In this article, climate justice is understood as the uneven distribution of climate risks and adaptive capacities across social groups, shaped by historical, spatial, and institutional inequalities. From this perspective, climate adaptation cannot be reduced to technical solutions but must address power relations, governance gaps, and differentiated vulnerabilities (Porter et al., 2020; Tschakert et al., 2013). Youth empowerment is conceptualized not simply as participation in predefined processes, but as the capacity of young people to articulate experiences, question structural constraints (Cahill and Dadvand, 2018), and exercise agency in shaping collective responses to climate risk (Tafon and Saunders, 2025). Participatory urbanism, therefore, is approached as a democratic practice that values lived experience, situated knowledge, and co-creation as central to equitable urban transformation (Leino and Puumala, 2021).

Climate justice is grounded in socio-environmental activism and social movements and is closely linked to human rights, ethics, moral responsibility, and collectively constructed action (Sultana, 2022). At the core of the climate justice perspective lie power relations, as it highlights the intersection of social, political, and economic structures that produce structural inequalities, differentiated vulnerabilities, and uneven capacities to respond to climate change (Tafon and Saunders, 2025). These power asymmetries shape climate policy formulation and implementation, often reproducing systemic inequalities rather than addressing them (Sultana, 2022).

From this perspective, climate risks disproportionately affect populations whose livelihoods and everyday practices are already shaped by structural inequality (Sultana, 2022). Vulnerable groups frequently contribute the least to climate change while bearing its most severe consequences and holding minimal influence over planning and decision-making processes related to climate adaptation (Amorim-Maia et al., 2023). Addressing climate justice therefore requires moving beyond technocratic adaptation strategies toward participatory, rights-based, and collective approaches that recognize lived experience, political agency, and social inequalities as central dimensions of climate governance (Sultana, 2022).

It is essential to challenge the assumption that climate shelters must be futuristic structures inspired by science fiction or shaped by the logics of green real estate capital as showcases of ecological modernisation. On the contrary, many of the most effective experiences rely on existing urban facilities, such as public schools, libraries, cultural centers, parks, and religious institutions (Amorim-Maia et al., 2023). These are accessible, well-located spaces with hosting capacity that can be activated efficiently during extreme climate events (Amorim-Maia et al., 2023). Precisely because they operate year-round, such spaces are familiar to local populations and can also function as sites of civic awareness and environmental education beyond moments of emergency.

More than physical spaces, climate shelters should be understood as infrastructures of urban care (Cruz et al., 2025). A school equipped with shade, adequate ventilation, accessible drinking water, and shelter during summer months provides immediate protection while simultaneously promoting health, inclusion, and a sense of belonging (Amorim-Maia et al., 2023). When articulated with health services, civil defense, social assistance, and educational systems, these spaces become powerful instruments of climate adaptation and environmental justice.

This perspective is particularly relevant because the impacts of extreme heat are not evenly distributed (Monteiro dos Santos et al., 2024). Populations living in areas with limited vegetation, high density, and reduced access to urban infrastructure are disproportionately affected (Lin et al., 2015). Elderly people, individuals with chronic illnesses, people experiencing homelessness, and persons with disabilities are especially vulnerable. The absence of public policies addressing thermal protection therefore deepens existing social inequalities (Sampson et al., 2013).

Brazil holds significant potential to establish networks of climate shelters based on infrastructure already embedded in neighborhoods, such as public schools, health units, libraries, cultural and religious centers, and urban parks. The central challenge lies less in constructing new facilities and more in fostering intersectoral integration, community mobilization, and recognizing heat as a real and urgent urban risk. Climate shelters are neither luxuries nor futuristic innovations; they constitute an urgent, accessible, and feasible response to the tangible impacts of the climate crisis and should be recognized as part of broader public policies aimed at urban resilience, public health, and social justice (Amorim-Maia et al., 2023).

