Focusing on wildfires as disasters which challenge previous expert knowledge due to climate change and human exploitation of natural resources, we propose to compare three countries where wildfires have taken on increasingly critical proportions every year: Australia, Brazil and Portugal. We address a species gap in our knowledge of disasters, and wildfires in particular, by exploring the possibilities of learning with animals how to live and cope with extreme change and uncertainty in wildfire-prone areas.

Drawing on contributions from sociologists, anthropologists, biologists and geographers, ABIDE aims at attuning to, translating and including the perspectives, experiences, and stories of animals into our knowledge of how multispecies communities can better recover from the traumatic experience of wildfires.

In the end, we seek to build the foundations for a new interdisciplinary framework for addressing humans’ and animals’ ability to build and abide in multispecies communities that are more resilient to wildfires and other disasters. In so doing, we aspire to identify the landmarks of a post-species episteme, and thus push forward the frontiers of knowledge of human-animal relations, as well as contribute to a more-than-human disasters.

ABIDE is hosted at Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon, Portugal, and at the Human-Animal Studies Hub. It kicked off officially in 2023 and will unfold until 2028.