Description du projet
S’inspirer des animaux pour se remettre d’une catastrophe
Les catastrophes telles que les inondations, les sécheresses et les incendies de forêt ont des conséquences dévastatrices sur la vie et l’habitat des hommes et des animaux. Pourtant, de nombreuses espèces animales parviennent à s’adapter et à survivre. Alors qu’une augmentation des phénomènes climatiques extrêmes est attendue dans les années à venir, l’homme pourrait certainement tirer profit d’une meilleure compréhension des différentes stratégies d’adaptation des animaux aux catastrophes. Financé par le Conseil européen de la recherche, le projet ABIDE étudiera comment les communautés multispécifiques s’adaptent et perdurent dans les régions d’Australie, du Brésil et du Portugal sujettes aux incendies de forêt. S’appuyant sur l’expertise d’une équipe interdisciplinaire, le projet entend apporter un éclairage sur la manière dont les animaux s’adaptent et se rétablissent après une catastrophe, et traduire ces connaissances en termes humains afin d’améliorer la résilience sociale et la gouvernance des catastrophes.
Objectif
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.
Champ scientifique
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Régime de financement
ERC - Support for frontier research (ERC)Institution d’accueil
1600 189 Lisboa
Portugal