Environmental education emerges as one of the possible strategies to face up to the double-order, cultural and social, civilization crisis. Its critical and emancipative perspective intends to trigger processes in which the individual and collective searches for cultural and social change are dialectically intertwined.

Building national people-centered early warning systems (EWS) is strongly recommended by the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR). Most of the scientific literature is critical of the conventional view of EWS as a linear model with a topdown approach, in which technological features are given more attention than human factors. It is argued that EWS should be people-centered, and used for risk prevention, with an emphasis on resilience, rather than only being triggered when a hazard occurs. However, both the UNISDR and the literature fail to say how a people-centered EWS should be built, and what steps are needed to put EWS into effect. This article examines the obstacles and measures required to promote people-centered EWS, with a focus on the situation in Brazil. After assessing the institutional vulnerability of EWS, we analyze some measures that can be taken to reduce institutional vulnerability, based on experiences with a participatory citizen science educational project that involved high school students. Some guidelines are developed for adopting a bottom-up approach towards achieving the four elements of EWSrisk knowledge, monitoring, communication of warnings, and response capability-with the help of school curricula.

Context: Global environmental change and disasters pose several challenges to governments, society and science. These challenges occurred in social contexts were information and communication technologies can be used to share data and information, engaging citizen scientists in multidirectional and decentralized knowledge creation initiatives. Often referenced as participatory (or people-centered) early warning systems, this has been of a great potential to improve decisions taken by both emergency institutions and exposed and/or affected communities. Several methodologies have been proposed, mainly in natural science, redefining traditional ways of transferring knowledge about scientific process to the public.

Promoting climate change transformation with young people in Brazil: participatory action research through a looping approach. Action Research.

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This article maps and explains Brazil's policies, strategies, plans and initiatives related to Climate Change Education (CCE), in the overall context of Environmental Education (EE) and Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). The case of Brazil offers useful insights on how to enhance climate response through education because of its unique strength in climate policy making and its established EE tradition. The article traces the development of EE in Brazil and provides an overview of the relations between EE and climate change legislations and public policies. Although Brazil established a strong legal framework for EE and the Ministries of the Environment and Education have adopted a number of initiatives to implement the EE policies, climate change legislation addresses education rather superficially. Many other challenges remain, including fully integrating EE in the mainstream work of the Ministry of Education, enhancing the impact of EE policies and programmes, and creating synergies between EE and a number of climate-related education initiatives developed in other areas such as science and technology.

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