape architecture – simply put, the design of built landscapes for people and the environment. Although often misunderstood as “landscaping” or simply arranging green things around buildings (which in the public’s minds are rather more tangible than “landscape”), landscape architecture is a discipline that holds significant power to address real-world challenges, including those coastal issues that are identified through the Coastal Solutions Program. Though landscape architects certainly do work with the medium of land, they also work through the medium of relationships: as generalists and conveners, landscape architects routinely work with scientists, conservationists, planners, architects, and engineers to solve land-based problems and make spaces work. They often specialize in community engagement; ensuring that projects affecting the land people live on are responsive and truly fitted to expressed community needs and desires. 

My organization, the Landscape Architecture Foundation (LAF), is a U.S.-based nonprofit organization with a mission to support the preservation, improvement, and enhancement of the environment. In this sense we share this mission with many, many other nonprofit organizations, but the difference with LAF is that we believe that landscape architects, and designers of the built environment, are key to fulfilling this mission. To that end, we offer research, scholarship, and leadership programs for landscape architects and designers. Another key part of that mission is collaborating with other organizations that have similar environmental aims to ours – including Coastal Solutions Fellowship Program.

My little corner of LAF is our research programs. My role is focused on the quantifiable environmental, social, and economic value that exemplary design brings, with a strong dose of sustainability – one might say, “solutions”. I manage LAF’s Landscape Performance Series, which includes over 200 case studies of built landscape projects with quantified benefits as well as resources and tools to help measure or estimate the value of landscape solutions. I also support teams of faculty and students to conduct a post-occupancy evaluation of real-life landscape projects through our Case Study Investigation program. My work in landscape performance has a natural connection to the work of the Coastal Solutions Fellows, who are expected, as part of their projects, to understand the impacts they hope to have, and measure the impacts they ultimately do have on their project sites along the Pacific Flyway. 

Above all the Coastal Solutions program spoke to me personally from its geographic focus; I spent two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in a small village outside the town of Uspantán in the department of El Quiché, Guatemala (2011-13) and one year in David, Panama (2017). During these experiences I became intimately acquainted with local ideas about the role of land in peoples’ lives and livelihoods. Some of my time in Panama was spent at a nature sanctuary and rehabilitation center located on the Pacific Coast, and I was able to appreciate both the stunning biodiversity of the place as well as its fragility, as the sanctuary was an island of biodiversity surrounded by teak plantations and deforestation. From what I had seen and experienced during my years in Latin America as well as studying design and planning in the United States, it was immediately clear to me that the Coastal Solutions approach of developing, testing, and deploying solutions by investing in young professionals in Latin America was clearly a winner. 

It was particularly gratifying to see landscape architecture (and sister disciplines planning and architecture) woven into the fabric of Coastal Solutions Program from the very beginning. In Latin America, landscape architecture and landscape solutions are not always harnessed to their fullest potential – some countries (for example Mexico and Colombia) have much stronger academic programs and a stronger culture of professional landscape architecture practice than others. The program has been elevating the curiosity and energy of young people trained in landscape architecture and closely allied disciplines, including Leslie Ponce de León (2019 Fellow), Flavio Sciaraffia and Laura Ibarra (2020 Fellows), and Gustavo Diaz (2021 Fellow) – as well as several other Fellows trained as architects who are doing landscape-focused work. Their projects have introduced design and mapping into the equation of shorebird preservation in new ways, and their engagement with other Fellows in disparate disciplines has shed light on the role designers can play in delivering coastal solutions. I am also hopeful that their leadership as young designers will set the example for more Latin American landscape architects to carry on both the technical solutions as well as the cultural value of landscape to new areas along the Pacific Coast Flyway (and beyond).

Above all, the Coastal Solutions Fellowship Program represents an innovative, new approach in a area that can benefit from true and deep collaboration – with Fellows working on the same sites and in the same regions, there can only be a multiplier effect. The CSF team’s attention to training Fellows in policy and governance is also so essential; I wish this was something all young designers would learn. When the physical environment and those who understand it deeply – designers, community members, technical and environmental experts and local leadership – can come together, coastal solutions result. 

Coastal Solutions Fellowship Program

The Coastal Solutions Fellows Program builds and supports an international community to design and implement solutions that address coastal challenges across the Pacific Americas Flyway. Our main goal is to conserve coastal habitats and shorebird populations by building the knowledge, resources, and skills of Latin American professionals, and by fostering collaborations among multiple disciplines and sectors.