Environment and Health Seminar Series: Regenerating Rainforests by Listening to Communities: A Model for Planetary Health with Nina Lester Finley

When and Where

Wednesday, March 12, 2025 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm

Speakers

Nina Lester Finley

Description

About the Seminar

Health In Harmony is an international non-profit organization with a mission to regenerate rainforests by listening to communities. Our method is Radical Listening. Since 2007, we have spent hundreds of hours listening to rainforest communities across Indonesia, Madagascar, and Brazil. Specifically, we have listened to their answer to the question, “What would you need as a thank-you from the global community to be able to protect your forest?” The answers have been different everywhere, but three key themes emerged across geographies: access to high-quality healthcare, training in alternative livelihoods, and support for youth education. The reason we call it Radical Listening, instead of just "listening," is that we invest in precisely the solutions that communities design – and the communities have been right. A study conducted by Stanford University and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences analyzed the first ten years of data from the community-designed health, livelihood, and education programs in Indonesian Borneo. The results: a 70 percent decrease in deforestation compared to a composite control of all comparable Indonesian national parks, equating to $65 million in averted carbon emissions, a twelve times return on investment. It turns out, trees are the most effective tool on earth for storing carbon. Providing healthcare also supported people, resulting in a 67% drop in infant mortality and significant decreases in chronic cough, fever, and unintended weight loss. Human and ecosystem health are inextricably linked – neither can thrive without the other – and investing in communities is a win-win situation for both. Health In Harmony is now partnering with Pawanka Fund, Woodwell Climate Research Center, and hundreds of communities across the equator with the audacious goal to protect half the world’s rainforests before we reach irreversible tipping points for climate and health.

About the Speaker

Nina Lester Finley is the research manager of Health In Harmony, a non-profit organization that supports Indigenous communities of rainforests. Over the past ten years, Nina has conducted disease ecology research in Ecuador, Brazil, Madagascar, Indonesia, Malaysia, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Nunavut. As a Marshall Scholar, she writes essays to examine the ruptured relationships between humans and microbes under colonialism. Her work has been published in journals from PLOS Medicine to Tropical Natural History and featured in The New York Times. Nina holds a BA in biology-environmental studies; an MSc in One Health; and an MA in creative non-fiction writing. Nina is currently a doctoral student at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. For her thesis, she is working alongside rice farmers of Madagascar’s rainforests to test solutions for living well with schistosomes—freshwater parasites that move between snail and human hosts. Stories at www.ninafinley.com and on X @ninafinley.


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