‘The end of civilisation’: Exploring children's eco-narratives through an analysis of visual grammar

This article reports on findings from a study investigating how a sample of 40 children aged 5–11 perceive and represent environmental issues through multi-modal eco-narratives (n = 40) 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. 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 elements of the eco-narratives frequently depict environmental damage as agentless events, suggesting a gap in children's understanding of the causal role of human activity. We interpret these elements as naturalising environmental harm and softening human culpability at an age where socialisation into responsibility is formative. 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 also makes a methodological contribution to the field of ecolinguistics in exploring the ways in which the analytic tools of visual grammar and multimodal discourse analysis can be used to further understandings about how ecological discourses are constructed in texts. • Investigates how 40 children (aged 5–11) perceive and represent environmental issues through multimodal eco-narratives. • Uses Kress and van Leeuwen's (2006) visual grammar framework within a multimodal discourse analysis approach. • Demonstrates the value of visual grammar and multimodal analysis in ecolinguistics, highlighting how children's visual choices encode agency, affect, and evaluation in eco-narratives. • Findings show that children show clear concern about environmental degradation, especially its impact on animals. Animals are often depicted as passive victims. Humans are portrayed as either heroic saviours or passive observers, rarely as contributors to harm. • Environmental damage is frequently shown without a visible cause or agent.