Novas perspetivas sobre o envolvimento dos jovens em risco costeiro

In a world facing global challenges related to climate change, building community resilience is imperative. Disasters occur only when a lack of resilience allows systems to be overwhelmed. With hazard events becoming more frequent and intense due to climate change, efforts to build resilience and mitigate existing risks, while preventing the emergence of new ones, need to be accelerated. In Europe, approximately 41% of the population lives within 50 km of the sea, while in Portugal this figure more than doubles (83%), underscoring the significance of coastal risks. The SYREN project aims to foster community resilience by harnessing science-based knowledge and insights of teenagers, fostering collaborative innovation between the two. A novel aspect of this research lies in understanding and developing in co-creation an increasingly favoured approach that aligns research and service development, to create youth experts on risk engagement. This entails the involvement of youth in meaningful and sustained ways on issues of importance to their communities, thus contributing to the engagement of future generations. Project SYREN thrives on multilevel intersections - as transdisciplinary research should do - between disciplinary areas, science and society, sea and land, learning and teaching, with teenagers themselves on the threshold between childhood and adulthood. Therefore, the proposed research is concurrently original, challenging, and relevant. The overarching goal of the project comprises seven specific objectives: (1) to define key concepts of coastal risks and actions to address them, establishing the knowledge component of coastal risk literacy; (2) to identify factors shaping teenagers ́ perception of coastal risks and assess their current knowledge, (3) to characterize teenager’s information-seeking behaviour via the internet and social media; (4) to co-create three media products about coastal risk: a video, a comic story, and a third media to be determined; (5) to co-create an engagement plan for Portugal targeting youth on coastal risks; (6) to know how youth relates to coastal risk and how they envision risk engagement should look like, and (7) to share project findings with researchers, schools, coastal stakeholders and the public. Despite the abundant literature on climate change, youth engagement with coastal risks remains scarce. Notably, coastal risk literacy has yet to be defined, to integrate other overarching literacies such as climate literacy, ocean coastal literacy or environmental literacy. SYREN aims to establish a benchmark in this domain. Our ambition is to drive transdisciplinary research towards outcomes that surpass the sum of individual subjects' contributions, drawing on diverse fields such as coastal geosciences, education, communication, and psychology. Addressing youth engagement with coastal risks, akin to climate change, must navigate the potential for eco-anxiety or the normalization of risk, as highlighted in recent literature on climate change communication with youth. A key innovation in this study lies in its exploration and advancement of co-creation, which has the potential to transcend traditional academic boundaries, fostering impactful societal transformation through vibrant, contextually responsive collaborations between communities and academia.