Sonia Dias

Solid-waste management, gender, climate change, action-research, participatory methodologies, advocacy and policy analysis, popular education, participatory platforms

Dr Sonia Dias is a leading global expert on inclusive waste management systems.  An action research and popular education specialist, her work focuses on climate change, women’s empowerment and occupational-health in the waste sector. She has led a number of major projects in Brazil – Gender and Waste tackling gender inequalities waste pickers face, Cuidar Project and CataSaúde Viraliza focusing on health issues and climate change impact mapping in the waste picker sector across Brazil. Her current focus is near-real-time monitoring of climate impacts on waste-picker cooperatives in six cities in Brazil.

She started in the solid-waste field in 1985 as a municipal public officer, where she worked to integrate the social aspects into the technical planning of waste collection and recycling in Belo Horizonte. The Waste and Citizenship social activism that Sonia was involved in led to the creation of multi-stakeholder forums at local, sub-national and national levels. She is a core-group member of the Observatory for Inclusive Recycling in Brazil.  She is the coordinator of the Circular Economy Thematic Chamber of Brazil’s National Climate Change Forum, and sits on the Municipal Adaptation and Eco-efficiency Committee of the city of Belo Horizonte.

At a global level, Sonia has collaborated with Habitat III as the policy unit expert working on the New Urban Agenda.  She serves on numerous advisory boards including the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, End Plastic Pollution International Collaborative (EPPIC), the Circulate Initiative Responsible Sourcing, Systemiq’s Living Income Study and Pimp My Carroça.  She has taught at the Gender and Green Jobs Academies at the ILO’s International Training Centre. She has served as Latin American representative to the Collaborative Working Group on Solid Waste Management in Low and Middle-Income Countries.

For her work as city officer in Belo Horizonte, Sonia was awarded ICLEI’s Local Initiatives Award 2000.

Sonia has a PhD in political science and a master’s degree in human geography both from the Federal University of Minas Gerais.  She has a specialization in solid waste management from the University of Kitakyushu, Japan. She was nominated as an Eisenhower Fellow (2007) and a fellow of the Japanese International Cooperation Agency (1995).

Select Publications

Op-Eds