Around a hundred people live in Llano del Triunfo, one of nine villages in the municipality of Santa María Yucuhiti, in Mexico’s Oaxaca state. Accessible by a bumpy dirt road and nestled at 8,500 feet above sea level, the village’s concrete homes and wooden buildings disappear and reappear amid fog that drifts across rocks and fields and hilltops.

“The weather changes a lot here during the year due to the high altitude,” says Leoncio Espana Lopez, a local farmer, as he guides us across his land. Like most people who live here, he uses the surnames of both his parents. In winter, he says, high villages like this one suffer freezing cold weather, and in March and April, drought is a challenge.

Since most of its people make a living from agriculture, in 2012 Santa María Yucuhiti authorities identified climate change as a challenge that needed to be addressed. Today, Llano del Triunfo is one of the villages where people implement low-tech solutions to address the problem.

To help identify and implement these solutions, the municipality approached Espacio de Encuentro de las Culturas Originarias (A Space for Meeting of Original Cultures, or EECO), an Oaxaca-based organization that has been supporting Indigenous and rural communities for the past 15 years. Subsequently, EECO members visited all the communities in the municipality, which is part of Oaxaca’s La Mixteca region and is home to about two-thirds of Mexico’s Indigenous Mixtecs.

“We held meetings and workshops, and based on what we saw and heard, we put together a plan on how to combat climate change,” says Tzinnia Carranza Lopez, a director of EECO. Through this process, the organization learned that one of main issues communities wanted to solve was water scarcity. According to Conagua, Mexico’s water agency, in March 2024 more than half of Oaxaca municipalities were experiencing drought, creating the need for more water storage.

Espana Lopez shows us various projects that emerged from working with EECO. Right by his house, for example, is a concrete rainwater collection tank. “These 10,000-liter water tanks were built in the first phase of cooperation,” says Viviana Ibeth Lopez Jimenez, who lives here and has been working with EECO as a field technician in the municipality for the last seven years. These water tanks are now part of the scenery in Santa María Yucuhiti communities. One can find them by houses, on coffee plantations, and close to gardens, where locals can use the stored water for irrigation.

“It is very helpful because there are no water sources here, and this way we collect rainwater from the roof,” says Fernando Alvaro Lopez Lopez, another farmer, who lives close to Espana Lopez. The water his family collected last year was enough to see him, his wife, and daughter through this year, but they need to be careful about how much they use, he says.

Meanwhile, Espana Lopez, who lives with his parents and his sister, had a different experience. “The water that we collect during the rainy season is usually enough for only two to three months,” he says, even though they try to conserve as much as possible. “This year, the rain was delayed,” he says. “It did not rain until June.”

In the beginning, EECO helped install 10-liter water tanks, but recently the demand has been for tanks double the size. So far, EECO has helped construct more than 900 water tanks with a total holding capacity of 20,000 liters across Oaxaca state. These tanks collect more than 18 million liters of water a year. “You cannot do anything if there is no water,” says Lopez Lopez, who makes a living by selling produce.

Apart from water tanks, communities here are adopting other low-cost ecotechnologies as well.

On the rocky, inhospitable land that surrounds his house, Espana Lopez shows us a fog catcher, a wall of green netting that captures fog and a gutter below it, where droplets of fog condensate fall. Near the netting is a waru waru, an irrigation system of water canals and earthen platforms based on techniques developed in Andean Peru and Bolivia to grow potatoes and quinoa.

On Espana Lopez’s land, canals are 10 meters long, 1 meter wide, and 1 meter deep. “It is filled with a plastic membrane so that the water does not evaporate quickly, once collected during the rainy season,” EECO’s Lopez Jimenez explains. Since it creates a microclimate, it helps keep the soil warmer during freezes. The water can also be used to water plants on other parts of the farmers’ land.

