At 28, many people would consider Amanda Costa to be young. But she was much younger when her passion for socio-environmental activism began to take shape, as she told IPAM Amazonia in an interview.
During her childhood in the northern fringes of São Paulo, Costa would walk along the beaches of Praia Grande, picking up garbage with her mother.
"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," she said.
Her hometown was situated in a region scarred by frequent flooding, poor sanitation, and little greenery, which Costa credits to her early passion for taking care of the environment. But it wasn't until her teens that everything really began to click.
In 2017, Costa was awarded a scholarship from the World YMCA to attend the prestigious COP23 conference.
"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," she told IPAM. "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."
Costa hardly needed these subjects explained to her. Instead, she took on the challenge of bridging the gap between these high-powered authorities and the neighbors she knew personally.
This felt particularly important to her, considering that the latter included many people whose lives had been directly affected by the dangers of a warming planet, but who had also been denied a real voice.
She earned her degree in International Relations and created a project that has since grown to become the Instituto Perifa Sustentável, or the Sustainable Periphery Institute.
"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," Costa explained.
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Definitely 👍 Today, her organization seeks to democratize climate action in the so-called peripheries by working across three axes: education, communication, and climate-focused political advocacy.
Costa has been named a young ambassador to the United Nations, representing Brazilian youth at four UN Climate Conferences, and she was placed on Forbes magazine's #Under30 list in 2021.
"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," Costa said.
"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."
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