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Paper short abstract

This paper explores how children (aged 5–11) use multimodal econarratives to express their views on climate change. Findings show strong awareness of ecological harm, emotional responses such as eco-anxiety, and a tendency to depict humans as heroes or bystanders, rather than as causes of damage.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores how children negotiate their (current and future) identities and relationships with nature through the production of econarratives. The paper reports on findings from a study investigating how a sample of 40 children aged 5-11 perceive and represent environmental issues through multi-modal econarratives that they have produced in response to a visual stimulus. Using a multimodal discourse analysis framework, the research explores the discursive and semiotic strategies children employ to express their knowledge, attitudes, and emotions about climate change and ecological harm. Application of the framework also helps to reveal how the children use narrative production to understand their own human identities in relation to more-than-human identities in nature. Findings reveal that children demonstrate a strong awareness of environmental degradation, particularly its impact on animals, often portraying humans as either passive observers or heroic saviours, but rarely as contributors to environmental harm. The visual narrative elements frequently depict environmental damage as agentless events, suggesting a gap in children’s understanding of the causal role of human activity. The study highlights the emotional weight of children’s responses, with sadness and eco-anxiety emerging as dominant themes. These insights underscore the importance of integrating multimodal approaches in climate education and suggest that future curricula should more explicitly address human agency and empower children with actionable knowledge to confront environmental challenges. The study makes a methodological contribution to ecolinguistics in exploring the ways in which multimodal discourse analysis can be used to further understandings about how ecological discourses are constructed in narrative texts.