Interview with Iona Bell, researcher with Fenómeno de Oportunidades.
Tell us a little bit about the research. What are its main purposes and goals?
Our research seeks to create an interdisciplinary and multi-sectoral research consortium, to understand the El Niño-food systems in the Sechura desert of Northern Peru as a pathway towards enhancing its long-term resilience to future, short term, cyclical environmental shocks. By investigating the lived experience of the El Niño phenomenon, we are targeting pressing issues of inequality and climate change by addressing three intersecting processes.
The first is that of the extreme marginalisation of communities in Northern Peru. Rates of poverty and extreme poverty (61.9% and 16.7% respectively, MIDIS, 20131), as well as rates of social exclusion (40-60%) and of regional outmigration (IOM, 20152) are among the highest in the country. Second, Peru faces significant exposure to environmental hazards, mainly that of the El Niño phenomenon. Its cyclical occurrence sees months of rainfall every 2 to 7 years, which cause significant floods and subsequent infrastructure damage, crop loss, and health challenges including Malaria. Lastly, the COVID-19 pandemic has hit Peru exceptionally hard as it faced the highest death rates per capita, attributed mostly to a weak health system and a lack of local solutions addressing diversity, poverty, and multi-generationality (Taylor, 2013).
Through community interviews, newspaper archives, satellite imagery, supply chain analyses, and further research methods, we are putting together the story of communities coexisting with El Niño in the Sechura desert. We are focusing on the benefits of increased rainfall for economic activity, particularly through fishing in temporary lakes and farming on newly irrigated desert land. With a focus on social impact, we are also implementing an educational programme with the NGO PRISMA, the local school board (UGEL Sechura), and with the educational institution Daniel Alcides Carrión. This project rescues ancestral knowledge on maximising the benefits of floods by encouraging intergenerational exchange between family and community members, and is being carried out digitally as a result of Covid-19.
What was the impetus for the research? How did the research start?
Nina Laurie, our Principal Investigator, has had a love for Peru ever since she first visited to conduct her undergraduate dissertation research. This particular project, however, quite unexpectedly came to life following a series of casual conversations with local people while retrieving sediment samples from a lake for a palaeoecological (historical) reconstruction of El Niño events. Local fishermen highlighted that these lakes were temporary as a result of the months of rainfall in 2017, and that they brought an abundance of fish and, therefore, economic growth through fishing. This point of view – of El Niño being beneficial – dramatically challenges dominant framings of disasters as negative. It also carries significant implications for risk management, as draining excess water tends to be a priority following floods, which would inhibit economic gains in the area.
This framed the first project, “Fishing and farming in the desert? Understanding the impact of El Niño on marginal communities in northern Peru” funded by the Scottish Funding Council’s (SFC) Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) and then the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). A few of these interviews were carried out with school teachers and educational authorities, indicating the significant motivation to highlight contextual and historical knowledge on El Niño practices. As such, the additional project “El Niño, a phenomenon with opportunities: learning history and valuing community assets for an empowering digital curriculum in northern Peru”, also funded by the AHRC, came to life, integrating local sources of information into formal education by training secondary students in methods of communication, storytelling, and digital tools for them to retrieve and portray oral histories from their social networks.
What is your involvement and role?
I have been involved on the project as a Research Assistant since July and will continue work into the new year as Impact Officer. This means, for the most part, I have been focused on producing research outputs in the form of academic articles. My contributions come from a human geography standpoint, looking particularly at the construction of children’s identities, differing definitions of resilience, and the use of time as a way to understand disaster narratives.
My new role as Impact Officer is a very exciting one. I will be developing a teaching resource for the Royal Geographical Society (you can get a glimpse here), through which our project will be made available to Geography teachers for use as a case study in secondary education around the UK. In addition to this, we will be providing a platform for curricular dialogue through which specialists can engage in the comparison between Peruvian and UK curricula. Conversations leading up to this platform have provided extremely rich exchanges of perspectives and approaches to geographical education (more info here), and I look forward to opening the dialogue to a wider public.
How do you think this research will impact the Sechura community?
I believe the research has both an intangible and tangible impact for the communities in the Sechura desert. First, working in collaboration with communities and organisations, we hope to provide them a recognition they have rarely experienced given rates of extreme marginalisation. Additionally, stories about previous experiences of El Niño events, and its ups and downs, were heavy with emotion, wherein participatory research provided a space for communities to recognise and engage with these.
