<aside> 📽️ Our Video!
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transcript :
824,000.
That’s how many people were left homeless by floods in Brazil…
In just one year.
But behind that number are faces.
Behind the water… is loss.
Homes. Dreams. Futures. All washed away.
In Porto Alegre, rising waters didn’t just destroy homes.
They triggered a 400% increase in disease in the city's most vulnerable neighborhoods.
And while families prayed for relief…
the system collapsed around them.
Commerce froze — $91 million lost in weeks.
Roads, clinics, and schools… gone.
So we asked: What if these scars became seeds?
Introducing Água Viva Park —
a living, breathing response to disaster.
It’s more than a park.
Here, 1 hectare absorbs 3.8 million litres of stormwater.
Rain becomes resource — not ruin.
And through natural coal-sand filtration, this park doesn’t just hold water.
It cleans it.
Providing safe, reused water for sanitation, irrigation, and dignity.
It’s flood defense. A health oasis. A job creator.
With each hectare, we prevent disaster.
With every tree, we clean the air.
With every step, we create jobs.
And with every life touched - we rewrite the future.
Because when you plant resilience, you harvest dignity.
Hope isn’t built with concrete. It’s grown.
The floods made headlines.
Now let’s make history.
Daniel Arcila https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniel-arcila-3019b8297/
Ted Dyer https://www.linkedin.com/in/ted-dyer-26b54b212/
Elmie Levelonindrainy https://www.linkedin.com/in/elmie-levelonindrainy/
In Porto Alegre, Brazil, rapid urbanization and deep socio-economic divides have left many low-income communities without access to inclusive, green public spaces or basic climate resilience infrastructure. These communities face recurring environmental and health risks due to inadequate drainage, poor water access, and spatial exclusion. While local initiatives exist, fragmented governance and a lack of community-centred, integrated solutions have stalled progress. Without urgent and inclusive action, vulnerable populations will remain excluded from climate adaptation efforts—threatening social cohesion, sustainability, and long-term urban equity. Addressing this challenge requires collaborative innovation aligned with SDGs 11, 13, and 1, while also connecting to goals 8, 15, and 16.
Água Viva Park is a community owned green space idea that transforms unused grey land, such as parking lots or abandoned warehouses into multifunctional parks for climate relief, clean water, and social equity. It is designed for communities in Porto Alegre that experience flooding and other climate change issues. These parks feature permeable pavement, rain gardens, native trees, and underground systems to capture and filter stormwater into reusable fresh water. In Copenhagen and Bangkok, floodable parks reduced flooding by 40–60%. Inspired by these successful models Água Viva addresses is a nature-based solution to respond to the natural disasters. Porto Alegre faces projected disaster recovery costs of over $2.5 billion annually by 2030. The benefits of the project are beyond natural disaster prevention: it will help to cool the city, replenish biodiversity, and narrow social inequalities through shared green space and opportunity.
As young students, we recognize our limited understanding of Porto Alegre’s reality and challenges. We aim to empower youth from vulnerable communities living around the river. We are also aware of several limitations in our understanding and approach. We lack deep insights into local cultures governance and the lived experience of residents. The image model we 😌 is generated with AI and we acknowledge the difference between the model and the real project. We don’t have the tools to create a clear business model and identified the companies and stakeholders willing to fund this project. Moreover, another challenge that is crucial for the implementation of this project is the resistance to change of the community. To mitigate this risk, we encourage dialogue and cooperation with the local organizations connected to the communities.