Forest futures: empowering Amazonian children to safeguard heritage and biodiversity
Tropical forests are major components of world’s carbon and water cycles but how their trees cope with drought stress?
The challenge
The Amazon region is home to a quarter of the world’s biodiversity and half of its rainforests. Indigenous communities have unique knowledge of this environment, which informs their distinctive ways of living sustainably. However, both the rich biodiversity they depend upon and their understandings of it are critically endangered.
Deforestation, overexploitation by extractive industries, and climate change impacts are drastically reducing availability of plants and wild animals – vital sources of protein and micronutrients for rainforest communities.
This environmental disruption is entwined with unprecedented loss of Indigenous ecological knowledge. Transmitted orally and embedded in daily practice, this knowledge is rapidly disappearing between the generations due to increasing urbanisation, global media influences, and the pressure of market economies on local livelihoods.
What we're doing
This project brings together anthropology, conservation biology and digital animation to ask how Amazonian children (aged 6–16) imagine the future amidst the intersected loss of natural resources and ecological knowledge.
Forest Futures addresses these issues by engaging Amazonian children in dialogues on biodiversity management and revitalisation of endangered ecologies. Through collaborative workshops delivered with local artists, the children will co-produce animated films to explore themes of biodiversity decline, engage with the knowledge of their elders, and envision hopeful scenarios where their traditional heritage and surrounding environments are thriving.
How it helps
Our central goal is to empower Amazonian children and inspire them to feel hopeful about their adulthoods, equipping them with creative skills through which they can preserve ecological knowledge and build upon it to keep living sustainably in a changing environment.
Investigators
- Dr Camilla Morelli, Department of Anthropology and Archaeology
- Dr Shirley Famelli, School of Geographical Sciences
- Sophie Marsh, animator