During the first week of April, the Climate Resilience Project team returned to Alto del Carmen in Chile’s Atacama Region for a second field visit, following their initial engagement in January. During that first visit, the team met with residents and local stakeholders to begin developing the Climate Change Communal Action Plan (PACCC).
The delegation included Project Manager Antonia Samur of Columbia’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness (NCDP), Chris Molinari from the Santiago Center, and Gemita Navarrete and Danilo Miranda from Itrend. Together, they facilitated three hands-on workshops that brought together 75 local stakeholders.
During the visit, the team worked closely with representatives from the Municipality of Alto del Carmen, led by Sandra Anacona, Director of Environment, Sanitation, and Beautification; Francisca Berríos, also of that division; and Gerardo Tapia, Disaster Risk Management Officer.
The first session, hosted at the Municipality of Alto del Carmen, focused on training municipal staff to integrate climate change management into local governance. To ensure broader participation, the team then traveled to the communities of El Tránsito and San Félix—two of the commune’s roughly 30 villages—to deliver community workshops and participatory risk‑mapping exercises. Attendees included members of neighborhood councils, indigenous leaders, senior‑citizen committee representatives, local authorities, and first responders.
In each workshop, the team introduced core concepts—climate change, hazard, exposure, vulnerability, risk, disaster, and resilience—and explored the connection between socio‑natural disasters and climate impacts through frameworks of adaptation, mitigation, and disaster risk management. Drawing on their lived experience, participants mapped recent extreme events (frosts, heatwaves, floods, landslides) and identified at-risk infrastructure such as schools, bridges, hospitals, and emergency facilities. Small-group exercises surfaced local knowledge about community strengths, vulnerabilities, existing coping measures, and generated ideas for resilience‑building strategies tailored to each locality.
This second visit deepened the team’s understanding of local needs and provided invaluable community input for the forthcoming PACCC. Alto del Carmen lies 710 km north of Santiago, covers 5,938.7 km² entirely in rural territory, and encompasses around 30 villages, with San Félix (in El Carmen Valley) and El Tránsito (in its eponymous valley) as the most significant.
Pictures of the visit are available here.
