BEACONSplus — Building Resilience in Atlantic Communities through Innovation and Science

2026–2029 · Horizon Europe · Innovation Action · Atlantic Coastal Communities · Climate Adaptation · UFPA

Coastal Resilience · Climate Adaptation · Socio-Ecological Systems · Co-Design · Local Knowledge · Nature-Based Solutions · Amazonia

Project Overview

BEACONSplus — Building Resilience in Atlantic Communities through Innovation and Science is a Horizon Europe Innovation Action that strengthens the capacity of coastal communities on both sides of the Atlantic to adapt to climate change and increase their socio-ecological resilience.

The project brings together research institutions and organizations from Europe, Africa and the Americas. Coordinated by the Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research (ZMT) in Germany, BEACONSplus runs for 42 months, from July 2026 to December 2029. The Universidade Federal do Pará (UFPA) participates as a beneficiary and represents the Belém-based Beacon Site within the All-Atlantic Network of Coastal Resilience Beacon Sites.

BEACONSplus responds to the increasing exposure of coastal communities to sea-level rise, extreme events, ecosystem change and other climate-related pressures. Rather than proposing uniform solutions, the project combines scientific knowledge with Indigenous, traditional and local knowledge and works with communities through processes of co-design and co-creation.

Its central premise is that coastal resilience depends not only on scientific and technological solutions, but also on the capacity of communities to participate in identifying problems, evaluating alternatives and developing locally appropriate pathways of adaptation.

Coastal Resilience across the Atlantic

Coastal communities face combinations of environmental and societal pressures that vary substantially between regions. Sea-level rise, flooding, saltwater intrusion, extreme events, ecosystem degradation, urbanization and changing livelihoods interact with different institutional capacities, knowledge systems and economic conditions.

BEACONSplus therefore approaches coastal resilience as a socio-ecological problem. The project defines it in terms of the capacity of coastal natural and socio-economic systems to persist, adapt or transform when confronted with disturbances while maintaining essential functions.

A network of Beacon Sites provides the empirical and organizational basis for comparison, experimentation and knowledge exchange. The project seeks to connect locally specific experience with an Atlantic-wide infrastructure through which communities, researchers and other actors can exchange solutions, good practices and failures.

BEACONSplus builds on the existing All-Atlantic Network of Coastal Resilience Beacon Sites and further develops the All-Atlantic Coastal Resilience Hub, together with tools and communication structures intended to support longer-term exchange between coastal communities.

From Knowledge to Adaptation

A central challenge addressed by BEACONSplus concerns the relationship between knowledge and action.

Scientific research has substantially increased knowledge about climate change and coastal ecosystems, but scientific information alone does not necessarily translate into locally viable adaptation. At the same time, local communities possess observational, experiential and traditional knowledge that is often insufficiently incorporated into scientific and policy processes.

BEACONSplus seeks to connect these different forms of knowledge through iterative co-design. Communities are not treated simply as recipients of externally developed solutions but as participants in identifying challenges, assessing needs and developing adaptation pathways.

The project combines this approach with climate and environmental data, resilience indicators, ecosystem research, Nature-based Solutions, community-based knowledge, digital platforms and international knowledge exchange.

The UFPA Beacon Site

UFPA participates in BEACONSplus as Beneficiary 14, representing the Núcleo de Altos Estudos Amazônicos (NAEA — Centre for Advanced Amazonian Studies) / Federal University of Pará (UFPA) Beacon Site in Belém. The university contributes across most of the project's Work Packages, connecting climate and environmental data, socio-ecological research, community resilience and knowledge exchange.

The UFPA work programme includes contributions to the co-designed conceptual framework for coastal resilience, climate and socio-environmental data, ecological resilience, local ecological knowledge, the All-Atlantic Coastal Resilience Hub, community empowerment, storytelling and knowledge-network activities.

UFPA also leads work on the cataloguing and harmonization of existing climate, oceanographic and socio-environmental data and is responsible for the corresponding project deliverable. Field-oriented activities include research on the resilience of vegetated coastal ecosystems, particularly Amazonian mangroves, as well as local ecological knowledge and ecosystem goods and services.

