El Niño: Phenomenon of Opportunities
Bilingual teaching resource
Welcome to the bilingual teaching resource: "El Niño: Phenomenon of Opportunities". Select "Teaching Resource" from the drop down menu on the top left to access the educational material.
This teaching resource aims to educate Geography students on the highly nuanced and contextualised occurrence of disasters by looking at the lived realities of the El Niño phenomenon in the Sechura desert in northern Peru as a case study. Based on an interdisciplinary and multi-sectoral research project titled “El Niño: Phenomenon of Opportunities”, this resource uses a range of data collection methods and sources to reflect the diverse nature of Geography as a discipline.
The El Niño phenomenon causes months of rainfall in the western coast of Latin America as a result of warming sea temperatures in the eastern Pacific Ocean. This weather phenomenon occurs every 5 to 7 years, bringing with it significant damage to communities as infrastructure is destroyed, agricultural fields are flooded, people suffer from direct and indirect health concerns, among other impacts. Northern regions of Peru are particularly affected by this phenomenon.
However, nestled in the Sechura desert of northern Peru, the rural community of Mala Vida (“bad life” in Spanish) challenges the negative assumptions about El Niño by finding the good in the ugly. For centuries, subsistence farmers and fishermen have taken advantage of the window of opportunity brought about after an extreme rainfall event which fertilises land for agriculture and livestock farming, as well as creating temporary lakes which fill up with fish. Such abundance has rarely been recognised as a direct benefit from a disaster.
An international and multi-sectoral research team was created to investigate this pocket of opportunity brought about by the El Niño phenomenon. Within this, an educational programme was developed to safeguard and continue the use of ancestral knowledge with regards to disaster management. Following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, this programme was implemented virtually to empower children while fostering alternative methods for data collection. The students at the Daniel Alcides Carrión school, in Mala Vida, have since developed a collection of videos, stories, images, and more which communicate the benefits of the El Niño phenomenon in the Sechura desert – a vast repertoire of knowledge on which this teaching resource is based.
This resource is based on the following research projects financed by the UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council:
Understanding the impact of El Niño in marginal communities in northern Peru.
Learning history and valuing community actives for an empowering digital curriculum in the north of Peru.