Loly Masegosa

Loly Masegosa is redefining how societies regenerate their landscapes by turning regeneration into a shared civic practice. Her work guides communities, institutions, and educators in how to actively shape how land is understood, managed, and sustained across Spain and beyond.

Loly has created an approach that enables communities to regenerate ecosystems while strengthening social cohesion through a shared and sustained practice. Her Pedagogy of the Landscape, a structured and replicable framework, guides people through a sequence of steps: understanding their territory as an interconnected system, engaging diverse actors in a shared diagnosis, and designing and implementing actions that respond to local ecological and social challenges. It synthesizes principles from regenerative ecology with community development practices and empathic leadership, integrating ecological knowledge, social processes, and personal development tools into a single, actionable pathway.

The idea that landscapes are living systems shaped by relationships between soil, water, biodiversity, and human activity lies at the center of Loly’s innovation. Through facilitated experiences, participants learn to interpret these dynamics, align different perspectives, and translate them into collective action that restores ecological balance while reinforcing social bonds.

The idea becomes tangible in practice across different contexts. Because the Pedagogy of the Landscape is a methodology rather than a fixed program, it can be adapted to schools, municipalities, regional planning processes, and international networks. Loly is already working across Spain, Mexico, Chile, and Colombia, where trained leaders and partner organizations are applying and evolving the model within their own ecological and social realities. This adaptability, combined with its integration into education systems, policy frameworks, and cross-sector networks, makes her approach inherently scalable and positions it as a practical infrastructure for large-scale ecological transition.

Across Europe and globally, environmental degradation is accelerating. Soil erosion, biodiversity loss, and the disruption of water cycles are undermining the resilience of ecosystems and intensifying the impacts of climate change. In response, ambitious global, European and national frameworks such as the European Green Deal and the Nature Restoration Law have established clear targets for ecosystem recovery.

However, despite growing political commitment and technical knowledge, regeneration lags behind. A core barrier is not the lack of solutions, but an absence of systemic designs within governance, education, and community leadership to enable people to collectively understand, decide, and act on their landscapes over time. At the same time, societies are increasingly disconnected from the ecosystems they depend on. Urbanization, rural depopulation, and the erosion of traditional ecological knowledge have weakened people’s relationship with the land.

In Spain, where more than 80% of the population lives in urban areas, this disconnection is especially visible, especially among children: 82% of those aged 0–12 spend less time outdoors than recommended, limiting their well-being and their capacity to develop a meaningful relationship to nature.

This disconnection has systemic consequences. When people do not feel part of the landscapes they inhabit, they are less able, and less likely, to engage in the long-term, collective decisions required to sustain them. Awareness of environmental challenges may be growing, but it is not translating into coordinated, sustained action.

Response through environmental action often results in fragmented interventions, projects, policies, or sector-specific initiatives that operate in isolation from the social and cultural dynamics that shape how land is actually used and managed. These efforts commonly bring external funding, technical expertise, or short-term incentives, rather than sustained ownership among communities or alignment across stakeholders. As a result, many initiatives fail to endure beyond initial implementation or to scale across territories.

Education systems, which could play a central role in addressing this gap, often reinforce it. Environmental education is typically fragmented, theoretical, and disconnected from local realities. Students rarely develop the ecological literacy, practical skills, or collaborative capacities needed to interpret their territory and act within it. Teachers themselves lack the training and tools to facilitate this kind of learning, further limiting the system’s ability to respond.

At the policy level, environmental strategies are frequently designed without integrating social processes or participatory mechanisms. They struggle to bridge institutions, sectors, and communities, and therefore fail to build the shared ownership and long-term stewardship required for effective implementation.

In this context, without a shared, practical way to understand their landscapes as living systems, efforts to regenerate ecosystems will remain fragmented, short-lived, and insufficient to meet the scale of the challenge.

