Building resilience in the face of nexus threats: local knowledge and social practices of Brazilian youth (NEXUS-DRR)

The EU provided three years of funding (2019-2023, project extended due to covid-19) for the project: Building resilience in the face of nexus threats: local knowledge and social practices of Brazilian youth (NEXUS-DRR)” (European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme, Marie Sklodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No. 833401). The project was carried out in collaboration with the School of Public Health at the University of Sao Paulo. It was designed using hybrid participatory methods and was shifted to remote methods due to covid-19. Using WhatsApp groups, the project engaged young people aged 12 to 18 in the urban periphery in Sao Paulo in discussions and reflections on their everyday experiences with chronic and acute disaster risk as well as scarcity of food, water, and energy. The project aimed to shape pathways for creating long-term (emotional) resilience through emotion-based community-based and formal educational strategies for disaster risk reduction and preparedness.

To live better with and develop long-term (emotional) resilience in a context of interconnected, often chronic, crises at the nexus of scarcity and disaster risk and to learn from young people’s everyday agency.

The project has several aims:

1. To analyse the ways in which young people understand and experience their everyday role in terms of access to and use of food/water/energy resources.
2. To explore young people’s knowledge of the underlying causes of disaster risk such as unsustainable resource use as well as their perceptions of future scenarios.
3. To explore the social practices of youth to reduce their vulnerability to resource insecurity and to create resilient communities, and to identify their needs for capacity building.
4. To critically reflect on how youth knowledge and their social practices can be valued and considered for the development of public policies, focusing on integrating the role of youth agency in participatory early warning systems and education for resilience.

• Blurring the ‘-ism’ in youth climate crisis activism: everyday agency and practices of marginalized youth in the Brazilian urban periphery
• Building resilience in the face of nexus threats: local knowledge and social practices of Brazilian youth
• Nexus DDR
• Emotions matter: EMPOWER-ing youth by integrating emotions of (chronic) disaster risk into strategies for disaster preparedness