Making music for managing El Niño

This project builds on the success of earlier stages in our collaborative El Niño research and the 2022 award of the Peruvian Ministry of Education’s (FONDEP) Educational Innovation Projects National Competition prize to EI (Educational Institution) DAC’s (Daniel Alcides Carrión) storytelling project. On their initiative, IE. DAC bought musical instruments with their prize money. Students composed and performed two El Niño folksongs using their storytelling data:  ‘El fenómeno del niño y sus beneficios’ re-telling El Niño benefits in farming, fishing and livestock. ‘En mi pueblo querido’ specifying crops and activities, and ending with the words: “men and women fight and struggle for their pueblo for a better future and to leave poverty behind.”  

These voices are normally excluded from ‘disaster’ narratives about El Niño, and yet have the potential to communicate a complex and culturally-nuanced understanding of climate change adaptation through music. Sharing this music more widely with other young people, experiencing similar and different climate challenges, contributes to empowering the next generation of development actors to take action to combat climate change and its impacts, benefiting them and their communities longer term.