Drawing resilience: how comics are helping young people engage with flood risk

26 May 2026

Rhiannon Mair Griffiths of the creative organisation Comics Youth and Sara Kenney of the Environment Agency share the approach behind Rising Voices, a project using creativity as an approach to climate anxiety

The water is rising. Not as metaphor, but as reality – along coastlines, through river systems, across towns where flooding is no longer a rare event but an increasing condition of life. It is tracked in data, modelled in projections and managed through complex systems of engineering. But for young people, it is encountered somewhere else first.

In the body. In the imagination. In the question of what the future is going to look like – and whether it will hold.

Climate change, for this generation, is not simply an environmental issue. It is psychological. It shapes how safety is understood, how stability is imagined, and how much control over the future feels possible. Anxiety about climate change is not abstract; it is pervasive, often influencing daily life, decision making and a sense of agency. Yet the systems designed to respond to flooding are not built to engage with that reality – they are built to hold water back.

Flood defences are among the most visible expressions of climate adaptation – precise, technical, necessary. They protect homes, infrastructure and communities from increasingly volatile conditions. But they exist within a wider system that is far harder to construct: trust. Trust that these systems will work. Trust in the institutions that design them. Trust that the future is not already slipping out of reach.

This is where the challenge lies. Trust cannot be engineered in the same way as a barrier or a wall. It is built slowly, relationally and through experience. For many young people, particularly those already navigating marginalisation or instability, that trust is fragile or absent.

This is the space that Rising Voices aims to inhabit. Developed by Rhiannon Griffiths of the Birkenhead-based creative community organisation Comics Youth, and the Environment Agency's Sara Kenney, the project was kickstarted through an Ingenious public engagement grant from the Royal Academy of Engineering and supported by the government’s Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) and the EA's Sustainability Innovation Fund.

It brings young people into direct engagement with engineers, flood risk and the systems designed to manage it. Through workshops, field visits and co-designed sessions, participants encounter flood defences not as abstract infrastructure, but as something embedded within the places they live.

Understanding through creativity

After engaging with the realities of flood risk and management, it's time for the young people to get creative. Comics, zines and visual storytelling are used not simply to communicate ideas, but to process them. They allow for ambiguity, fragmentation and the coexistence of image and text in ways that reflect how experience is actually lived. A comic panel can hold contradiction without resolving it. It can move between past, present and imagined futures without requiring a single, linear narrative.

Creativity is not an outcome. It is the method. This becomes critical when engaging with climate change because climate change is not experienced as a coherent story. It arrives in fragments: headlines, weather patterns, conversations, fears about what might happen next. For many young people, this produces uncertainty rather than clarity and overwhelm rather than action. Through comics, Rising Voices is enabling young people to approach climate change sideways – to translate fear into narrative, externalise what feels unmanageable and make sense of something that does not yet have a clear shape.

Alongside engineers, young people also worked with EA engagement practitioners whose role is not simply to communicate technical information, but to think carefully about how relationships between institutions and communities are built in the first place. Engineering is often understood as a technical discipline, but meaningful engagement requires its own forms of technical expertise: listening, storytelling, trust building and the ability to translate between systems and lived experience.

Facilitation and evaluation support from Simon Wilson at Wilson Sherriff became an important part of the project's development, helping shape reflective practice and supporting how impact was understood across the collaboration.

In Rising Voices, engagement itself is treated as a practice of design – something that, like infrastructure, must be constructed with care. During the workshops 10 young artists between the ages of 16 and 25 are paid to work alongside 12 engineers – both graduates and seasoned professionals – not as passive recipients of knowledge, but as participants in shaping how that knowledge is understood and communicated. They ask questions that sit outside technical frameworks, challenge assumptions and contribute to engagement approaches that influence how institutions connect with communities. Questions like:

• “Why don't reports or websites contain pictures, when we know the human brain processes and retains information better with images?”
• “Why aren't there signs and artwork telling us what this flood defence is? So we can appreciate the importance?”
• “If you ask for feedback, does it make a difference?”
• “How can we hear and share more stories about the people impacted by flooding? We want to hear about the conflicts and how they might be resolved.”
• “We care about nature, how does this link to the flood work?”

That shift in approach matters because climate adaptation is not only an engineering challenge, but also a social one. It depends on whether communities trust institutions, whether people feel included in decision making, and whether engagement is treated as an ongoing relationship rather than a one-off intervention. This 'bottom-up' approach to engagement is fundamental to how Comics Youth works and also shapes Community and Creativity, an EA pilot project that Sara Kenney leads.

Through films, masterclasses and collaborative projects, the pilot explores how institutions can better collaborate with communities, share power and take genuinely interdisciplinary approaches – where psychology, sociology, storytelling and history become as important as engineering itself.

At the centre of Rising Voices is the creation of an anthology that brings together comics made by young people (both artists and engineers) in response to their experiences of flooding, climate change and resilience. These are not just literal, illustrative pieces about how things work. They are translations, placing technical systems within the context of lived experience, emotion and everyday life.

As the project has evolved, collaboration has expanded. During a field trip in the Wirral, Mary Long-Dhonau – aka Flood Mary – introduced participants to the FloodMobile initiative, sharing practical approaches to flood resilience and awareness. Working alongside Gabi Putnoki from the Graphic Novel Reading Room and Rosa Kusabbi, the lead youth worker and artist at Comics Youth, the team is now co-designing a prototype Mobile Flood Café, with illustration, storytelling and comic art woven directly into the fabric of the space. This will be an alternative van to compliment the work of Flood Mary, but with a different focus - ann alternative van to complement the work of Flood Mary, but with a different focus.

The audience for the van includes renters, students, young adults, people in social or assisted housing, neurodiverse and disabled people, and those who may not even realise they are at risk of flooding. Helping people understand that risk – and what to do next if risk becomes reality – is becoming increasingly urgent as the UK moves from one in six properties at risk of flooding to one in four by 2050.

One of the risks of engagement work, particularly with young people, is that trust is built temporarily and then abandoned. A project begins, relationships form, stories are shared, and then the structure holding those relationships disappears. The process ends abruptly, even though the realities people are navigating do not.

Rising Voices pushes against that pattern. The project is not conceived as a single moment of consultation, but as the beginning of a longer process of relationship building between young people, communities and institutions. The aim is not simply to communicate information about flooding more effectively, but to create forms of engagement that can continue over time – building familiarity, confidence and trust slowly, rather than expecting them to appear instantly.

This year, the collaboration will be showcased at Flood & Coast 2026 in Liverpool, where Comics Youth, the EA and the Graphic Novel Reading Room will share a collaborative stand exhibiting work from the anthology and wider creative approaches emerging from the project.

The water is rising. The question is not only how we design systems to contain it, but how we create the conditions in which people – particularly young people – can live with that reality, understand it and shape what comes next.

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Come and meet the team at stand A1 and A2 (by the Juice bar) at Flood & Coast 2026. Thanks to CIWEM for providing the space to share our work.

We are seeking further funding to co-design our 'Mobile Flood Café' so if you think you can help and for all other enquiries please contact sara.kenney@environment-agency.gov.uk.

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Rhiannon Mair Griffiths MBE is a co-founder and managing director of Comics Youth
Sara Kenney is an innovation and engagement manager in the Flood and Coastal Risk Management Directorate at the Environment Agency