Miguel Alberto Londoño Gómez

Senior Officer for Post Conflict and Green Growth
Global Green Growth Institute

Aug 25, 2020

Miguel Londoño is a Senior Program Officer at the Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI). He works on issues of sustainability, conflict, and urban green growth, particularly focusing on resource mobilization and establishing accountability and monitoring/evaluation systems. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science and a Master’s degree in peacebuilding from Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá. Miguel’s work at GGGI focuses on fostering green growth by working in an advisory capacity for governmental authorities, both nationally and sub-nationally. In the context of Colombia, green growth emphasizes socially responsible growth with a genuine environmental component that creates jobs and stimulates the economy—all while supporting the peace process. 

Miguel began his career working with grassroots organizations in rural areas of Colombia, and he carries this perspective with him throughout his work. He recently worked with the German International Cooperation Agency as the Senior Sectorial Advisor for Climate Change, Peacebuilding, Mining and Infrastructure, focusing on implementing sustainable forest use in Putumayo and strengthening REDD+ capacities of national, regional, and local stakeholders. He has also worked with the District Department of Environment for the City of Bogotá on urban environmental challenges and climate diplomacy, and with Ecolsierra on projects to improve livelihoods for honey-producing families. Miguel’s work exemplifies an integrated approach, drawing from political science, business, environmental management, urban studies, and sustainability to address unique challenges faced in urban and rural areas in Colombia.

Miguel is currently partnering with the Environmental Law Institute on a three-year project to address illegal logging in Colombia, supported by the Swedish Postcode Foundation.  Project seeks to build capacity of judges in the Colombian Amazon to hear and decide cases related to deforestation, which has increased dramatically since the signing of a peace agreement with the FARC. The project will run through 2022 and build capacity and awareness among judges and magistrates in Caquetá, Guaviare, Meta, and Putumayo—the four regions that are most affected by illegal logging. The project helps to increase protection for communities and activists as they seeks to protect forests by increasing enforcement and prosecution of cases related to illegal logging and deforestation. It particularly aims to remove illegal profits from deforestation and therefore remove a key incentive for illegal logging. This work brings together sustainable development, biodiversity, forest protection, legal capacity, and peacebuilding to exemplify the ways in which environmental peacebuilding can work on the ground and can combine with the legal sphere, particularly to build environmental rule of law in conflict-affected situations. Miguel explains, “There are great expectations that this will create a shift in the judicial culture in Colombia and will provide enhanced capacity from the judicial side for tackling deforestation.”

Like many practitioners, Miguel has faced significant challenges to continuing with impactful and relevant work due to the changes from the Covid-19 pandemic. Specifically, the pandemic constrains the ways that environmental peacebuilding can be designed and implemented in a participatory, inclusive and pertinent way in the field. Miguel, alongside his teammates, has adjusted to keep working through these uncertainties and move forward with virtual possibilities for judicial training and other initiatives.

For Miguel, environmental peacebuilding is important because it allows us to address development challenges, environmental objectives, social priorities, and peacebuilding objectives in an integrated manner that reflects the situation on the ground. He stresses the importance of Latin American voices in the Association. He explains, “Environmental peacebuilding is a tool for tackling big challenges in terms of development in Colombia through integrated research and work. What’s going on in Colombia in particular is very interesting and is an evolving laboratory where one can learn a lot about environmental peacebuilding on the ground and in real life.”