PARALLEL SESSION: Science and technology within reach: low-cost solutions and traditional knowledge to increase community resilience

The session will rescue experiences and good practices from the Central American, Caribbean and Pacific subregions and from those people who are most exposed to high levels of disaster risk, showing examples of how the knowledge of communities and indigenous peoples represents a relevant opportunity and low-cost to build resilience. A space for the exchange of experiences and learning will be promoted, highlighting the knowledge of the communities and discussing the articulation or reflection of this knowledge with the academy and the education systems of the indigenous peoples, who have autonomy, government and own education. Sustainable community solutions centered on people as active subjects of the GdR will be shown, and a debate will be generated on how this knowledge could be integrated into the national systems of GdR. An intersectional perspective of how vulnerability factors related to gender, age and ethnic origin come together will also be addressed.

In this sense, there will also be a discussion on how to recognize, value and promote the exchange of intergenerational knowledge and ancestral knowledge, especially indigenous women. The role of women and how these experiences are harmonized with agendas, as well as public policies, strategies or plans for DRR under the intersectional gender perspective or approach.

Session objectives

The objective of the session is, through the voices of the community, to give visibility to those experiences and local knowledge that arise from the communities to respond to threats, and that are the result of knowledge accumulated at the local level. Likewise, it seeks to highlight the experience accumulated by civil society in the Latin American and Caribbean region, as well as the long tradition of working in knowledge networks. Finally, it is expected to promote the incorporation of local and ancestral knowledge in governance and national GDR systems.