Amazonian cities and extreme hydro-climatic events: research to reduce vulnerability and build resilience

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This research partnership will build and strengthen scientific collaboration between UK and Brazilian researchers. Our team will work together to develop new, innovative research in order to reduce the vulnerability of Amazonian cities to extreme climatic events, such as floods and droughts. We hope that this research enables decision-makers in Brazil to identify those cities that need humanitarian assistance most during climate emergencies, and also build long-term resilience (capacity to absorb these shocks) to floods and droughts. Our team members come from various academic disciplines, including statistics, health science, economics, environmental social science, and spatial modelling. We will use secondary data sources to examine how adaptive capacity, local institutions and natural hazard exposure (the occurrence of droughts and floods) influence the negative impacts of these climate events on the well-being of people living in Amazonian cities. We are also interested in how extreme climatic events may influence food prices in these cities, which has implications for the affordability of food for the poorest city-dwellers. Our network also involves local citizens, and we will work with a range of community members in our focal cities in order to make sure that are research is locally-relevant and useful. Finally, we are investing significant effort in improving career opportunities for Amazonian scientists, and will achieve this through UK-Brazil researcher exchange, and workshops to train Masters and PhD students in the UK and Brazil.