Iā€™ve just returned from a two-month research fellowship in Fukushima, Japan and have been asked to write about the work I have been doing there. Funded by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, this project built on our and connects with our ongoing CUIDAR programme.

The fellowship was hosted by Aya Goto, Professor of Health Information and Epidemiology, and her colleagues at Fukushima Medical University (FMU). I worked with a class of children from Tsukidate Elementary School in Date City and a group of nursing and medical students from FMU, using theatre methods to investigate how children and young people can contribute to the building of more resilient communities in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima ā€˜tripleā€™ disaster – the Great East Japan earthquake and ensuing tsunami and nuclear power plant accident. I also interviewed staff from FMU and members of local government involved in response and recovery work following the disaster.

As requested by the school, the work with the children in Tsukidate focused mainly on the future, rather than looking back at the accident. During the workshops the children discussed and presented their ideas about their community: what they liked about it, what had changed during their last six years at school (they started in Class 1 one month after the earthquake) and what improvements they would like to see. They created actions on their own and in groups, developing these into short scenes which they showed to each other and discussed. Some developed their ideas in song, senryu poetry or letters. We then gathered all their work together into a performance piece that presented a vision of the Tsukidate community from the childrenā€™s perspective, highlighting its strengths and its challenges and the childrenā€™s ideas as to how to address some of the challenges. This piece was performed as part of the schoolā€™s annual presentation day event for parents and members of the local community.

The FMU students tried out various theatre techniques, creating small sketches and discussing how these approaches could be used in a health setting, such as to communicate health information, to elicit information from the community and to encourage medical professionals to problemĢżsolve or reflect on their practice. The students watched the Tsukidate childrenā€™s performance and wrote a response in letter form, which they performed during a public talk I gave about the project just before returning home.

Working with the staff and students at FMU encouraged me to think about community development and disaster recovery in terms of community ā€˜healthā€™ and it was useful to connect the methods I was using on this project with my hostā€™s work in the area of health literacy. This approach to public health, with its focus on dialogue and a sharing of knowledge, can be mapped onto some of the theory that underpins applied theatre work and is useful in understanding how to bridge the gap between health and development/education workers and local communities that has been exposed by the disaster.

Participatory theatre is relatively unknown in Japan so the project provided a useful opportunity to test out this approach with children and young people in educational settings. The methods proved successful and my host and I would like to develop a follow-on visit in a yearā€™s time to find out from the participants about the longer term impact of taking part.

During the last week of my visit, on 22^nd November, Fukushima experienced a severe earthquake and tsunami alert. Reported to be an aftershock from the 2011 earthquake, this experience gave me a very different perspective on the research and I now regularly check earthquake activity on .

The first thing that hits you when you approach Amatrice is how beautiful it is. Hosted by Save the Children Italy, I arrive on a still, sunny day ā€“ the mountains almost surround the place and the airĢżseems so clearā€¦ until you find yourself in clouds of dust from the bulldozers pushing away stones and parts of peoplesā€™ lives. Many people still live in tents following the earthquake which struck the area on August 24th and the many aftershocksĢż – at least those people who have chosen to stay close to the town. When I say ā€˜chosenā€™, this is not like any other kind of choice. People are also waiting for the temporary wooden houses that are to replace the tents. They will exchange one form of temporary housing for another and may live in these for several years.

Everywhere you go there is so much help ā€“ the Italian Civil Protection organisation is unique and draws together so many aid workers. But already there are signs of some of the organisations withdrawing as the business of planning the future of the town starts to be discussed. What will be rebuilt and where? And what will this say about what is valued in this place?

On such a bright, clear day it’s hard to imagine the great loss of life that happened in this lovely place. Disaster is always incongruous.

The terrible events unfolding, in which many of the reported , highlight the importance of : Cultures of DisasterĢżResilience Among Children and Young People and its project partner (Onlus) which is undertaking work with municipal authorities in severely affected areas. Save the Children Italyā€™s Emergency Department has been working to promote a culture of disaster risk reduction nationally and locally and to guarantee the protection of children during the emergency response and recovery. Onlus was heavily involved in projects providing psychological support for children in the aftermath of the Abruzzo region earthquake of 2009; organising child friendly spaces within the tent camps in the wake of the Emilia Romagna quake of 2012; and working on various prevention, preparedness and disaster risk reduction programmes. The development of consultative workshops to facilitate dialogues with children and young people on their perception of disaster risk and resilience is now central to the work of the CUIDAR project.

