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Climate Change, Adaptation, And Formal Education: The Role Of Schooling For Increasing Societies' Adaptive Capacities In El Salvador And Brazil, Christine Wamsler, Ebba Brink, Oskari Rantala

Christine Wamsler

With a worldwide increase in disasters the effects of climate change are already being felt, and it is the urban poor in developing countries who are most at risk. There is an urgent need to better understand the factors that determine people’s capacity to cope with and adapt to adverse climate conditions. This paper examines the influence of formal education in determining the adaptive capacity of the residents of two low-income settlements: Los Manantiales in San Salvador (El Salvador) and Rocinha in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), where climate-related disasters are recurrent. In both case study areas, average levels of education …