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Animal ABidings: recoverIng from DisastErs in more-than-human communities

Project description

Learning from animals how to recover from disasters

Disasters such as floods, drought and wildfires have devastating consequences on the lives and habitats of both humans and animals. Yet, many animal species manage to adapt and survive. With more extreme climate events expected in the coming years, humans could surely benefit from understanding the manifold adaptation strategies of animals to disasters. Funded by the European Research Council, the ABIDE project will investigate how multispecies communities cope and persist in wildfire-prone areas of Australia, Brazil and Portugal. Drawing on expertise from an interdisciplinary team, the project aims to shed light on how animals adjust and recover from disasters, translating it into human terms for better social resilience and governance of disasters.

Objective

What and how can we learn from animals about recovering from disasters? How can we hear them in their own terms, translate their stories, and include their perspectives, in human knowledge about disasters? This project explores the resilience of multispecies communities, and their capacities for healing and bouncing back from disasters, through the point of view of nonhuman animals. It departs from the current context of acute climate crisis, which sets the stage for Dantesque scenarios of impending climate-driven disasters such as wildfires, floods, tornados and hurricanes, with related extensive loss of both human and nonhuman lives, liveable dwellings and species extinction. Focusing on wildfires as disasters that challenge previous expert knowledge due to climate change and human exploitation of natural resources, we propose to compare three countries where wildfires have taken on increasingly critical proportions every year: Brazil, Australia and Portugal. We address a species gap in our knowledge of disasters, and wildfires in particular, by exploring the possibilities of learning with animals how to live and cope with extreme change and uncertainty in wildfire-prone areas. Drawing on contributions from sociologists, anthropologists, ethologists, biologists and geographers, ABIDE aims at attuning to, translating and including the voices, stories and experiences of animals into our knowledge of how multispecies communities can better recover from the traumatic experience of wildfires. In the end, we seek to build the foundations for a new interdisciplinary framework for addressing humans' and animals' ability to build and abide in multispecies communities that are more resilient to wildfires and other disasters. In so doing, we aspire to identify the landmarks of a post-species episteme, and thus push forward the frontiers of knowledge of human-animal relations, as well as contribute to a more-than-human governance of disasters.

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Topic(s)

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Funding Scheme

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HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants

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Call for proposal

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(opens in new window) ERC-2021-COG

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Host institution

INSTITUTO DE CIENCIAS SOCIAIS
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 1 999 970,00
Address
AV PROF ANIBAL DE BETTENCOURT 9
1600 189 LISBOA
Portugal

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Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Links
Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

€ 1 999 970,00

Beneficiaries (1)

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