Ugandan Environmentalist JulietGrace Luwedde Advances Community-Rooted Climate Action

She is an environmentalist, an environmental justice advocate, and a youth leader. But more than any title, she is someone who understands that climate action without inclusion is not really climate action at all.

Where It Began

Juliet Grace did not arrive at this work through an academic pathway. She arrived through a teenager's instinct about injustice. At fourteen, she began volunteering with TEENS Uganda, an organisation whose acronym stands for Training, Education, and Empowerment for Neighbourhood Sustainability. The work she found there was immediate and grounded: training women in backyard gardening so they could grow their own food and generate income from small, neglected spaces around their homes. As she later told the UNDP, it was through that experience that food security and the climate conditions that threaten it became the lens through which she understood her purpose. "If I want to contribute to the food value chain," she said, "I must address the climate crisis."

That early experience shaped a commitment that has never left her. In 2017, she was invited to speak on behalf of young people at the United Nations Environment Assembly in Nairobi, which ran under the theme "Towards a Pollution-Free Planet." She has described that moment as a turning point: the realisation that advocacy was not something done on the sidelines of the real work, but a form of the work itself. She carried that conviction into the founding of the Creatives Climate Cafe in Kampala, a space she described to UNDP as bringing together storytellers, poets, painters, photographers, and children to interpret climate issues and explore how to tell the success stories of change happening around them. A government official joined one of the sessions, opening up the possibility of collaboration on public climate reporting. "People realised," she said, "that conversations on climate change need to happen outside of conference rooms."

A Continent Bearing a Disproportionate Cost

Africa contributes roughly four per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, yet it bears a disproportionate share of the consequences. Droughts, floods, erratic rainfall, and soil degradation are reshaping livelihoods, displacing communities, and threatening food systems across the continent. Uganda sits at the sharp end of this exposure. Around 80 per cent of Ugandans depend on agriculture for their livelihoods, and the sector generates 90 per cent of the country's export earnings. Climate variability strikes directly at that foundation. By 2022, an estimated 41 per cent of Uganda's land area was considered degraded, 12 per cent severely so. The country's forests and wetlands, which together contribute significantly to household livelihoods and GDP, are under sustained pressure from population growth, agricultural expansion, and decades of inadequate environmental governance.

Uganda's government has responded with ambition. In 2022, it launched a ten-year Environment Restoration Plan and declared a "war decade" for restoring degraded ecosystems. These are serious commitments. The gap between them and what happens on the ground is precisely where practitioners like Juliet Grace do their most important work.

Four Issues That Define the Field

To understand what Juliet Grace is working against, and working to change, four interconnected issues shape the climate landscape she operates in.

The first is the gender gap in climate vulnerability and decision-making. Climate change is not gender neutral. UN Women's 2025 gender snapshot found that under a worst-case scenario, more than 158 million additional women and girls could be pushed into extreme poverty by 2050, nearly half of them in Africa, with 236 million more facing food insecurity. A 2026 research review found that fewer than 34 per cent of UNFCCC delegates are women, and only 15 per cent of national climate plans even mention gender. For Juliet Grace, this gap is not an abstraction. In a 2023 feature published by the Global Environment Facility ahead of the GEF Assembly in Vancouver, she described how her mother had saved to purchase land, only to be swindled by the broker she had dealt with, who to this day refuses to hand over the title. "If she were a man," Juliet Grace said, "the story would be different." That experience, she explained, is what drives her insistence on women's land rights as a cornerstone of sustainable agriculture, food security, and ecosystem protection.

The second is the exclusion of youth from meaningful climate decision-making. Africa has the youngest population of any continent, with 60 per cent of its people under the age of 25, yet the median age of political leaders across the continent is 62. A 2023/2024 Kenya Institute for Public Policy Research and Analysis brief found that youth exclusion from climate decision-making is one of the most documented and least addressed failures in African climate governance. Young people are frequently invited to attend. They are less frequently invited to shape.

The third is the implementation gap between policy ambition and community reality. Juliet Grace has written about this directly. In a reflection published ahead of COP27, she observed that plastic bag bans adopted across Africa over a decade ago had changed very little on the ground: "Plastic bags are still everywhere. Effective implementation doesn't happen as often as it should." The Second Africa Climate Summit in September 2025 addressed this gap directly, launching the Africa Just Resilience Framework alongside the Climate Justice Impact Fund for Africa, which has already dispersed 64 grants across 17 countries. These are steps forward. But the human infrastructure for translating continental ambition into village-level change remains the most critical and least-resourced piece of the whole system.

" “Being part of the LéO Africa Institute as an alumna for Huduma Fellowship has transformed my journey from one of individual ambition to collective purpose, grounding my leadership in service, expanding my vision through community, and reminded me that true impact is built not alone, but alongside a network that challenges, supports, and believes in a better future.” — JulietGrace Luwedde, Distinguished Fellow

The fourth is the land restoration imperative. In East Africa, a landmark programme launched at COP26 committed a USD 150 million finance package to restore around 1.9 million hectares of degraded agricultural land across six countries including Uganda, targeting 1.5 million farming families. The principle behind the programme, that 45 per cent of carbon credits generated are directed back to communities, is precisely the kind of design that Juliet Grace advocates for: restoration that benefits the people whose land is being restored, not just the institutions financing the work.

 

The Roles She Holds

Juliet Grace's professional footprint reflects the seriousness with which she has pursued this work at every level. She has served     as the Eastern Africa Regional Coordinator for the African Youth Initiative on Climate Change and has held the role of Global Focal Point for the [1]     UNCCD Global Youth Caucus on Land and Desertification, the youth constituency of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification. In that role, she has represented the voices of young people on one of the most consequential environmental governance processes on the planet.      Earlier in her career, she contributed as a junior consultant with Uganda's Ministry of Water and Environment and the National Environment Management Authority, giving her a grounding in how environmental governance works at the national institutional level alongside her grassroots and international experience.

    

From Individual Ambition to Collective Purpose

Juliet Grace is a class of 2021 Huduma Fellow of the LéO Africa Institute. The fellowship, she has said, changed the nature of her ambition.

That shift, from individual ambition to collective purpose, is not a small one. It requires a willingness to let go of the idea that impact is something a single person produces, and to embrace the slower, more complicated work of building it together. For someone already committed to inclusion and participation, the LéO Africa community offered a place to live those values, not just apply them professionally.

A Final Note

The climate crisis is urgent, and the people working on it carry that urgency every day. What Juliet Grace Luwedde adds to that work is something equally important: the insistence that urgency cannot become an excuse for leaving people behind, that the speed of ambition must be matched by the depth of inclusion.

Africa is not just a victim of climate change. It is increasingly positioning itself as a driver of solutions. But that positioning will ring hollow if the communities most affected by the crisis are still waiting to be heard at the table where the solutions are designed. Juliet Grace has been making sure they are not left waiting since she was fourteen years old.

She is rooted in that conviction. And from it, she keeps reaching.

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