Interview with Tercio Ambrizzi

Extreme events have become part of daily life in Brazil, yet understanding these climate phenomena is only one part of the challenge. It is essential to transform knowledge into prevention, prepare institutions, reach local territories, and acknowledge that the impacts do not affect everyone in the same way. This is the space in which the Climate Crisis and Disasters Resilience Research Center (CLIMARES) aims to operate. Organized around various research axes, the Center seeks to bridge climatology, risk management, health, food and water security, economy, social transformation, innovation, education, and knowledge dissemination. In this interview, Tércio Ambrizzi explains why resilience lies at the heart of this proposal, discusses the obstacles to building truly interdisciplinary research, and outlines how CLIMARES intends to bring science, decision-makers, and communities closer together.

The problem that CLIMARES was created to address

How would you explain CLIMARES to someone who is not yet familiar with the Center? What is the main problem it was created to address?

Today, almost everyone is aware of extreme events: floods in some places, droughts in others, landslides, and various other events that have severe impacts on the population. Yet, not everyone makes the connection between these events and climate change.

The Center was born with a spirit reflected in its very name: resilience in the face of crises and climate extremes. To achieve this, we must first develop methodologies that enable the issuance of increasingly effective alerts. This is why CLIMARES maintains a strong partnership with CEMADEN, the National Center for Monitoring and Early Warning of Natural Disasters.

However, the challenge does not end with the warning. The warming of the atmosphere affects public health, the economy, mobility, water availability, and food production. Each of these dimensions is addressed within the Center’s various thematic axes. What sets CLIMARES apart is its commitment to building an interdisciplinary perspective, which also incorporates governance and knowledge transfer. This allows us to gain a broader understanding of how climate extremes affect society.

Interdisciplinarity: beyond the sum of the projects

Interdisciplinarity is a major distinguishing feature of the Center, but also a significant challenge. How can it be made to happen in practice, rather than just as a collection of projects in different fields?

It’s the million-dollar question — and it’s one that every reviewer asks. I would ask it too, as I’m a project reviewer myself, and I made sure to consider this when we were drafting the proposal. It’s a genuine challenge. Just look at the university itself: there are dozens of units, each with its own research, yet they often have very little interaction with one another.

At CLIMARES, the common core is global warming and its impacts on the climate, a theme that cuts across every field. The economy group needs simulations of future climate conditions to project economic impacts. These impacts have social consequences. Variations in precipitation and temperature directly affect agricultural production. In the field of health, we observe climate-sensitive diseases and the effects associated with flooding, heat, and pollution. There are, therefore, many potential connections.

The major challenge is to overcome a culture where researchers work in isolation or merely request data from other groups. We need knowledge transfer and co-production: it’s not enough for me to simply hand over data for you to analyze on your own. It is essential that I understand what you intend to do with that data, and that you know how it was produced.

The international committee suggested beginning the integration process in stages, starting by bringing together groups that share the greatest affinity. We aren’t going to integrate everyone all at once. If we can make this work within smaller clusters, the entire community will benefit.

How can internal meetings help with this integration?

Internal events are an important part of this process. The idea is to create spaces where groups can get to know one another better, identify synergies, and build shared agendas. A positive finding from our internal mapping is that the various thematic areas have shown an interest in collaborating with each other.

We have top-tier principal investigators who understand the value of integration. Our role is to sustain this motivation and demonstrate that, while each person’s research has its own specific focus, it must also align with a common mission: the mission of CLIMARES.

Mission and resilience

What is the mission of CLIMARES, in one sentence?

Articulate different areas with focus on resilience in the face of extreme climatic events.

Resilience is the main core of the Center. What does this word mean when we talk about climate change?

"Resilience" is a difficult word, even to explain. The concept has gained traction in IPCC reports and, over time, has come to be used more frequently by the scientific community and policymakers alike.

When we talk about the climate, we must acknowledge that some losses, including those affecting ecosystems and biodiversity, are already irreversible. Other changes, however, can be managed, mitigated, or partially reversed. Therefore, resilience does not necessarily mean returning to a previous state; rather, it entails developing the capacity to confront, adapt to, and respond to new conditions without further exacerbating the damages.