The EMPOWER framework provides a conceptual and methodological lens for integrating emotions into disaster preparedness and climate adaptation processes (Borner, 2023). Developed in the context of youth engagement with chronic disaster risk, EMPOWER emphasizes that emotions such as fear, anxiety, frustration, and hope are not barriers to rational action but constitutive elements of learning, reflection, and agency. Its strengths lie in acknowledging lived experience, fostering emotional literacy, and supporting the transformation of affect into collective action (Borner, 2023). At the same time, EMPOWER does not claim to resolve structural inequalities or governance failures on its own; rather, it depends on facilitation, institutional openness, and political mediation to translate youth agency into concrete change (Borner, 2023). In this study, EMPOWER is mobilized as a critical framework to understand how emotionally grounded participation can enhance youth engagement in climate adaptation without overlooking broader structural constraints.

This study is grounded in participatory urbanism, climate justice, youth empowerment, and emerging policy frameworks on climate shelters in Brazil. It integrates three core knowledge bases: (i) international literature on youth, emotions, and disaster risk reduction; (ii) national policy-oriented guidance on safe and inclusive climate shelters; and (iii) empirical data generated through participatory future workshops with middle-school students in Santos (Akom et al., 2020; UN-Habitat, 2024).

Recent research on chronic disaster risk emphasizes that risk is no longer episodic but has become a continuous condition shaping everyday life in vulnerable urban territories (Monteiro dos Santos et al., 2024). It argues that long-term resilience requires moving beyond technical risk management toward approaches that integrate emotional experiences, participatory learning, and youth agency (Kelman et al., 2016). Youth are positioned not as passive victims but as co-producers of knowledge and active subjects in disaster preparedness, whose emotional experiences play a crucial role in shaping collective responses and adaptive behavior. This perspective aligns with the EMPOWER framework, which advocates for acknowledging, validating and engaging with emotions as part of disaster preparedness and transformative change (Borner, 2023).

In parallel, international policy-oriented literature defines climate shelters as adapted spaces designed to protect populations from extreme heat events, particularly heatwaves, which now represent one of the most lethal climate-related hazards in urban contexts (Cavaco and Torres, 2025; Monteiro dos Santos et al., 2024). These shelters are characterized not by high technological complexity but by accessibility, thermal comfort, provision of potable water, ventilation, shading, and resting areas. They should prioritize vulnerable populations and be equitably distributed across territories marked by socioeconomic and environmental inequalities (Amorim-Maia et al., 2023). Importantly, climate shelters are understood as infrastructures of urban care, promoting health, inclusion, belonging, and social cohesion, rather than solely as emergency response facilities (Tronto, 2013).

Participatory planning is identified as a central pillar for effective climate shelter implementation. Methodologies such as social cartography, co-creation processes, and educational workshops enable communities to shape shelters according to their lived realities. When combined with Nature-Based Solutions (NbS), such as tree planting, green roofs, shaded patios, and rain gardens, climate shelters become multifunctional spaces that simultaneously mitigate heat, foster environmental education, and strengthen community bonds (Raymond et al., 2017; Frantzeskaki et al., 2019).

This theoretical and policy framework supports the analytical lens of this article, which conceives climate shelters not only as physical structures but as socio-spatial devices where youth participation, emotional resilience, and climate justice intersect, forming context-sensitive pathways for urban adaptation. EMPOWER advocates for openly engaging with young people’s emotions—such as fear, anxiety, hopelessness, and hope—as a means to strengthen critical reflexivity, collective learning, and transformative capacity. It emphasizes that resilience is built through acknowledging lived experiences, fostering peer learning, and cultivating collective hope (Borner, 2023). This framework directly informs the methodological approach of this research, as the Future Workshops were designed to enable students to express emotions, articulate visions, and translate affective experiences of climate stress into concrete spatial and political action (Jungk and Müllert, 1987).

The research was conducted in two public schools in Santos:

The two schools were intentionally selected to represent contrasting yet complementary socio-environmental conditions within the same city. The hillside school reflects a context of compounded vulnerability, where extreme heat intersects with landslide risk, infrastructural scarcity, and mobility constraints. In contrast, the urban heat island school represents a consolidated, densely built environment characterized by high surface temperatures and limited green infrastructure. This comparative design allowed the research to explore how territorial specificities shape youth perceptions of climate risk and imaginaries of climate shelters.

