By Sara Leal*
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It was in Brasilândia, on the northern outskirts of São Paulo, that one of today’s best-known climate activists was born. At the age of 28, Amanda Costa is a young ambassador for the United Nations and, in 2021, made Forbes magazine’s #Under30 list.
Amanda grew up in a region marked by floods, poor sanitation and few green areas, which, she says, shaped her perception of the world and would later spark her socio-environmental activism.
As a child, when she traveled with her parents to Praia Grande (SP), she would walk along the sand with her mother carrying a small bag in which they would put the garbage they found. “Even though I didn’t know what climate justice or environmental activism was, my body already felt that taking care of the planet was urgent,” Costa describes.
She became a volleyball athlete in her teens, but in 2017 her destiny took a different turn: she was selected for a scholarship from the World YMCA (Young Men’s Christian Association) to attend COP23 (Conference of the Parties on Climate) in Bonn, Germany.
“When I got there, I was shocked to find myself surrounded by white men in suits discussing how the climate crisis would impact the peripheries. They spoke as if we didn’t have a voice, as if we needed someone to explain to us what it’s like to feel the absence of public policies, violence and environmental racism,” she recalls.
The experience, she says, made her realize that the challenge was not only the climate, but also who occupied the spaces of power and who was systematically silenced. She decided to react to this inequality by building an activism that started from the territory, articulated local knowledge and sought climate justice with popular protagonism.
In 2019, she finished her degree in International Relations and, through a call for proposals from United People Globe Sustainability Leadership, created the Sustainable Perifa project.
“I didn’t feel represented by decision-makers and, at the same time, I found it very difficult to communicate the climate agenda in my favela, with my family, with my church friends. So the idea was to create a bridge between the global and the local, to connect what was happening in multilateral decision-making forums with those impacted by the climate crisis in the peripheries and communities,” she explains.
In 2021, what was once a project became the Sustainable Periphery Institute. Today, the organization’s mission is to democratize the climate agenda in the peripheries, communities and favelas through three main axes: education, communication and political advocacy with a focus on climate.
Since then, Amanda has represented Brazilian youth at four UN Climate Conferences, where she has developed skills such as political advocacy on the climate agenda and educommunication.
“We’re at a point in history where we can no longer think about new technologies and propose solutions that aren’t connected to a sustainable development debate that reduces social inequalities. This is the future I believe in and seek to build every day. But for it to happen, we need each person to find themselves, see themselves and position themselves as an agent of transformation, a person who is collaborating to create this truly sustainable future,” he concludes.
*IPAM Communications Coordinator, sara.pereira@ipam.org.br