From scientific knowledge to action

One of the challenges in climate science is transforming knowledge about risk into capacity for prevention and decision-making. How does CLIMARES intend to bridge the gap between what science knows and what governments, cities, businesses, and communities are actually able to do?

This is a challenge that the university has struggled to address for many years. More recently, the transfer of knowledge to society has taken on a much more significant role. One of the core missions of the CEPIDs (Research, Innovation and Dissemination Centers) is precisely the transfer of technological development and innovation; CLIMARES fulfills this function by addressing issues that directly affect society, such as food, health, education, and many other dimensions.

Our goal is to gain an increasingly deep understanding of the work being carried out within each research axis and to identify how this knowledge can be applied for the benefit of society. CLIMARES must serve as a bridge, utilizing media, scientific outreach, and the direct participation of researchers, through interviews and other forms of communication.

At the same time, we must maintain contact with decision-makers. These are distinct audiences, yet both are essential. Once we have results and syntheses of our work, we need to translate them into accessible formats and share them both with the media and within decision-making spheres.

Inequality, territory and the role of communities

Extreme events show that vulnerability is not distributed equally. How do social inequality, territory, and varying response capacities factor into the scientific agenda of CLIMARES?

Many Brazilian cities are vulnerable, and a significant number of them still possess limited institutional capacity to deal with extreme events. This is a problem that must be addressed locally and, in some cases, through regional cooperation frameworks.

Risk depends on three factors: hazard, exposure, and vulnerability. A hazard is an extreme event. Exposure refers to the presence of people, housing, infrastructure, and other assets in locations that could be affected. Vulnerability relates to the capacity to prevent, withstand, and recover from impacts, and it encompasses social and economic conditions. To understand the risk faced by a population, we must examine these three elements together.

For this reason, risk is highly localized. Within a single city, some areas are far more exposed and vulnerable than others. There is no single solution that can be applied uniformly everywhere.

Does this mean working directly with the populations in each territory? What should their role be in the production of knowledge?

I believe so. Within the Center and among our partners, there is already experience working with vulnerable populations, schools, and communities, focusing on raising awareness, prevention, and building capacity to deal with extreme events.

CEMADEN, for instance, has significant experience in risk education. My dream is for CLIMARES to develop something like a “CLIMARES Education” initiative, one that can reach schools across different regions of Brazil through both in-person and online activities, while also training educators who can then multiply this knowledge.

We have already had some very promising experiences with courses designed for public school teachers. The online format significantly expanded our reach, as schools are not always able to release teachers for in-person activities. We can learn from these experiences, as well as from the work our partners are already doing, to refine existing initiatives and scale them up, without having to reinvent the wheel.

What does CLIMARES hope to learn from people, so that the circulation of knowledge is not one-way?

This point is fundamental. When we work with teachers, students, and communities, we do not merely learn how to communicate better; we also gain insight into existing vulnerabilities, the knowledge already present, and the specific characteristics of that particular context.

For instance, there was an initiative in schools that involved the development of a card game focused on climate and extreme events. Activities like this demonstrate that, before adapting or conveying knowledge, we must first understand how people perceive the problem and how it manifests in their daily lives.

CLIMARES plans to develop participatory workshops to build resilience solutions in collaboration with the local population, combining data generated by the Center with the knowledge that people possess regarding their own territories.

Where CLIMARES is now and where it aims to go

At what stage is CLIMARES currently, and what position does it aim to occupy among climate-focused networks?

The Center is still in a relatively early phase of consolidation. As is common with large-scale projects, we have faced initial challenges regarding infrastructure and equipment acquisition, but such hurdles are simply part of the development process. At the same time, there is strong engagement among the researchers, and the scholarship programs are being implemented.

One of our priorities is to build a shared database containing long-term climate simulations that can be utilized by different research groups. This is significant because it establishes a common knowledge base and facilitates integration across our different research axes.

CLIMARES was conceived as a long-term project. In these initial years, our goal is to ensure that our scientific, data, integration, and outreach structures are fully organized, and to establish the Center’s reputation based on its contributions. We aim to build a robust framework, capable of fostering new partnerships and projects, and one that can continue to operate well beyond specific funding cycles.

Our hope is that CLIMARES will make a meaningful contribution to the advancement of knowledge, ultimately helping to save lives in Brazil and potentially elsewhere, by putting scientific knowledge at the service of society.