Educação ambiental como instrumento de prevenção aos desastres naturais

Abstract

Brazil is frequently hit by the occurrence of natural disasters associated to processes of surface and atmospheric dynamics. Santa Maria does not escape this world reality and the less favoured populace suffers with the lack of infrastructure, prevention and personal training on the civil defense area, which causes social, material and human losses. With this purpose, it is believed that environmental education shall greatly help in understanding these phenomena. In this manner, this monograph has as main objective propagate the civil defense philosophy utilizing the environmental education as a tool for producing and distributing of a handbook designated for conveying knowledge about main natural disasters, its features, causes, occurrences, main adverse effects and emergency preventive measures to children and young people, granting previous knowledge, reflection on reality and the sensitizing, and through these, the creation of a new individual and collective awareness. The handbook deals with 17 natural disaster types that occur in Santa Maria as well as in other places. The investigated disasters are separately described by event, the most frequent triggering event being identified.