This creates an opportunity to connect the wider Atlantic comparative framework with the distinctive socio-ecological conditions of the Amazonian coast.

My Role

I participate in BEACONSplus as UFPA Vice-Coordinator, working with the UFPA team across the university's contribution to the international consortium. The project documentation identifies my principal area of responsibility within the UFPA team as sociobioeconomy.

My contribution is particularly connected to the social and regional dimensions of coastal resilience: the relationships between communities, livelihoods, knowledge, ecosystem services, organizations and possibilities for adaptation.

This work connects the international architecture of BEACONSplus with my continuing research on Amazonian regional development, society–nature relations and the ways in which global environmental processes and governance arrangements become consequential within particular regional settings.

Research & Innovation Approach

BEACONSplus combines transdisciplinary, multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches. Its research and innovation architecture includes:

co-design and co-creation with coastal communities;
climate, oceanographic and socio-environmental data;
resilience and vulnerability indicators;
research on coastal ecosystems and Nature-based Solutions;
Indigenous, traditional and local knowledge;
community-based assessment and self-evaluation;
digital tools for comparison and knowledge exchange;
communication and storytelling;
exchange of practices and experience across Atlantic Beacon Sites.

An important feature is the project's emphasis on learning rather than simply transferring predefined solutions. The Beacon Sites provide settings in which approaches can be developed, tested, compared and adapted while preserving attention to regional differences.

Contribution to My Research

BEACONSplus represents an important extension of my research on regional development, society–nature relations and Amazonia into an explicitly transatlantic climate-adaptation framework.

The project brings together several questions that have emerged through different strands of my research: how environmental change becomes regionally consequential; how scientific and local knowledge enter decision-making; how organizations connect actors operating at different scales; and how interventions developed within international programmes interact with specific regional conditions.

The Amazonian Beacon Site is particularly relevant because coastal resilience cannot be reduced to exposure to physical climate hazards. Adaptation also depends on livelihoods, organizational capacities, access to knowledge and resources, ecosystem relations and the ability of communities to participate in decisions affecting their future.

BEACONSplus therefore provides a contemporary empirical setting for investigating the interaction between global climate change, international research and governance networks, knowledge systems, organizations, communities and regional adaptation.

Relation to Regional Development in World Society

Unlike earlier projects that can only be related to Regional Development in World Society (RWS) retrospectively, BEACONSplus overlaps temporally with the current development of the research programme.

The two nevertheless remain analytically distinct. BEACONSplus is a Horizon Europe research and innovation project on coastal resilience and climate adaptation; it is not an RWS project or an empirical implementation of RWS.

From the perspective of RWS, however, the project provides a particularly relevant empirical field. Climate science, international environmental policy, funding programmes, research organizations, digital infrastructures and local knowledge all extend beyond individual regions but become connected in different ways within specific coastal communities.

The comparative architecture of the Beacon Sites also makes it possible to examine why similar global pressures and internationally circulating adaptation approaches may produce different regional responses and consequences.

The BEACONSplus material can therefore contribute to future analysis of knowledge and measurement, organizational mediation, selective territorialization, differential access and regional consequences, while keeping this theoretical analysis separate from the formal objectives and outputs of the Horizon Europe project.

Expected Outputs

Because BEACONSplus began in July 2026 and is currently ongoing, project results should not be presented as completed outputs.

The approved project architecture envisages, among other results, a coastal resilience toolbox, climate and resilience data resources, approaches for conserving and restoring coastal ecosystems, mechanisms for integrating scientific and local knowledge, strengthened Beacon Sites, and further development of the All-Atlantic Coastal Resilience Hub and associated communication and knowledge-sharing structures.

UFPA's planned contributions include the climate-data catalogue, participation in the co-designed resilience framework and indicators, research on Amazonian coastal ecosystems and local ecological knowledge, support for the Belém Beacon Site, and contributions to Atlantic-wide knowledge exchange.

These should be understood as planned project outputs and activities until their completion can be independently documented.