Luis Felipe has been working as an environmental advocate in southern Colombia since 2008. Starting with a community radio programme in school, he later founded a television channel called Telecalamar to discuss environmental issues affecting the Chiribiquete National Park in Colombia. Despite being a protected area, between September 2021 and February 2022, over 2,000 hectares of the park were deforested [1]. In 2016, Pipe Q-ida emerged as a digital project within CoBosques that uses social media channels to communicate with local communities about conservation and environmental issues.
Luis Felipe attended the One Young World Summit in London, 2019, during which he was able to connect with other environmental activists in Latin America and the United States, which gave him new ideas and approaches to fight for climate justice. He has since received support from One Young World Ambassadors to develop his project’s website and has made joint calls to action with Ambassadors in the fight against climate change.
As a parallel project to Pipe Q-ida, Luis Felipe and the Cobosques team have set up seven schools in Colombia called the Guardians of Chiribiquete. Each course lasts three months, with nine sessions in total, and teaches an average of 20 children environmental education and the skills to become environmental activists in their own right. At the end of each school, 1,200 trees are planted, and through their work since 2016 the organisation has planted over 50,000 trees in 600 hectares. In addition, they have partnered up with 2,800 families in local communities to protect and conserve 21,000 hectares of the Chiribiquete National Park.
“One Young World came at a time in my life that I did not expect, but I needed that injection of motivation and it helped me see different perspectives and create connections that persist to today.”
