In January 2026, forest fires burned around 20,000 hectares in Chile's Biobio Region, with the commune of Penco among the hardest hit, losing more than 80 percent of its urban area. The fires left the area highly vulnerable, socially, economically, emotionally and in terms of everyday community safety.
Biodiverse home gardens can help on several fronts at once: they strengthen food security and ease the cost of feeding a family, bring emotional balance, especially to the women who run these households, provide natural remedies for family health, and draw back the biodiversity that helps a damaged landscape recover.
The project
The project supports families in Penco to rebuild the biodiverse gardens they had before the fires, working through existing community groups and neighbourhood councils. Using low-cost, easily replicable growing techniques, families recover not just a source of food but a familiar, tended space that had been lost along with their homes and land.
Rooted in a dialogue between technical knowledge and the families' own experience, the project supports socio-environmental resilience and self-care through connection with nature, alongside food sovereignty through growing for the household's own consumption. The aim is to help participants recover their physical and mental wellbeing, restore the food varieties families used to grow, and rebuild the collaborative bonds and sense of belonging that come from tending land together again.
Who the project is for
The project's direct beneficiaries are 10 family groups belonging to community work groups or neighbourhood councils in Penco, in the Biobio Region, reaching around 40 people in total.
Its impact reaches further, to the neighbourhood units where the project takes place, encouraging other families to take up the same growing methods, with the potential to reach at least 1,000 people as the experience spreads.
Project name: Semillas que brotan desde las cenizas. Huertas biodiversas en la comuna de Penco para la resiliencia comunitaria post-incendios
Proposing organisation: ONG CETSUR
Area of intervention: Environment & Sustainable Communities
Country: Chile