Introduction
According to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, 2023 was the hottest year on record, with global temperatures already 1.48°C higher than the preindustrial average.1 Climate change is fueling extreme weather events that threaten human health and well-being in diverse ways including through extreme heat, wildfire smoke, contaminated flood water, as well as loss of access to shelter, food, infrastructure and livelihoods.2 For populations impacted around the world, climate change is not a future event but rather a reality being lived today. This is particularly true for disadvantaged groups living in regions that are now experiencing increasingly frequent emergencies.3 This practice paper reflects on an ongoing Participatory Action Research (PAR) project that combines community-engaged methods, national data analysis and multilevel advocacy to support community-based emergency response to extreme weather events in 16 Indigenous communities in Alta Verapaz province, Guatemala.
We are an interdisciplinary team composed of Indigenous researcher/practitioners and allied members. As coauthors of this article, we are from diverse social and professional locations, including three Mayan researcher/practitioners who work with the Guatemalan NGO, Centro de Estudios para la Equidad y Gobernanza en los Sistemas de Salud (CEGSS), two of whom are Maya Q’eqchi’ from Alta Verapaz, the area of focus in this article. We also have four allied team members: a national policy analyst from the Guatemalan NGO, Laboratorio de Datos GT, and three researchers based at universities in Toronto, Canada and Washington DC, USA. Together with rural Indigenous communities, we are implementing a 3-year PAR project. We understand PAR as ‘a scholar–activist research approach that brings together community members, activists and scholars to cocreate knowledge and social change in tandem’.4 PAR is typically centred on collaboration between communities with lived experience and knowledge of a social issue and professional researchers with other relevant skills, expertise and resources. The research relationship aims to create knowledge, not for its own sake, but in service of partner communities and their goals.4 Our project is the result of demands from communities in Alta Verapaz for accompaniment from civil society organisations they trust, CEGSS and Red de Defensores y Defensoras Comunitarios por el Derecho a la Salud (REDC-Salud), to understand why government agencies are not helping them to mitigate the effects of climate change, including extreme weather events. The project aims to create strategies to demand government’s attention to address these problems.