The heat speaks, youth answer: co-producing climate shelters in vulnerable urban territories

Climate change is intensifying extreme heat events in coastal cities, disproportionately affecting socio-environmentally vulnerable communities. In Brazil, climate shelters have recently emerged as a promising adaptation strategy, yet their conceptualization and design remain underdeveloped, particularly in territories marked by inequality. This article advances scientific understanding by examining how youth can co-create climate shelters through an emotionally grounded, participatory framework. We conducted a multi-stage participatory process with students from two public schools in Santos—one located in a hillside area exposed to landslide risks and another situated in a consolidated urban heat island. Using Future Workshops (Dream Tree, Stone Pathways, Bridge to Action) combined with the EMPOWER framework, we explored how young people imagine climate shelters, identify structural barriers, and formulate actionable strategies at both school and neighborhood scales. Findings reveal that young people produce highly situated, affective, and politically aware visions of climate resilience. Youth associated climate shelters with water, shade, greenery, cooling devices, and safe communal spaces, interpreting them not merely as emergency infrastructures but as socio-spatial arrangements of leisure, care, learning, and belonging. They also identified governance gaps, financial constraints, behavioral challenges, and territorial inequalities as key barriers, demonstrating critical environmental citizenship. The transition from emotional expression to strategic agency—evident in youth-led proposals for negotiation, mobilization, and resource-seeking—confirms the relevance of emotions in climate adaptation processes. This study contributes a novel, youth-centered conceptual and methodological approach to climate shelter design, demonstrating that youth’s knowledge is constitutive of effective, context-sensitive, and socially just climate adaptation. It argues that climate shelters should be understood as co-produced infrastructures of care, shaped by emotional experience, democratic participation, and territorial specificity.