As a result, building on this new-found energy for individual and political voice, we are raising awareness of the value of water resulting from El Niño events. As such, it will provide a thorough basis through which to advocate for the political recognition of economic activities, namely those of fishing and farming. This includes the formalisation of temporary lakes, asserting the need for water infrastructure including reservoirs and irrigation canals, and highlighting the potential damage of large-scale water draining solutions. This, in turn, will significantly shape long term resilience planning in the area, provide greater access to public services, and facilitate taking advantage of abundant rainfall.
More broadly, however, this is an extremely enriching case study providing insight into the very complex realities of disasters and development, and we hope it will advance the field of disaster risk management to more contextually attuned approaches.
What has been the biggest obstacle to conducting research?
I would say the Covid-19 pandemic has been one of the biggest challenges in shaping our ability to conduct fieldwork, but it has also been very difficult to see the devastating impact it has had in Peru. The nation has seen strict lockdowns imposed by military, large waves of return migration from urban to rural communities, and, for a long time, was among the countries with the highest deaths per capita, with significant implications on children losing carers.
However, the turn to digital education has proven to be a significant opportunity through which to elevate low levels of digital literacy in Peru, particularly in rural areas. For us, this has been central to the implementation of the second project on intergenerational education, through which all classes are conducted, and materials exchanged, online. Children have thus been taught how to use technological devices and tools such as Zoom and Whatsapp for the creation and dissemination of knowledge and will be able to carry these into their daily lives.
“…the kids were all participating through the chat box – it was really cute because none of us noticed they were commenting and thought we had full radio silence until we realised.”
Peruvian schoolchildren and their families were incorporated in the project, creating some interesting intergenerational dialogue. Can you tell us about that? What impacts have you seen from it?
The second project we are working on seeks to save ancestral knowledges through oral histories, focusing on economic activities resulting from El Niño rains such as fishing and farming. In practice, this meant that children were given tablets to go home and record interviews with their family or community members, therefore engaging with the mechanisms through which the rains are used for benefit – methods which have lived on through generations. They then created stories, both written and filmed, in which they themselves outlined these methods, highlighting a rich connection to landscape.
In doing so, we have seen a myriad of outcomes, the following being most prominent. First, children learn about contextually relevant knowledge for land management that they will apply in their lives. Second, these ancestral ways of land management as community-based knowledge are preserved and continued, preventing their loss. Third, the increasing exchange between children, family and community members, and school institutions, significantly strengthens community bonds. Finally, and specific to the Covid-19 pandemic, the project targets communication and self-expression skills, which have been significantly impaired by the loss of in-person education.
Furthermore, the educational programme has won both regional and national awards, whose recognition has been very motivating for all involved, as well as promoting a national interest in participative education and, more generally, the case of El Niño in the Sechura desert.
What has been your favourite part of being involved in this project?
Definitely working with the children (and the amazing teachers and organisers making it happen on the ground)! It is so enriching to see all the time and effort going into this project come to life with such vivid enthusiasm through the students’ participation and commitment to the topic. During workshops, you can hear them in busy households or by loud streets, determined to contribute to the conversation regardless of obstacles. When they are unable to communicate because of insufficient data coverage, the students run to have their say on the workshop’s chat box. Their production of videos, interviews, and stories are brimming with creativity. Additionally, we have also observed the wonderful confidence boost gained through this project, particularly in comparing the project with its pilot run, as the students now know they are being heard around the country and around the world.
How do you plan to disseminate the findings of the research?
This project has many elements to it, and the outcomes thus far have been varied. As a research project, we do have a focus on academic outputs which are on the way. In the meanwhile, we have had a range of platforms through which information has been communicated. This includes consistent updates on our website, updates from our partners (including the local school board, UGEL Sechura, and the national NGO PRISMA), the upcoming teaching resource for the Royal Geographical Society, and a variety of talks (for example at the Cop26 Resilience Hub, or the Global Challenges Research Forum and the Cultural Heritage Hub at the University of St Andrews). We are also anticipating new outcomes in the form of a virtual panel exhibition to display the students’ achievements throughout the programme, as well as various research dissertations conducted by students at the University of Piura (UDEP) about El Niño’s statistical records, historical dynamics, and cultural heritage through music.
One particularly thrilling platform is brought to us by the Museum and Heritage graduate students at the University of St Andrews, who are doing a wonderful job at collecting a range of data to collate into an exhibition at the Scottish Fisheries Museum in Anstruther, Scotland! You can follow their updates on Facebook or Instagram.