Book Event with President Duque - Our Future: A Green Manifesto for Latin America and the Caribbean

The world is facing an unprecedented environmental crisis: we have lost more than 70% of wildlife in the last fifty years; with the current rate of deforestation, the Amazon will become a net emitter of greenhouse gases in less than a decade; rising sea levels threaten entire cities; and frequent natural disasters, resulting from extreme weather events, indiscriminately annihilate lives.

Latin America and the Caribbean play a predominant role in mitigating this crisis, as they possess the highest concentration of biodiversity on the planet, the main sources of freshwater, the Amazon biome (a natural CO2 capture machine), and an incalculable wealth of coral reefs, among other assets.

Aware of this reality, Iván Duque outlines in his latest book, Our Future, a roadmap for the countries of the region — with realistic, fundable, replicable, scalable, and sustainable strategies — to join efforts to enable short, medium, and long-term solutions.

To learn more, join us in a conversation about the strategies that Latin American countries must undertake to save the planet and take concrete actions to begin implementing them.

Select Quotes

H.E. Iván Duque Márquez

Chair and Distinguished Fellow, Iván Duque Center for Prosperity and Freedom, Wilson Center

President of the Republic of Colombia (2018-2022)

“There's no doubt that many countries have developed at the cost of harming the environment.  Now, also inside the developing countries, there's this political sense by some people saying 'okay, now they want us to stop our development, while other countries became rich by harming the environment.'  I think that is a futile debate because I think that essentially we need to recognize is that there is no prosperity without nature protection, without climate action and without the preservation of our biodiversity and ecosystems."

“Since there is a great amount of debt or debt to GDP [and] there are limited resources, the only way to make this happen in parallel is by having market-driven nature-based solutions.  I think that is the big bet that we have to put in when it comes to development and the right investment in climate.”  

“Latin America and the Caribbean is the most important place for the US' energy security, nature security [and] food security.”  

Hon. Mark A. Green

President and CEO, Wilson Center

“Latin America in so many ways is on the leading-edge--it's been on the leading-edge in terms of feeling the impacts and can be on the leading-edge, with good leadership, in terms of finding a path forward.”  

“Projecting out--so in 2020 4.5 million people [were] displaced purely because of natural disasters--in the current track by 2050 it'll be 17 million in a year.”