Webinar showcasing ERC-funded research on the Amazon

ERC-funded research on the Amazon

Discover research projects funded by the European Research Council (ERC) on a variety of topics related to the Amazon. With the participation of ERC awardees and a team member working in Portugal, UK and Norway.

Slides ERC Amazon 2023.pdf

About the projects that were presented:

• ERC ECO Project: Animals and Plants in Cultural Productions about the Amazon River Basin

Patricia Vieira, Principal Investigator, Coimbra University, Portugal

At a time when the Amazon and its peoples are increasingly threatened by large-scale logging and forest fires associated to extractivist industries such as mining, oil drilling, agribusiness, and so on, that regard the biosphere as a mere resource at the service of humanity, ECO aims to uncover other, non-imperialistic views on animals and plants in the region.

ECO seeks to understand how different cultural productions depicting Amazonia lend a voice to animals and plants and reveal the interdependence of humans and non-humans. It develops the concept of zoophytography to describe the inscription of non-human beings in different cultures, thus decentering humanity as the sole source of meaning-making.

• ERC LASTJOURNEY Project: The End of the Journey: The Late Pleistocene-Early Holocene Colonisation of South America

Jose Iriarte, Principal Investigator, University of Exeter, UK

Despite the size and geographical importance of north-western South America, the study of the first human colonisation in the region is limited and incomplete. However, the human journey to this region during the Late Pleistocene-Early Holocene period impacts a wide range of disciplines from geography to molecular biology. This is because human colonisation in a vast and diverse region took place during fundamental climatic and environmental changes. During this period, megafauna was extinct, plants were domesticated, and a remarkable diversity in human groups was developed. The EU-funded LASTJOURNEY project investigates the human colonisation process by using the archaeological and palaeoecological data across the diverse environments of South America.

• ERC LORAX Project: Understanding Ecosystemic Politics

Lucas de Oliveira Paes, team member from LAC, Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, Norway
The politics of ‘speaking for’ border-crossing ecosystems
Nature knows no borders. For instance, currents move plastic litter from its point of origin – perhaps a carrier bag blown into sea outside a tourist town in the UK – to the distant shores of the Svalbard archipelago in the Arctic. Likewise, the Amazon is crucial to life and livelihoods in the rainforest and also of importance to the global climate. The EU-funded LORAX project explores border-crossing ecosystems to expand our understanding of global political architecture and of how shared, border-crossing problems are managed. The findings will be used to better understand the broad political consequences of states ‘clubbing together’ to support ecosystems of the Arctic Ocean, the Amazon Basin and the Caspian Sea. 
Our speaker focuses on the ecosystemic politics of the Amazon rainforest.

About the ERC

Read more about the ERC, the calls 2024 and more resources here.

Set up in 2007 by the European Union, the European Research Council is the first European funding organisation for frontier research across all fields. It aims to stimulate scientific excellence in Europe. It selects and funds the very best, creative researchers of any nationality and age to run five to six-year projects in a public or private research organisation based in the countries of the European Research Area (ERA), that includes EU Member States and Associated Countries to the Framework Programme Horizon Europe.

=> To know more about the ERC and its funding opportunities, watch the recording of the ERC webinar and Q&A that took place on 20 September. More: https://euraxess.ec.europa.eu/worldwide/lac/events/webinar-erc-grant-co…