Increasing Children’s Awareness of Flood Risk: Panju Island, Mumbai, India

Climate adaptation challenges are most acutely felt in the most vulnerable locations like estuarine Islands and by one of the most vulnerable groups, children. In December 2019, we conducted a workshop with 40 children in the Municipal School on Panju Island to understand their awareness of flood risk. The workshop started with the theatrical representation of a flood situation with puppets. Then, the children were divided into two groups based on their age group (5 - 9 years and 10 -12 years old). The children who were in the primary school were asked to draw a disaster scene. The children in the primary and upper-primary schools were asked to draw a map of the Island. The workshop encouraged children to express themselves through the medium of drawing regarding their perceptions of flood risk. We developed an educative material for children by converting the outcome of the workshop into a board game using various drawings of children. It is going to be the first game drawn with input from children for an inhabited estuarine island which is highly prone to sea-level rise.