Project BeChange
"The tomorrow of the Amazon and now” | image: Carlos Tello, GERICS/Hereon
Background
The Brazilian Amazon faces the compounded challenges of deforestation and climate change. Our study region, a municipality of the Pará state, experiences these socio-environmental dynamics with land management and distribution issues, severe drought in the recent years and some of the highest deforestation rates in the country. Small agricultural communities here operate within complex circumstances, often without adequate technical assistance or access to climate information.
BeChange closes these gaps by engaging local stakeholders, traditional and indigenous communities to assess climate risks and vulnerabilities, co-create shared visions for sustainable futures and develop practical digital tools tailored to on-the-ground resilience planning. Through a transdisciplinary approach combining impact chain assessments, participatory backcasting and digital tools co-creation, the project seeks to bridge the divide between climate science and local decision-making needs, while fostering behavioural change toward climate-resilient agricultural practices. On a second stage, the project aims to bridge the two cluster regions by replicating the methodologies and adapting the impact chain assessments and participatory approaches to the Harburg region, in order to facilitate the same process of shared visions co-creation for sustainable and suitable futures.
Aims & Objectives
- Assess current agricultural practices , land-use impacts and perceived climate vulnerabilities through participatory workshops or interviews with smallholder rural producers and other local stakeholders.
- Co-create desirable and suitable future scenarios for climate-resilient development using participatory methodologies.
- Co-design a prototype digital climate service to support sustainable agricultural decision-making in the region.
- Validate and monitor the digital tool’s effectiveness in facilitating decision-making and driving behavioural change in sustainable land management.
- Develop a transferable methodological framework to share learnings and enable replication in other regions.
Project Staff
Prof. Dr. Martina Neuburger, Universität Hamburg
Prof. Dr. Uwe Schneider, Universität Hamburg
Dr. María Máñez Costa, Climate Service Center Germany (GERICS)
Dr. Carlos Tello, Climate Service Center Germany (GERICS)
Dr. Vladimir Metelitsa, Climate Service Center Germany (GERICS)
M.Sc. Viviane Mattos Nicoletti
M.Sc. Christiane Lawrenz