Are Brazilian schools safe? Incorporating school resilience as response to water related disasters and adaptive management
Authors: Benso Marcos Roberto , Anache Jamil Alexandre Ayach , Taffarello Denise , Montenegro Suzana Maria Gico Lima , Silva Greicelene Jesus da , Mendiondo Eduardo Mário 
Published: March 2024

In the event of disasters such as droughts, floods, and landslides, social sectors including housing, education, and social protection are the most affected. Here, we present a project that incorporates the school system as a vulnerable sector to water insecurity and a tool to promote resilience. In this sense, we adopt the concept of water security defined by the United Nations (UN), including the availability of water to support socioeconomic development, the preservation of aquatic ecosystems, and the ability to withstand a reasonable amount of risk from floods and droughts. Planning for the supply and use of water at the national level should be based on the four elements of water security. This project is contextualized at the Brazilian National Observatory for Adaptive Water Security and Management (ONSEAdapta) (https://onseadapta.org/en/elementor-642/). Given the importance of schools, the objective of this project is to propose a conceptual framework to incorporate school resilience as a response to water-related disasters and adaptive management. The proposed methodology is divided into two approaches. First, a top-down approach is proposed to collect data from the annual school census of Brazilian schools that is provided at school level by the Anisio Teixeira National Institute of Educational Research and Studies (INEP) and water security data from the National Water and Sanitation Agency of Brazil (ANA). Second, a bottom-up approach is proposed to survey educators and members of the school community to depict how water security is incorporated into schools, what initiatives promote the participation of school and society, and the main implications for reducing disaster risk, building capacity, and increasing disaster resilience. In Brazil, according to the 2022 school census, there were 184,331 schools that accommodated 22% of the Brazilian population (~47 million students). To propose the concept of school resilience as a dimension of water security, we located and diagnosed the number of schools that are in water insecurity by combining the Brazilian water security index (ISH) with the georeferenced map of Brazilian schools. Using the ISH that combines human, ecosystemic, economic, and resilience dimensions, we identified that 11.93, 14.40, 16.04 million students are under minimum to low, medium, and high to maximum water security, respectively. This analysis unveils that almost 28% of Brazilian students are below a low level of water security. These students come from preschool, elementary and secondary education in rural and urban areas. We conceptualize the assessment of school resilience using a comprehensive framework that considers infrastructure, level of water insecurity, impacts on school, emergency preparedness, and community involvement. To foster community involvement and scientific contributions, the next step is the creation of an online platform to promote citizen science, collect data, and engage with educators. By fostering participatory citizenship education in schools, this project aims to create a resilient and well-informed community capable of mitigating the impact of disasters and contributing to general water security and adaptive management.