The Latin American Network of National Ozone Officers met in Asunción, Paraguay, alongside the XVIII Ibero-American Congress of Air Conditioning and Refrigeration (CIAR 2026) to strengthen regional cooperation in sustainable refrigeration.
The Network, coordinated in the region by UNEP’s OzonAction Programme and funded by the Multilateral Fund of the Montreal Protocol, brought together National Ozone Units, implementing agencies, and technical experts. Participants discussed capacity building, best practices, HCFC phase-out, HFC reduction, new technologies, regulatory frameworks, and regional coordination in international fora.
Gilda Torres, Director General of Air at Paraguay’s Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development (MADES), said the main challenge is promoting technologies with low global warming potential and high energy efficiency. She also emphasized training, human capacity building, and strategies such as energy efficiency labeling for refrigeration and air conditioning.
Participants visited a Paraguayan company at Puerto Seguro Fluvial in Villeta that provides integrated refrigeration solutions for river transport. The visit covered logistics, refrigerant gas management, and cold chain requirements, including the need to keep containers at -18°C to preserve meat transported via the river port to Uruguay and Brazil.
Technical sessions at CIAR addressed low-global-warming-potential refrigerants, energy efficiency under the Kigali Amendment, digitalization, energy audits, low-charge technologies, and natural refrigerants. A separate visit presented Paraguay’s first CO2-based refrigeration system in the retail sector, installed at a supermarket to replace R-22 and improve energy efficiency, with an estimated payback period of 4.4 years.
At the closing of the event, Marco Pinzón, Coordinator of the Latin American Ozone Network, stressed the need to identify synergies at regional and national levels to support the transition to new technologies while enabling countries to meet their obligations under the Montreal Protocol and its Kigali Amendment.