The series of short, free-form essays produced by the Interdisciplinary Climate Change Observatory team is releasing its latest edition, the report Challenges for urban adaptation in the face of climate change, authored by internationalist Júlia Nascimento Santos. The text covers the activities and discussions held during the four-days of the SP Meeting 2024: Climate Change and the challenge of global cooperation for urban adaptation, an event held on the campus of Mackenzie Presbyterian University (UPM) in São Paulo (SP) and organised by the German-Brazilian Klimapolis Initiative and the Cities, Infrastructure and Adaptation to Climate Change Network (CIAMClima).

Read an excerpt from this issue:

The discussions and speeches during the event reinforced the feeling I had about Klimapolis being very much focused on ‘real-world experiment’ projects, as they call them. In this sense, these projects consist of the engagement of the member researchers, more than 30 PhDs from various fields of knowledge, in some cases with São Paulo’s urban planning for rainwater harvesting and flood prevention through the installation of ‘swimming pools’. In the end, they apply their studies in order to perfect the techniques and solutions for adapting the city, here so that this water control is efficient. The practice of theorising or producing comprehensive knowledge on the profound issues of climate change thus takes a back seat to the individual researchers and their respective lines of research, while joint action is based on real cases from which data and knowledge are produced through empiricism.

Besides being a collaborating researcher at the OIMC, Júlia Nascimento Santos is a member of the World Political Analysis Laboratory (LABMUNDO). Within the Observatory, among other academic productions, she co-authored the three reports monitoring climate negotiations during the United Nations Climate Change Conferences (COPs) held in 2021, 2022 and 2023, all published in Cadernos do OIMC. Her concluding work for her bachelor’s degree in International Relations at the State University of Rio de Janeiro (DRI-UERJ), entitled The political internalisation of the Ramsar Convention in Brazil: the case of the Amazon Estuary and its Mangroves, was supervised by Prof. Carlos R. S. Milani and co-supervised by Prof. Mário L. G. Soares.