Promoting Climate Change Transformation with Young People in Brazil: Participatory Action Research through a Looping Approach

Amid research into the mounting social and environmental threats presented by climate change, young people’s everyday experiences and knowledges are often overlooked, despite being the generation that will be most affected by climate change. We present a ‘looping’ methodology, developed through collaborative work between two distinct but complementary research projects wherein young people in the Paraıba do Sul watershed, Sao Paulo state, Brazil, shared their perspectives on (respectively) climate-related disasters and the food-water-energy nexus. The approach combines the theoretical framings of citizen science and nexus thinking under the aegis of participatory action research to identify points of mutual learning related to the knowledge, action and critique co-produced with young people. This ‘looping methodology’ enables meta-analytic insights into how participatory action research, looped with other action-oriented research, can enable young people and other protagonists to articulate and act upon the complex, multi-scalar processes that characterise what it means to live in uncertain social, political and environmental times.