Por Kaya Agari (parceira do Global Fund for Children) e Thalita Silva (Global Fund for Children)
Read this blog in Portuguese.
Who taught us that the earth is a resource? Who decided that the forest’s worth is measured by cubic meters of timber, the river’s by megawatts, the territory’s by hectares of soy?
For many peoples, the land is not a commodity — it is kin, it is sacred. When a people lose a river contaminated by mercury from mining, they do not lose only water: they lose a relative, a living relationship, a piece of themselves. What is lost there is not only the history of a people, but the possibility of it continuing to exist.
The land does not belong to us. We are part of it.
And perhaps that is what the world still has not managed to understand – it is the difference between treating the land as a resource and recognizing it as life.
We both grew up in different territories but shaped by the same worldview of development — one that has historically tried to erase us. Yet we continue to reinvent ourselves every day.
I, Kaya Agari, am an Indigenous woman from the Kurâ-Bakairi people and am the coordinator of the Indigenous Youth of Kura Bakairi and of the Yukamaniru Institute, created in 2008 to support Indigenous Kurâ-Bakairi women. Through the institute, we strengthen female leadership, promote social inclusion, and carry out actions that value and keep alive traditional knowledge — especially knowledge related to graphic patterns, body painting, and the cultural expressions of women and youth of our people.
Our territory is in the Cerrado. And the Cerrado burns. Fires caused naturally but also by human action leave the village in fear, because there have already been cases of villages catching fire. Today there is prevention, there is surveillance, but the threat has not gone away.
To exist, for the Kurâ-Bakairi people, also means language. Our language is spoken in everyday life, in the fields, in gatherings. Women sing everything in our language — songs that are even on Spotify today, because technology also serves culture when it is in our hands. But this same technology threatens: children grow up with cell phones and learn more in Portuguese than in our own language. That is why the elders insist: let us speak our language, let us teach our language to the younger ones.
The Kurâ-Bakairi territory is surrounded by monocultures, cattle farms, and impacted by the hydroelectric plant on the Teles Pires River, which compromises our fishing and our food sovereignty.
We are called an obstacle to development. But what kind of development is this that destroys in order to exist?What is truly an obstacle is a world that only knows how to extract.
Kaya Agari
I, Thalita, am a climate activist and program coordinator at GFC in Brazil. I grew up in the urban and peripheral Amazon, watching the forest turn into city, streams become polluted, and living ground be covered by cement and inequality.
Without sanitation, without healthcare, without quality education, learning from an early age to deal with absence — including the absence of what should be basic. How is it possible to live in the largest freshwater basin in the world and not have drinking water at home?
The consequences of the climate crisis are no longer a distant warning — they are a reality that cuts through the daily lives of millions of people. They arrive in the floods that invade homes, in the droughts that prevent planting, in the heat that makes people sick, in the water that is missing or contaminated.
Thalita Silva
And even so, what continues to be called development remains based on exploitation to the limit of the land, of bodies, and of territories. A model that grows by destroying, that accumulates for a few and distributes crisis for many.
The climate crisis does not reach everyone equally. It has an address.
It mainly affects those who are already historically vulnerable. UNICEF points out that more than 40 million children and adolescents in Brazil — nearly 60% of the total — are exposed to more than one climate risk at the same time. Data from ECLAC, in partnership with UNICEF, show that climate change could push up to 5.9 million children and youth in Latin America and the Caribbean into poverty by 2030 — a number that could reach 17.9 million if nothing is done. And still, in the region, only 3.4% of multilateral climate financing is dedicated to children.
A Kurâ-Bakairi young woman who can no longer fish in the river suffers today. A girl from the outskirts of Manaus who does not have access to water lives this crisis in her body every day. Insisting on speaking of children, adolescents, and youth as the “future” is a way of not listening to those who already know, already feel, and already resist — now.
Thalita Silva
In February 2026, I — Thalita — was in Aky-te Village during the 1st Kurâ-Bakairi Youth Gathering. I found more than 50 organized young people, surrounded by elders, children, women, and teachers, because in the territories, youth is not an isolated phase of life — it is part of a collective body.
There were dances, songs, the language being taught out loud, graphic patterns. There was joy. There was strength. There was continuity. And, above all, there was solidarity.
What I saw was a people practicing well-being — not as a concept but as a daily practice of existence: living according to their own cosmovision, in relationship with the land, with elders, with the younger ones, with the rivers, and with the forest.
And that also moved through me. Because even coming from an urban and peripheral territory, I recognized something there that also shaped me: life that is only possible collectively, resistance that is born from relationship.
This text was born that way too. In orality, in conversations, in voice notes exchanged on WhatsApp. Both of us understand that there are other ways of learning and teaching, and that the spoken word holds as much value as the written word.
GFC’s Thalita Silva with the Kurâ-Bakairi Indigenous youth group
The solutions already exist, because our peoples have never stopped creating paths, even in the face of violence and erasure. What is lacking is not answers. What is lacking is listening, political commitment, and the redistribution of power and resources into the hands of those who sustain life every day.
It is along this path that Tecendo Soluções Climáticas: Jovens pela Justiça Climática emerges — a pilot initiative of Global Fund for Children with youth groups in Brazil. The Kurâ-Bakairi collective is one of the 16 supported. More than a project, this initiative is an attempt — still in construction — to do things differently: to truly listen, to respect timeframes, to trust in the territories’ own ways of organizing and managing.
Communities already do a lot with almost nothing. And when resources reach the grassroots — with autonomy, transparency, and without constraints that erase identities — what already exists becomes stronger, expands, multiplies.
An allied philanthropy does not arrive with ready-made answers. It takes responsibility, redistributes power, and recognizes that solutions are already being woven every day in the territories.
We write this text on Earth Day to (re)affirm that children, adolescents, and youth are not the future — they are the present in motion. Climate justice only exists when the most affected bodies have decision-making power, access to funding, and their territories protected.
If we already know where the answers are, why do resources still not reach them? If this is a political decision, may we have the courage to choose — every day — the side of life.
This message is an invitation to action, responsibility, and a change in practice. For those who fund, for those who decide, for those who build policies and narratives: it is time to trust, to transfer power, and to walk together — not ahead, but side by side.
Kaya Agari is an Indigenous woman from the Kurâ-Bakairi people, an artist, activist, mother, and youth leader of the Kurâ-Bakairi. Born in Cuiabá (MT), she developed her visual research based on the graphic patterns and the material and immaterial dimensions of her people’s culture, carrying in each trace the memory, spirituality, and continuity of their existence.
In the patterns she paint, lives the Kurâ-Bakairi cosmovision. Body paintings, called kywenu, are taught by elders — from women to girls and from men to boys — as a way of transmitting ancestral knowledge. Each design carries deep meanings of identity, belonging, and social organization, with specific patterns for women, men, and children. Inspired by nature and structured through geometric forms, these traces are not just aesthetic: they are language, they are living memory, and they also express roles and relationships within the people.
Thalita Silva is a climate and socio-environmental activist and a Program Coordinator (Brazil) at Global Fund for Children.
As vulnerable and/or made-vulnerable people and communities, we refer to those whose territories, cultures and ways of life have been affected by colonization and capitalism, leading to the loss of their ancestral references and to their social marginalization.