A qualitative, participatory, and exploratory approach was adopted, based on the Future Workshops methodology. The process engaged students aged 12–14 in three sequential workshops in each school.

The study focused on students aged 12–14 years, corresponding to middle school, a stage in which young people are developing critical thinking skills, emotional awareness, and a growing understanding of social and territorial inequalities. This age group combines strong attachment to everyday spaces such as schools and neighborhoods with an emerging capacity to reflect on collective problems and propose solutions. Participants were recruited in collaboration with school staff, ensuring voluntary participation and diversity within each class. In total, 42 students participated across the two schools. The workshops were conducted between August and September 2025. All research procedures followed ethical guidelines for research with minors, including informed consent from legal guardians and assent from participating students.

The use of the EMPOWER framework is grounded in the recognition of the central role of emotions in coping with disaster risk and broader socio-environmental challenges. Integrating young people’s everyday emotional experiences into the construction of climate resilience requires participatory and community-based research methodologies. Drawing on the framework proposed by Borner (2023), EMPOWER was applied in this case study within the school community, considering both the suitability of its core elements to this context and the potential role of youth as multipliers of transformative change emerging from collective processes.

Within this perspective, climate shelters are conceived beyond physical infrastructure aimed solely at protecting individuals during socio-climatic disasters (Amorim-Maia et al., 2023). Instead, the co-construction of solutions through collaborative planning is understood as essential for producing effective and just outcomes, contributing to community empowerment and moving beyond the technocratic conservatism that often characterizes urban planning practices (Torres et al., 2024). The application of EMPOWER strengthens the co-construction of climate shelters by enabling more accurate territorial knowledge, fostering community engagement, and explicitly incorporating emotional perceptions into disaster risk and climate adaptation processes. In the Brazilian context, this reinforces the argument that climate shelters should not be guided by standardized or purely technocratic models, but rather understood as part of a broader transformative shift required by the climate emergency.

The “Bridge to Action” phase marked the transition from imagination and critical reflection to concrete agency. Building on the dreams articulated in the Dream Tree and the structural barriers identified in the Stone Pathways, students were invited to translate their visions into feasible, action-oriented strategies. This stage emphasised problem-solving, collective organisation, and engagement with institutional actors, encouraging participants to design realistic pathways for implementing climate shelters in both school and neighbourhood contexts. By developing proposals that specified actions, responsible actors, resources, and evaluation mechanisms, youth moved from emotional expression to strategic planning, demonstrating emerging civic agency and reinforcing the role of participatory processes in co-producing climate adaptation pathways (See Figure 10).

By embedding EMPOWER within the design of the participatory tools rather than applying it solely as an analytical layer, the study demonstrates how emotions operate as structuring forces in collective sense-making, co-construction, and the emergence of youth agency. The EMPOWER framework was employed to interpret the emotional and political dynamics observed throughout the participatory process. The sequence of Dream Tree, Stone Pathways, and Bridge to Action mirrors the core logic of EMPOWER: creating space for emotional expression, critically reflecting on structural constraints, and transforming affect into agency and action. Rather than treating emotions as secondary outcomes, the workshops operationalized them as drivers of reflection, learning, and collective mobilization in climate adaptation. Throughout the workshops, emotional expressions such as frustration, helplessness, discomfort, hope, and collective motivation were recurrently observed. These emotions did not arise as isolated reactions but as part of a broader affective landscape shaped by students’ daily exposure to extreme heat, institutional barriers, and perceived inequalities in public care. This dynamic is consistent with insights from disaster studies showing that chronic risk contexts produce emotional states that shape how young people interpret, engage with, and respond to climate-related threats (Kelman et al., 2016).

