Katia Carranza is a sustainability, climate, and environmental justice community organizer, researcher, and strategic planner focused on improving the reciprocal interconnections between people and nature while increasing equity for marginalized, migrant, and Native people. Sustainability and climate action became her passion fifteen years ago when she learned that climate change is threatening the health of our people and environments. Since then, Katia became impassioned  to take action, and she has directed transdisciplinary initiatives focused on advancing the climate, environmental, and social visions of her communities through equity and sustainability.

As she worked to obtain her Bachelor of Science in Ecology, she organized campus diversity trainings, organized for fair circular economies, created a community-driven sustainability club, and established a reusable container program at her college. After graduating, Katia has advanced equity and sustainability through her career and community organizing. She has collaborated with diverse  people to develop and advance their priorities for improving their social and environmental conditions.​ For six years, Katia mobilized her marginalized communities to transition a coal plant and challenge Ethylene Oxide polluting their hometowns, and she organized immigrant people to advocate for their rights. Four years ago, she founded the Together for Nature nonprofit in her hometown that is working on connecting  frontline and marginalized people and youth to nature and  preparing them to participate and lead in sustainability solutions. As a UC Davis Environmental Justice and Equity Fellow, she supported the nonprofit in developing an environmental justice curriculum for advancing the social and environmental priorities of underserved and frontline communities.

Katia has worked to develop actionable, community-driven and science-informed solutions that can create equitable and sustainable change.  She supported the City of San Rafael in analyzing compostable waste laws and developing implementation and compliance pathways, and afterwards, she created an equitable engagement plan for the climate department in the City of San Diego as a USDN Equity Diversity Inclusion Fellow. Katia also  developed recommendations for NRDC focused on advancing equitable sustainability in federal environmental programs as a Water Policy Fellow, and with the World Food Policy Center, she added to  an annotated bibliography focused on Indigenous agroecosystems by developing scientific and policy recommendations for supporting Indigenous efforts and knowledges. Her commitment to equitable sustainability led her to serve as a UN Global Goals Ambassador for the SDG 15: Life on Land and to advocate for sustainable land management that benefits social and ecological resilience.  

Katia has advanced her equity and sustainability work from the local to the international levels to support community-driven solutions. She pursued one year of a Master of Environmental Management at Duke University, and she transferred to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln to obtain her Master of Science in Natural Resource Sciences because she wanted to keep preparing for advancing the vision of her communities in sustainability and climate solutions. There, she collaborated with Indigenous leaders and with Buffalo Nations Grasslands Alliance to plan and implement research that supported the social-ecological relationships, priorities, and resilience of Indigenous people. Katia also served as a Conservation and Justice Fellow through the American Bird Conservancy to support the Indigenous Kinship Circle (IKC) in compiling conservation research and their priorities into an organizational strategy and implementing equitable engagement across North America. Katia also supported the IKC and the Central Grasslands Roadmap in obtaining and synthesizing community priorities into a Social-Ecological Working Group that is focused on advancing social-ecological conditions through conservation in the grasslands of North America. As the Young Professional Focal Point with IUCN's Commission on Environmental, Economic, and Social Policy in North America, she also recently started a Young Professionals Working Group focused on reimagining conservation and advancing equitable impacts.

Katia continues to be committed to collaborating with her underserved, migrant, and Native communities to advance our visions for and equitable sustainable future that heals our social and environmental relationships.