NaCERA conducts action-oriented research to bolster communities and ecosystem resilience in the world’s most biodiverse regions. Our objectives center on uncovering viable strategies for climate adaptation, biodiversity conservation and bio-economic growth, ensuring that nature-based solutions are integrated into national and sub-national policies, local development models and global conservation efforts. Building on a legacy of place-based interventions at the MIT ESI, NaCERA provides frameworks for multi-stakeholder engagement and community-based planning that prioritize local environmental needs, and develops pathways to co-create technologies and data driven tools to inform policy-makers, researchers, and local communities. To that end, NaCERA has developed participatory systems using machine learning and computer vision to predict climate-induced landslides generating high-resolution insights into environmental risks, has provided critical evidence on the natural resource stewardship of Afro-descendant communities, and established the international Alliance of Cities for the Biogeographic Chocó, leveraging capacity building, policy uptake and collective action to protect this vital ecosystem.

As ERA’s place-based and action-oriented arm, NaCERA connects local and scientific knowledge and builds critical understanding of the dependencies between social equity and environmental conservation. Through a robust network of multi-level government, academic, multilateral and community partners, we position ERA to deploy nature- and community based solutions that strengthen social and ecological resilience across the urban-to-rural continuum, specifically within critical biodiversity hotspots and global natural carbon sinks such as the Amazon and Biogeographic Choco regions.