At the core of Rowanbank’s Positive Imaginings project is a drive for climate justice and accessibility to climate education. This year the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) is being held in Glasgow, and Lucy and Arran were eager to design a project that would reach children from diverse backgrounds who are often most affected by climate change and/or encounter barriers to participating in tackling climate change.

We believe that climate action must be intersectional and inclusive, uplifting the voices who are most marginalised and putting them at the centre of our collective futures!

The project is inspired by core ideas taken from climate psychology and about how we can most effectively act on environmental issues and help address young people’s climate anxiety. Helping children understand climate change in ways that are relevant for them is key to fostering empowerment and the feeling of wanting to learn more. In turn, listening to children and learning from their experiences can help us all to turn feelings of powerlessness into positive action for a better future.

The woodland workshops were a fantastic opportunity for the children to access local greenspaces and learn outdoors, with play-based activities that allowed them to express their thoughts and feelings about nature and climate change. Drawing climate-positive dreamworlds, rewilding with clay flower-bombs, crafting willow dream catchers, and learning about forest plants and bugs were some of the activities that the children took part in during these workshops. Big smiles, endless questions about nature and climate solutions, and positive future imaginings spoke for the success of this part of the project!

We are now working on the final Positive Imaginings Climate Circus show. We are drawing inspiration from the children’s visions of what a positive future would look like for them in the face of climate change, listening to their stories and worries about our planet, and investigating how this can contribute to helping adults rethink their perceptions of what our collective future could look like. The show will be a combination of circus, theatre, music and climate science, and will aim to inspire confidence to tackle the anxiety and insecurities that many of us hold about our future and turn them into optimistic, solution-based actions.

The final show will be performed in primary school playgrounds and local greenspaces around central Scotland in the autumn of this year, as Glasgow hosts COP26, and we can’t wait to share it with you.

In order to share Positive Imaginings far and wide, we have three creative continuations ahead of us. A wonderful film will be made of the show and the project’s community engagement process; the unique methodology and script is being written up and shared with other creatives to use as a tool to give a voice to children; and the collection of fireside stories will be turned into an illustrated book – so families can read about Nani Woods and be inspired towards more positive imaginings!