The current tragedy is also of great relevance to CUIDARā€™s Portuguese . The Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 is widely considered to be one of the worst in European history, resulting in the deaths of thousands of people, and the near-total destruction of Portugalā€™s capital and much of the surrounding area. According to scientists, Lisbon is long overdue for a seismic event on the same scale as the catastrophic one in 1755. Thus, earthquake preparedness is a high priority for civil protection authorities and programmes aimed at children reflect just that. For instance, a yearly exercise named “” (based on the US model “ShakeOut”) takes place every November, promoted by the National Civil Protection Authority in Portugal. Schools, companies, NGOs and individual citizens are invited to take protective measures against earthquakes at exactly the same time. The 2015 exercise had thousands of registered participants, most of them in schools. Also, Lisbon civil protection authorityā€™s has a room devoted to teaching protectingĢżmeasures to children in case of an earthquake.

In the first session, children watched a short video about climate change and played a game of matching photos and definitions of 20 types of disasters. They then identified the ones related to climate change impacts and established the connection between climate change and different types of disaster. The participants then discussed and chose the most relevant risks for Portugal and for their home city. Debates with the children about the concepts of disaster, risk reduction, climate change impacts and adaptation permeated these activities. At the end of the session, the children were asked to conduct interviews at home, with parents, siblings and neighbours, about recent extreme climate events in Lisbon.

In the second session, children explored the timelines, consequences and intervening agents of the climate events evoked by their parents. The concepts of vulnerability, resilience, prevention and preparedness, response and recuperation were introduced. Based on the information collected, each class chose one type of risk to work on: floods and storms in one case and heat waves in the other. Working in groups, children then came up with actions and measures for risk reduction before, during and after a disaster, in the context of their home, school and community.

In the third session children chose how to communicate their key ideas and actions and created a presentation to convey their messages on risk reduction of floods and heat waves. Two videos, a play, a game, a magazine, and several posters were produced. The children continued improving their communication materials with their teachers and the team then returned to see the result of their work. At the end of this year, the children will present their messages in a school event to their peers, teachers and families.

Following this first set of consultations with the younger children the Portuguese CUIDAR team then went on to conduct consultation workshops with two classes of 9^th grade teenagers in the same school.

The event was attended by a diverse range of colleagues including academics and practitioners working with children and young people in a variety of settings. Alison said “there were some fascinating and thought-provoking presentations which explored key questions about childrenā€™s citizenship and agency, intergenerational perspectives and how children and young people take part in research”. Alison’s presentation was part ofĢżthe themed section ‘individual and collective agency and political participationā€™. Her paper focused onĢżthe creative methods that weĢżused with the children in the Ģżproject, both during the research workshops and to speak to stakeholders about the findings. Delegates responded positively to our project and there was a particular interest in the way that the childrenā€™s voices were impacting on policy and practice.

Led by colleagues at the Open University of Catalonia, all CUIDAR partners contributed by searching relevant policy and practice reports in membersā€™ countries (Greece, Spain, Italy, UK and Portugal) relating to childrenā€™s involvement in disaster management; interviewing key informants and sharing expertise. Additionally we reviewed and updated knowledge about the academic and research based literature, by compiling information and evidence from research projects in the field and by scoping evidence and gaps in scientific literature.

In contrast to systematic reviews, or other literature reviews, scoping reviews are particularly recommended to map existing evidence and literature in fields that, like ours, are large, complex, and diverse and have not been systematically reviewed before. Our review has discovered that children and young peopleā€™s participation in disaster management is still a young and emergent field. From 2008 onwards there is a growing global concern about putting children and young people at the heart of disaster management. Among the factors explaining this shift is the influence of the Hyogo (2005) and Sendai (2015) International Frameworks, together with the impact of major disasters in USA, New Zealand and Australia, and the evidence brought forward by important NGOs such as Save the Children and Plan International in developing countries. Although this tendency can also be seen at the European level, particularly in the UK and Italy, there is still a significant variation between the leading countries in this field.

However, this scoping study also reveals signs of change in Europe. This is especially so in the research field, where there are promising projects exploring participatory and creative methods and forms of engagement; expanding research to seldom explored ages, such as very young children and adolescents, and understanding more comprehensively the role of children throughout the different phases of disaster management.ĢżThe knowledge emerging from these projects, together with the influence of international frameworks and the positive predisposition of practitioners and experts to incorporate children and young people in disaster management may contribute to positioning Europe as a leading area in this field in the mid-term.

A range of fascinating presentations about crisis preparation, risk and resilience can now be downloaded from the TACTIC site. Maggie gave a presentation from the project focusing specifically on creative ways of enabling children to give voice to their experiences. She then mentioned how this project had led to the development of our current Horizon2020 initiative, the Coordination and Support Action CUIDAR. Ironically, the events took place at a time of very heightened tension in Brussels.