Within this context, the workshops demonstrated how structured participation can create affective spaces where emotions are recognized, shared, and transformed into agency—an outcome directly aligned with the EMPOWER framework. EMPOWER emphasizes that disaster preparedness must integrate emotional dimensions, not as secondary aspects but as drivers of critical reflection, social learning, and transformative capacity (Borner, 2023). The sequence of Dream Tree → Stone Path → Bridge to Action functioned as an applied EMPOWER process: students externalized emotions and wishes linked to climate stress, collectively interpreted their meaning, and gradually converted them into constructive strategies for change.

The articulation of dreams served as a form of affective imagination, allowing students to project desired futures rooted in thermal comfort, care, and well-being. Identifying obstacles brought forward emotions of frustration and perceived injustice, echoing research on how youth often recognize governance failures and inequality with considerable clarity. Finally, the design of action plans revealed emerging confidence, solidarity, and civic motivation, reflecting the core EMPOWER principle that emotional validation can catalyze youth agency and enhance adaptive capacity.

Taken together, these observations show that emotional landscapes are not peripheral to climate adaptation but foundational to how young people conceptualize risk and envision solutions. They illustrate how youth, when supported through participatory and emotionally locally-grounded methodologies, can transform climate distress into political, social, and spatial action.

The workshops revealed clear territorial differences in how youth imagine and prioritize climate shelters, reinforcing the importance of place-based adaptation (Olazabal et al., 2024). Students in the hillside area conceptualized shelters primarily as protective, safe spaces capable of addressing both landslide and extreme heat risks. This reflects research showing that multi-hazard environments shape hybrid perceptions of climate vulnerability and protective infrastructure (UN-Habitat, 2024).

In contrast, students in the urban heat island territory emphasized cooling, recreation, and accessible public infrastructure—dreams centered on swimming pools, shaded areas, drinking fountains, and ventilated bus stops. These visions align with the literature on thermal inequity and the urgent need for cooling infrastructure in compact, densely built urban areas (Slesinski et al., 2025; Moreira et al., 2024).

Both groups, despite their territorial differences, consistently identified water, shade, greenery, and multifunctional spaces as key elements of climate shelters (Table 1). These findings resonate strongly with research on Nature-Based Solutions (Raymond et al., 2017; Frantzeskaki et al., 2019) and with the emerging understanding of climate shelters as infrastructures of care that integrate environmental relief with social belonging and community well-being (Tronto, 2013).

Importantly, the territorial differentiation observed here reinforces the EMPOWER principle that emotional experience and place-based identity shape how youth interpret risk and envision adaptation. Students’ climate imaginaries were grounded not in abstract notions of heat but in lived exposure: the hillside students linked heat to precarious slopes and mobility constraints, while heat island students mapped it onto impermeable surfaces, lack of shade, and everyday discomfort in public spaces.

Thus, the combined insights from both territories highlight that effective climate shelters must be context-sensitive, socially anchored, and co-created with communities—particularly youth—to ensure relevance, legitimacy, and long-term resilience.

Students in the hillside territory conceptualized climate shelters primarily as protective and safe havens during both extreme heat and rainfall, while those in the heat island zone associated shelters with cooling, recreation, and public comfort in highly urbanized settings. These differentiated perceptions demonstrate the importance of place-based design, reinforcing the need for climate shelter models that respond to specific socio-environmental configurations rather than universal templates.

Together, these results highlight that co-creation processes anchored in emotional engagement generate technically relevant design insights and foster youth empowerment, community ownership, and democratic participation in climate adaptation planning.

This study demonstrates how youth-centered participatory processes can meaningfully contribute to the conceptualization, design, and governance of climate shelters in vulnerable urban territories. By combining the Future Workshops methodology with the EMPOWER framework and emerging Brazilian policy frameworks on climate shelters, the findings illuminate how emotional experiences, territorial inequalities, and political agency converge in youth’s climate imaginaries and proposed adaptation strategies (Borner, 2023; UN-Habitat, 2024).

