Over the next five years, the project "Animal Abidings: recovering from disasters in more-than-human communities (ABIDE)" aims to explore resilience and recovery capacity after disasters based on what happens to animals. The goal is to find new possibilities to live and handle these increasingly more frequent phenomena such as floods, hurricanes, tornadoes and forest fires, which arise from climate change and human exploitation of natural resources.

For Verónica Policarpo, the grant "will be decisive to consolidate the area of Human-Animal Studies in Portugal and internationally". The research focuses on comparing three countries affected by huge fires every year: Portugal, Brazil and Australia. With the contribution of sociologists, anthropologists, ethologists, biologists and geographers, the ABIDE project will gather stories and data about adaptation and resistance modes of multiple species to crisis situations, examples of synergies between humans and animals, as well as seek to know how whether animals are or are not considered in risk management strategies, emergency plans and post-disaster reconstruction.

Verónica Policarpo holds a PhD in Social Sciences (Sociology) from ICS-ULisboa and coordinates the postgraduate course "Animals & Society" and the project "CLAN – Children-animals friendships: challenging boundaries between humans and non-humans in contemporary societies" in the that same institution. Verónica Policarpo is part of the ICS research groups "Life Course, Equality and Solidarity: Practices and Policies" and "Environment, Territory and Society".

Created by the European Union in 2007, the ERC is the leading European funding body for excellent research. It funds creative researchers of any nationality and age to carry out projects in institutions in EU member countries.

Source: Institute of Social Sciences