Loly’s strategy transforms how decisions about land are made by redefining who participates, how landscapes are understood, and how to sustain collective action over time. She does this by building a distributed network of leaders, demonstrating the approach in real territories, and embedding it within education systems, institutional frameworks, and international networks.

At the core of her model is the identification and training of ecological leaders who can apply the Pedagogy of the Landscape in their own contexts. Each year, Loly selects a cohort of approximately 15 leaders through a rigorous process that prioritizes their capacity to influence systems, their ethical commitment, and their potential to mobilize others. These participants come from diverse fields and organizations, including education, public administration, agriculture, community development, and international networks such as Teacher for Future, allowing the approach to enter multiple systems simultaneously.

Selected participants gather in Finca Silvella, Loly’s home territory, in a regenerated landscape in southeastern Spain, where a traditional cave dwelling serves as Fundácion de Paisaje’s learning center. The Pedagogy of the Landscape, developed and refined since 2018, trains participants to facilitate collective decision making, group diagnosis of landscape, and conflict resolution, and is further structured around six pedagogical themes: food systems, agriculture and livestock, design, creativity, emotional intelligence, and social organization. The training process combines the immersive residency with ongoing virtual learning, applied project development, and peer exchange. Each participant develops and begins to implement a multi-year plan in their own territory, supported by peers and Loly’s team.

Once trained, these leaders implement the pedagogy in real contexts, over time, generating tangible transformations that demonstrate its value and build demand. These interventions consistently bring diverse stakeholders together, align ecological and social priorities, and translate them into concrete actions that regenerate both land and community. Decisions are made locally with new incentives.

Each trained leader becomes a carrier of a shared methodology that can be adapted to different contexts. Rather than replicating a fixed project, leaders use a common framework to engage stakeholders, interpret their specific landscape, and co-design context-specific solutions. This creates a consistent pattern of distributed replication: the pedagogy enters a new territory through a trained leader, is adapted through local participation, and generates visible results that attract institutional interest and further adoption.

The impact is measurable and growing. As of 2024, the network includes 44 educators and leaders from 10 Spanish autonomous communities and three Latin American countries, reaching 33 schools, over 3,200 students, and nearly 2,500 fellow educators and leaders. Over 98% of participants apply regenerative principles in their professional practice, and 100% report strengthened leadership capacity, demonstrating the model’s ability to shift behavior, influence decision-making, and sustain engagement over time.

Different levels of the system show what changes. In a high school in Guadalajara, a Fellow transformed a degraded schoolyard into a growing ecosystem, including edible forests and outdoor learning environments with native trees, water retention systems, composting areas, and biodiversity habitats, through a participatory process involving students, teachers, families, and municipal actors. Beyond environmental restoration, the process reshaped relationships and roles within the school community, reduced student disengagement, and has since been replicated by other municipalities.

The Baza municipality applied the pedagogy and transformed a conventional infrastructure project into a participatory regeneration process. What began as a technical plan to restore a green corridor became a collective effort integrating ecological, social, and economic criteria. Even after Loly’s direct involvement ended, the municipality continued expanding the work, securing public funding and embedding regenerative principles into its urban planning processes, demonstrating sustained institutional adoption.

Regionally, the cumulative work of several Fellows of the Pedagogy in the Granada region led to collaboration with the UNESCO-designated Geoparque de Granada, encompassing 47 municipalities. Loly’s approach is reflected in the Landscape Charter Action Plan that now guides the Geoparque’s long-term land stewardship, integrating ecological restoration, community participation, and territorial planning into regional governance frameworks.

Loly has co-founded and shaped networks that function as infrastructure for scale. These are not loose communities, but working platforms where educators, practitioners, and institutions apply and evolve the Pedagogy of the Landscape across contexts. This includes the Learning Landscapes Network, founded, coordinated, and facilitated by Fundación Paisaje, which brings together agricultural farms committed to education and regeneration, hosting trainings and the development of hands-on learning experiences related to water, soil, and biodiversity regeneration.