First, the results reveal that youth imaginaries of climate adaptation are materially and affectively grounded, shaped by lived exposure to extreme heat, infrastructural scarcity, and socio-environmental inequalities (Olazabal et al., 2024). This resonates with research on chronic climate risk, which shows that youth interpret climate threats not abstractly but through embodied experiences of discomfort, fatigue, and restricted mobility (Kelman et al., 2016). Across both schools, students articulated dreams centered on water, shade, greenery, and cooling devices—elements that correspond directly to the literature on climate-responsive design, thermal inequity, and Nature-Based Solutions (Raymond et al., 2017; Frantzeskaki et al., 2019). Their visions reflect not only local environmental conditions but also broader global principles of climate adaptation, reinforcing emerging evidence that youth insights can significantly enhance the planning of equitable and context-sensitive adaptation strategies.

Second, the identification of obstacles illustrates students’ critical environmental citizenship, revealing a sophisticated reading of structural factors shaping climate vulnerability. Students recognized financial constraints, spatial limitations, and regulatory barriers, while also demonstrating acute awareness of uneven governance and political neglect. This aligns with scholarship on climate justice, which documents how peripheral communities disproportionately bear climate risks due to governance gaps and unequal distribution of urban resources. The repeated references to the municipality, school authorities, and political representatives demonstrate that young people not only perceive institutional hierarchies but also understand how they mediate access to climate-responsive infrastructure.

Third, the Bridge to Action workshops evidenced how emotions can operate as catalysts for agency, directly validating the EMPOWER framework. Students transformed emotions such as frustration, helplessness, and hope into concrete proposals involving negotiation, mobilization, resource-seeking, and community engagement. This mirrors findings in disaster risk reduction literature showing that emotions—when acknowledged rather than suppressed—can strengthen youth agency, motivate collective action, and build adaptive capacity (Borner, 2023; Fletcher, 2025). Their proposed actions, including petitions, dialog with authorities, and community-oriented stewardship, demonstrate democratic literacy and political imagination, challenging persistent narratives of youth passivity in climate governance.

Fourth, the findings underscore the importance of territorial differentiation in the design of climate shelters. The hillside school envisioned shelters as protective spaces for both heat and landslide risk—reflecting hybrid hazard contexts common in informal or topographically vulnerable settlements (UN-Habitat, 2024). Conversely, in the heat island context of Gonzaga neighborhood, which has one of the hottest surfaces of the city in a supermarket parking lot (Figure 11), students imagined shelters as cooling hubs offering water-based relief, shade, and recreational opportunities, consistent with literature on urban form, thermal inequity, and the urgent need for accessible cooling infrastructure in densely built environments (Slesinski et al., 2025; Moreira et al., 2024). This territorial lens advances climate adaptation research by grounding infrastructure planning in differentiated urban ecologies and lived climate exposures.

Finally, the integration of theory, policy, and empirical data highlights the potential of youth co-creation as a methodological and political innovation for climate adaptation. The participatory process fostered emotional literacy, collective hope, and democratic engagement—outcomes aligned with global calls for inclusive climate governance (Akom et al., 2020). Moreover, the close alignment between students’ visions and contemporary frameworks for climate shelters suggests that youth perspectives can enhance the legitimacy, relevance, and sustainability of adaptation interventions. Their contributions reinforce conceptualizations of climate shelters as infrastructures of care, integrating social inclusion, environmental relief, and collective belonging (Tronto, 2013).

This study has several limitations. First, it is based on a qualitative case study involving two schools within a single city, which limits the generalisability of findings. Second, the participatory process occurred over a limited time frame, preventing the assessment of long-term impacts on youth agency or institutional change. Regarding future steps, some of the youth-proposed actions are being discussed with local stakeholders; however, their implementation depends on institutional commitment and resource availability. Future research could explore longitudinal outcomes of youth-led co-creation processes and examine how similar methodologies can be scaled or adapted to other urban contexts in the Global South.

Taken together, these findings contribute to advancing debates on climate resilience by framing climate shelters as socio-spatial infrastructures co-produced through emotional, social, and territorial dimensions. They demonstrate that youth participation, when properly facilitated, can bridge the gap between climate policy and everyday experience, generating pathways for more inclusive, context-sensitive, and socially just climate adaptation strategies.