Living Well with Water: Building Flood Resilience Through Participation, Education, and Inclusion

Author: Dr Katie Parsons, Loughborough University

Publication date: 24 October 2025

The evidence 

Dr Katie Parsons’ participatory research with children, youth, schools and intergenerational communities demonstrates that resilience grows through relationships, knowledge, and trust. Participatory Action Research (PAR) strengthens preparedness, supports wellbeing, and connects local experience with national adaptation planning.

Key findings

• Flood resilience is a socially constructed educational process.
• Children and young people are capable contributors to preparedness, response and recovery.
• Flooding disrupts education, play, and community life, yet these effects are rarely measured nor included as factors in adaptation assessments.
• Social Return on Investment (SROI) can capture broader social and wellbeing/health impacts and outcomes.
• Partnerships between community organisations, schools, local authorities, and the Environment Agency can improve communication and long-term community engagement.

Headline recommendations 

1. Embed participation and youth voice in flood governance.
2. Launch a national “Flood Education for All” initiative.
3. Apply SROI frameworks to measure social value and social impacts of flooding.
4. Integrate nature-based educational approaches.

Context: From Engineering to Imagination

Flooding remains one of the UK’s most pressing environmental and social challenges. Climate change, urbanisation, and ageing infrastructure are increasing both the frequency and severity of flood events that affect homes, schools, and workplaces.

While national policy has made significant progress in managing physical defences and emergency response, resilience depends equally on social systems and the ways in which people learn, collaborate, and care for one another in the face of the impacts of environmental change.

Within communities, children and young people are among those most affected by floods, yet their voices are often absent from resilience planning. Their daily experiences, creativity, and capacity for taking and understanding action represent an underused resource in building more adaptive communities and supporting recovery from flood events.

Dr Katie Parsons’ research at Loughborough University reframes flood resilience as a participatory and educational process that complements engineering and nature-based adaptations. Through projects such as Flood Stories, INSECURE and Reimagining Rivers, her work uses participatory and creative methods to engage young people, families, and schools in understanding water systems, sharing local knowledge, and co-designing action and responses.

This approach moves beyond defence to foster agency, empathy, and long-term collaboration the hallmarks of genuine resilience.

Research Insights: Social Resilience as Climate Infrastructure

1. Flood Resilience Is a Social Process: Infrastructure and warning systems are essential, but flood resilience ultimately depends on the relationships and trust that connect communities. Participatory approaches that bring together residents, educators, and policymakers build shared understanding and promote collective action that is place-based is key. Creative engagement techniques such as empathy mapping, storytelling, and filmmaking enable communities to express their lived experiences and identify practical, locally relevant, steps for adaptation.
2. Children and Young People as Active Contributors: Evidence from Flood Stories, INSECURE and Reimagining Rivers projects shows that young people can meaningfully influence preparedness, response and recovery. Supported through participatory methods, they have co-created flood-awareness campaigns, designed community communication tools, and advised on locally relevant actions. These initiatives strengthen intergenerational learning and embed adaptive behaviours for the future.
3. Flooding’s Hidden Social and Educational Impacts: Flood events interrupt education, recreation, and family routines, affecting wellbeing, child development, and long-term community connectivity and confidence. These impacts rarely appear in conventional risk assessments nor in funding decisions. Participatory research helps surface these lived experiences, demonstrating that resilience depends as much on social continuity as on physical protection of assets.
4. Measuring What Matters: Social Return on Investment (SROI): Conventional evaluation frameworks on flooding impacts focus on direct economic losses and infrastructure performance. A Social Return on Investment approach can provide a broader understanding of resilience, capturing outcomes such as wellbeing, learning continuity, and community cohesion impacts. Integrating these value indicators would allow agencies to make more balanced, equitable investment decisions.
5. Partnership and Coordination: Collaboration between community groups, schools, local authorities, and the Environment Agency enhances preparedness and trust. Embedding participatory engagement as a means to build trust and shared understanding within local flood-action groups and education networks offers a sustainable model for scaling community adaptation strategies and enhanced resilience across the UK.

Policy recommendations 

1. Embed Participation and Youth Voice in Flood Governance

• Establish Youth Flood Resilience Panels within local and regional partnerships.
• Ensure DEFRA and Environment Agency-funded projects include youth and community engagement as core, evaluated components.
• Provide guidance and training for local authorities on participatory and intergenerational engagement.

2. Launch a National “Flood Education for All” Initiative

• Embed flood and climate-resilience education into the national curriculum.
• Build flood education training that is on a par with fire training within all workplaces and institutions, such that what to do in a flood is second nature to people and communities.
• Disseminate creative educational tools (e.g., Flood Stories resources) that empower young people as resilience ambassadors with their lived experience at the forefront.

3. Adopt Broader Metrics for Resilience

• Implement an SROI-based monitoring framework that includes evaluation of the wellbeing, educational, and community impacts of flooding.
• Use these measures to guide the priorities of the Flood Resilience Taskforce and future investment strategies focused on adaptation.

4. Integrate Nature-Based and Educational Approaches

• Link habitat restoration and natural flood-management projects with school and community learning.
• Encourage “Living with Water” initiatives that combine flood mitigation with environmental education and local stewardship.

5. Strengthen International Collaboration

• Share participatory engagement models through international agencies such as UNDP, UNESCO, and global adaptation networks.
• Promote youth-led, education-based approaches as best practice in community-centred flood resilience.
• Facilitate exchange programmes connecting young people across regions facing similar climate challenges.

Conclusion 

Flood resilience is not only about resisting water, but indeed it is, about reimagining how we live with it.

Dr Katie Parsons’ research demonstrates that by embedding participation, education, and creativity into adaptation policy, the UK can move from a defensive model of flood management to one grounded in empowerment, education, and shared responsibility.

Participatory Action Research provides the mechanism to achieve this, aligning community knowledge with science, and transforming empathy into action.

To live well with water means investing not only in walls and pumps, but also in the social and educational systems that enable communities to adapt and thrive in a changing climate. By embracing these approaches, England can lead a new era of flood resilience that is as human as it is hydrological.