Digital Voices of the Future: Assembling children’s voice in policy, planning and planting of UK Treescapes

The future of treescapes belongs to the children of today. Yet, interdisciplinary research that explores their engagement with treescapes remains rare. To address this challenge, the Digital Voices of the Future project was designed in creative and interdisciplinary ways to explore avenues for embodied approaches of engaging children in treescapes-related activities to inform the development of video games. Such games feature a complex collage that assembles children’s voices and aim to open up expanded creative spaces for critically discussing the future of climate education, and the role of technology in this area. This paper traces the adoption of a nuanced, multi-directional knowledge exchange model with children at two schools in England to co-produce gaming environments that speak to the realities and fantasies that children have. We focus on the distribution of voice and its potentialities and limitations in the context of digital translations of imagined futures, as well as careful practices of listening and attending, to facilitate children’s wor(l)ds and influence policy development. The children in this project contributed to the strategic planning framework for The Mersey Forest: a regional community forest, whose plan was revised in 2025.