The Open Sky Education Network, which Loly co-founded, connects more than 500 educators and organizations across 18 countries who are shifting from traditional outdoor education toward regenerative, landscape-based learning. Through shared practice, joint learning processes, and collaborative experimentation, the network enables continuous adaptation and embedding of the methodology within diverse systems.

In parallel, through her role in the Network of Regenerative Territories and the Alliance for Regenerative Education, a coalition of organizations across education, agriculture, and community development, Loly contributes to integrating her approach into broader land restoration and policy frameworks linked to the European Green Deal. These platforms are developing shared curricula, professional standards, and new training pathways, and have already reached thousands of practitioners and citizens.

Loly also works to institutionalize the pedagogy within the formal education system. Her methodology is embedded in postgraduate and continuing education programs at universities such as Valladolid and Murcia and is being incorporated into teacher training initiatives at institutions including the Complutense Madrid University. Members of her network contribute to national teacher development programs, including Ministry-endorsed courses aligned with European education policy.

This network-based scaling is already enabling international adaptation. In Colombia, for example, Marta Valverde has integrated the Pedagogy of the Landscape into Escuela Viva, a community-based school system. There, the approach has been adapted to local ecosystems and campesino cultures, transforming schools into hubs for ecological restoration and community engagement and influencing other rural schools and local actors.

Through this combination of leadership development, real-world application, institutional embedding, and network-based scaling, Loly’s approach does not grow through the replication of a fixed model, but through distributed adoption, where local actors reinterpret a shared framework to transform how decisions about land are made within their own ecological, social, and institutional realities.

Loly Masegosa grew up in a rural village in southeastern Spain, in a family of farmers and entrepreneurs whose livelihoods depended directly on the land. From an early age, she was immersed not only in agricultural practices but in a culture of initiative, self-reliance, and adaptation. She experienced both the richness of this relationship with nature and its rapid degradation, as industrial agriculture and external investment transformed fertile landscapes into depleted territory. This dual exposure, to entrepreneurship and ecological loss, shaped both her mindset and her mission.

After studying Environmental Sciences, Loly chose not to follow a conventional professional path. Instead, she founded her own consultancy focused on supporting farmers in transitioning to organic and regenerative practices. Through this work, she helped mobilize local actors and contributed to the conversion of large areas of land. However, she began to observe a recurring pattern: many of these changes were short-lived. When subsidies or external incentives ended, practices were often abandoned.

This insight marked a turning point in her trajectory. Loly realized that regeneration could not rely only on technical solutions or funding mechanisms, it required a deeper shift in how people relate to their land and how collective decisions are made.

Building on this realization, she co-founded AlVelAl, one of Spain’s pioneering large-scale regenerative landscape initiatives. There, she worked across sectors—connecting farmers, institutions, and communities, and gained first-hand experience in coordinating complex, multi-actor processes. This stage allowed her to understand both the potential and the limitations of existing approaches to regeneration.

Driven by the need to address these limitations, Loly founded Fundación Paisaje, where she developed and continues to scale the Pedagogy of the Landscape. This move reflects a clear entrepreneurial pattern: she does not remain within existing structures when they fall short but creates new ones to address the underlying problem more effectively.

Her leadership is characterized by her ability to translate complex ecological challenges into processes that people can understand and act together. She builds trust across very different stakeholders, students, farmers, policymakers, educators—and enables them to collaborate around shared goals. Colleagues and partners consistently highlight her capacity to hold a long-term vision while grounding it in practical, actionable steps.

Loly’s trajectory shows a consistent entrepreneurial drive: from creating her first venture to support farmers, to co-founding a large-scale regenerative initiative, to building her own foundation and methodology. She identifies structural gaps, develops practical responses, and builds conditions for them to spread. Rather than implementing isolated solutions, she is shaping up a new way of thinking about the relationship between people, land, and collective decision-making.