Uruguay's Ministry of Environment brought Afro-descendant women from four departments together in the border city of Chuy to include their experience in the implementation of the 2026–2030 Gender and Climate Change Action Plan. The workshop took place on July 24 at the Polo Educativo Tecnológico and drew participants from Rocha, Treinta y Tres, Lavalleja and Maldonado.
The event was titled “Afro-descendant women: weather data, climate change and gender.” It sought to identify how participants experience climate events in daily life, what responses they develop within their communities and how those practices can connect with available meteorological information.
The meeting is the first in a cycle of three in border departments. Participating institutions include the Ministry of Environment, the National Women's Institute within the Ministry of Social Development, the National Climate Change Response System, the Ministry of Education and Culture, the Uruguayan Meteorological Institute, the National Emergency Directorate and the United Nations Development Programme.
The strategy addresses a concrete gap: climate impacts are not evenly distributed. Inequalities in income, housing, mobility, access to resources, care work and decision-making can increase exposure and weaken recovery, while knowledge built within communities is often absent from technical assessments.
Participatory processes that preceded the national plan had already identified effects such as heavier unpaid work, economic losses and harm to physical and mental health during extreme events. An ethnic-racial perspective adds a necessary layer, preventing policies from treating “women” as a uniform group and recognizing specific barriers in rural, coastal and border territories.
Connecting local experience with meteorology can make warnings, risk maps and emergency protocols more useful, but one workshop cannot guarantee that result. Effectiveness will depend on whether its observations become funded actions, assigned responsibilities and verifiable indicators during the 2026–2030 implementation, and whether participants are told how their contributions are used.
The next two meetings must broaden the territorial evidence and sustain institutional coordination. The longer-term challenge is to keep participation channels open, produce accessible climate information and determine whether responses reduce real inequalities; inclusion becomes substantive when it changes who defines risk, how data circulate and who receives protection first.