Top EA directors find time to engage with a small group of young people who were flooded and want to share their experiences. Whatā€™s even more remarkable is how these high level decision makers seem to be taking notice of what these teenagers have called for in their Flood Manifesto for Change.

Weā€™ve heard at this conference about how the EA is exploring the balance between ā€˜resistingā€™ floods and flood ā€˜resilienceā€™. ĢżMeasures called for in the address this issue directly.Ģż In we highlight how children and young people can be active in policymaking Ģż– perhaps this is the moment when it all comes together.

Maggie Mort and Marion Walker at the International Conference Centre, Telford, UK

ā€œUnprecedentedā€ has been the mantra of politicians, claiming that flooding such as this is an infrequent occurrence. But tell that to the people in Carlisle who are now flooded out of their homes for the second time in ten yearsĢżor Cockermouth for the fourth timeĢżin ten years. Or to people in Hull where more than 8,000 homes were flooded in 2007. Severe flooding should now be expected.

Whatā€™s it really like clearing up after a major flood? In our evidence to the based on our we tried to convey some of what people had told us.

For example, some were unsure what needed to be thrown out:

ā€˜We lost the fridge and the freezer and the cooker in the kitchen but the scary thing was we were actually still using them ā€“ nobody condemned them or even suggested that they were contaminated until we moved out. And then they said, ā€œOh you shouldnā€™t have been using themā€. You find out different things from different people. Just by talking to your neighbours ā€“ theyā€™d been told a completely different story to what youā€™re getting told by the insurance company.ā€™

Uncertainties around insurance become a source of huge anxiety:

ā€˜They say a lot of people didnā€™t have insurance and now some who are trying to get some have been refused by three different high-risk specialist companies. Those that have claimed canā€™t seem to get renewals…ā€™

Finding somewhere to live when you are flooded out of your home reveals some of the iniquities of the market, and how people can be exploited in the face of a disaster:

ā€˜I was very relieved to move out of our home so that the drying could start, but Iā€™m convinced that our insurance company and ourselves are being ripped off, being charged Ā£850 a month for it. Prior to the floods, thereā€™s no way theyā€™d have got that amount of rent.ā€™

In fact project managing the recovery takes over everything:

ā€˜Left another message [with loss adjustor] ā€“ no response. If he would just call me back, itā€™s so frustrating. This seems to be taking up my whole life ā€“ god, what did I do before the flood?ā€™

What our work on the floods in Hull showed was that no one talked to the . In our weā€™re working with a group of children in South Ferriby (Humberside) who were flooded on December 5 2013 during the storm surge of that winter, exactly two years ago to the day from Storm Desmond. These children and another group from Staines-Upon-Thames (severely flooded in February 2014) have made a and produced Flood Manifestos for Change.

These manifestos call for further measures to such as lessons in school about flooding and other emergencies; teachers to be trained about floods and how they affect people; groups set up for children affected so they can talk and get support; insurance companies to listen more to what children and families need; clearer flood warnings that people can understand and better flood defences with more building on stilts.

Because theyā€™ve survived floods (at considerable cost) these children can cut through bureaucracy. Such multiple measures are needed to help prevent, prepare and recover from floods.Ģż Itā€™s widely accepted that in the UK flood emergency response itself is effective and caring, but we also know that recovery is long, complex and does not follow in a linear path (). We know that what matters to people now is how they are treated by agencies and organisations; how they can look after their health; how they can find support from people who understand and, a little later, how they can participate in resilience work so that they do not fall prey to fatalism and depression.

ā€˜You feel like youā€™ve lost a year of your lifeā€™ (Male student, 14, Staines-Upon-Thames)

Working with school children hitĢżby severe flooding two years ago both on Humberside and Thames Valley, the ESRC project, partnered by Save The Children, has produced Children’s Flood Manifestos advising Government and major agencies on action needed before, during and after floods. The project, which includes Dr Marion Walker (Sociology), Dr Amanda Bingley (Division of Health Research)Ģżand Dr Alison Lloyd Williams (Sociology), has madeĢżĢżaimed at increasingĢżunderstanding of how children’s lives are disrupted by floods.ĢżProfessor Mort was interviewed by TV (East Yorkshire & Lincolnshire) (23:49) ; Dr Marion Walker (Sociology) by Ģż(02:23:15) on the second anniversary of the Humberside floods.

For more information on the project view theĢżĢżwebsite.