The water canals lay inside a micro-tunnel, a small construction made of metal framing and a nylon sheet. Inside, a warm and humid microclimate allows farmers to grow certain crops throughout the year, even during cold months, including radish, strawberries, cilantro, and onion. “We are still experimenting with which crops grow well here,” Espana Lopez says. The tunnel doesn’t always work. Sometimes, he says, a hard frost can pass through the nylon sheets.

This updated waru waru doesn’t work everywhere. The soil must be suitable. “For example, the land around Llano del Triunfo is full of rocks, and farmers need to be able to prepare channels for water storage so that sharp stones do not destroy the membrane,” Viviana Ibeth Lopez Jimenez says.

Recently, EECO has also started installing biofilters to treat grey water from kitchen sinks and laundry. “The idea is not to contaminate rivers with dirty water and to reuse the same water to irrigate people’s gardens,” Armanda Esperanza Lopez Lopez says. She uses a biofilter in her garden, which is right above a local creek in Zaragoza village. The water runs through the biofilter’s various containers, which help filter out waste and contaminants before passing through three pots of plants that do the final cleaning.

Ecological dry toilets also contribute to water savings, and, if they are placed on coffee plantations (there are many at lower altitudes in the municipality, including near Zaragoza), they also prevent soil contamination.

Beyond water, other experimental solutions have found a place here. Many women say they have started using energy-saving stoves, which direct smoke from open fires out of the kitchen, helping save on wood. It is common in Oaxaca for local people to cook indoors over an open fire, using wood sourced from nearby forests. This not only increases carbon emissions, but can hurt people’s health from exposure to carbon monoxide and particulate matter from indoor wood-burning.

There are more than one thousand energy-saving stoves currently in use around the southern Mexican state that the organization helped install. EECO estimates that these stoves are helping save nearly 2,000 tons of firewood and reducing black carbon emissions by some 840,000 tons each year.

Many of these simple ecotechnologies are built from the local material. EECO provides some supplies, while the rest, such as sand, is collected by each family from sites nearby. Farmers, families, and neighbors all work together to help build and maintain these technologies.

“We went to a workshop about how to construct the stove, but I asked them if I could redesign it a little bit,” says Elia Silvia Perez Gonzales, a single mother from Zaragoza. “Now, down here, I can dry my wood or chilies,” she says, standing by a stove made of bricks, concrete, and sand, with a stovepipe that directs smoke out of the kitchen. “The house stays cleaner, we save wood, and we do not have to breathe smoke,” she says. This has meant less respiratory problems in her family.

Not everyone is quick to adopt these technologies, though. Perez Gonzales’ neighbor, Maximina Antonia Castro Lopez, for instance, has an energy-saving stove, but she is not that excited about it. She has spent all her life making corn tortillas on an open fire, a method she still prefers, so she only uses the stove when she needs to make a lot of tortillas quickly.

Despite such reservations, across the Santa María Yucuhiti municipality, demand for these ecotechnologies is high. From the beginning, EECO worked to meet the needs of the communities, mostly through funding and capacity building.

However, the initial steps were also a challenge, Carranza Lopez says. At first, people did not want to share the responsibility for the work with the organization. But, she says, “It is not a paternalist project. We want people to participate throughout the process and to contribute.” (In fact, the organization’s participatory approach, alongside its ecotechnological solutions to climate change adaptation, won it the Local Adaptation Champions Award from the Global Center for Adaptation at COP28 in Dubai in 2023.)

Twelve years on, people’s attitudes towards this work have changed. “They always provide theoretical information, and afterwards we go into practice,” says Dina Lopez Hernandez, a municipality representative in charge of ecological projects. “People like this approach, including women, because they can learn something new.”

After our tour of his land, Espana Lopez leads us back to his house, a concrete unfinished construction. As we approach, his sister, and elderly parents come out to greet us. They invite us to join them, and in a quiet moment share little peaches from their nearby trees. Fog continues filling the surrounding fields while clouds gather above our heads. It looks like it might rain.