A Child-Centered Approach to the Climate Crisis Can No Longer Wait
“Humanity is waging war on nature…The fallout of the assault on our planet is impeding our efforts to eliminate poverty and imperiling food security. This is an epic policy test. But ultimately this is a moral test….We cannot use [our] resources to lock in policies that burden [future generations] with a mountain of debt on a broken planet.”
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash. Fridays for future - global climate strike on the European elections, Erlangen, Germany, May 24, 2019.
by Joni Pegram
“From education to health, food security, water and sanitation, housing and social protection, much more must be done to mainstream measures to both reduce emissions and enhance children’s resilience to climate impacts as central components in the strategies and budgets of these critical sectors, adopting a whole-of-systems approach. ”
As 2020 drew to a close, the havoc wrought by COVID-19 continued to reverberate around the world, and one could be forgiven for missing yet more sobering news: 2020 was the joint hottest year ever recorded, matched only by 2016. Prior to 2020 taking first place in the all-time rankings, the six hottest years in human history have all occurred since 2014. 2020 saw extreme weather events ranging from raging wildfires in Australia, the US and Siberia, to a record-breaking hurricane season in the Atlantic, devastating locust swarms sweeping through east Africa, the Middle East and Asia, and extreme flooding in China, India and Pakistan.
The world’s leading scientists warn us that we have around a decade to dramatically accelerate action to curb global temperature rise to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, beyond which climate risks will significantly increase. Yet current commitments taken by countries place us on track for a catastrophic rise of between 3 to 5°C this century, and the world’s largest economies are busy pouring money into COVID-19 recovery packages that will entrench rather than alleviate climate change.
For children, the stakes couldn’t be higher. According to the medical journal The Lancet, children will bear the brunt of the climate crisis at “every stage of their lives”, and, based on current trajectories, a child born today can expect to experience a world that is more than 4°C warmer than the pre-industrial average by the time they reach their seventies. Life on earth would be literally unrecognizable, with entire swathes of the globe rendered uninhabitable.
Indeed, the climate crisis is truly a child rights crisis, and for hundreds of millions of children around the world – particularly those living in precarious conditions, afflicted by poverty or other sources of socio-economic marginalization, its impacts are already being felt in visceral ways. Leaving aside the spiraling climate impacts that will occur over the course of their lifetimes, children shoulder a disproportionate share of climate-related harm in the here and the now. Drought, flooding, extreme weather and rising temperatures undermine their most fundamental rights, from access to food and safe water, to education, housing, and protection from exploitation, violence and abuse, and, too often, their very survival. According to UNICEF, 160 million children live in high-drought severity zones and half a billion children (almost a quarter of the world’s child population) live in extremely high flood occurrence zones. As a group, children tend to make up a greater share of the overall population in countries that are highly vulnerable to climate change, and demographic projections look set to accelerate this trend. Africa’s population, for example, is projected to triple by 2100.
Perhaps most significantly, children are disproportionately affected because – as the WHO notes quite simply – “children are not little adults”. Their rapidly-developing bodies and minds render them uniquely vulnerable to the kind of environment-related risks that are both contributing to, and being driven by, the changing climate. This is particularly the case between birth and the age of five.
For example, around 30 per cent of the world’s population is currently exposed every year to life-threatening heatwaves, and by 2100, this figure could rise to as much as 75 per cent. Young children are particularly vulnerable as they are less able to regulate their body temperature than adults.
The catastrophic effects of air pollution on tiny lungs, hearts and developing brains – both from fossil fuels driving climate change, and the wildfires it exacerbates, have been documented, contributing to the deaths of around 600,000 children under five each year, and leading to an array of permanent forms of damage for those that survive. Children’s higher respiratory rate, their tendency to spend more time outdoors, and the concentration of pollutants at ground level, makes them particularly vulnerable.
In many parts of the world, undernutrition, responsible for nearly half of all deaths of children under the age of five, is being exacerbated by the impacts of climate change on water and food security. Undernutrition in the first 1000 days of life can cause irreversible stunting, leading to poor physical and mental development and life-long effects, with ramifications for society at large. Undernutrition enhances susceptibility to infectious disease, and it is estimated that approximately 90 percent of climate-related health impacts – including an increase in the prevalence of vector and water-borne diseases such as malaria and diarrhea – are borne by under-5 year olds.
Beyond impacts on their physiological development, climate change exacts a severe toll on children’s mental health and wellbeing, as well as their education. Following Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, it is estimated that more than 5,000 children were separated from their families, placing them at risk of immense mental trauma, as well as increased protection risks. Displacement and high rates of PTSD symptoms, combined with destruction of essential school infrastructure, have been correlated with worse academic performance, behavioral issues, and higher drop-out rates in the aftermath of extreme weather events.
Compounding the injustice of these severe impacts and inequities is the fact that children, particularly the youngest, have no voice in influencing the policies and (in)action that are fundamentally shaping their wellbeing and future prospects, while decision-makers continue to sail past the critical thresholds and limits that they have set themselves during decades of global climate change negotiations. Historic child-led school strikes and a wave of child-led climate litigation at domestic and international levels have helped to disrupt the status quo, but we have yet to witness meaningful consideration of children’s particular vulnerabilities, needs and perspectives in climate frameworks at national or international levels. Just one in five of countries’ national climate plans put forward under the global Paris Agreement on climate change adopted in 2015 mention children, and where these references do occur, they are generally superficial and descriptive. This glaring omission points to an underlying lack of analysis and attention to a segment of society that nonetheless comprises one-third of the global population.
“Compounding the injustice of these severe impacts and inequities is the fact that children, particularly the youngest, have no voice in influencing the policies and (in)action that are fundamentally shaping their wellbeing and future prospects, while decision-makers continue to sail past the critical thresholds and limits that they have set themselves during decades of global climate change negotiations. ”
At all levels, one of the key challenges is that those involved in formulating and implementing climate change policies and action on the one hand, and those concerned with children and child-relevant sectors on the other, tend to work in siloes, leading to low awareness and consideration of the intimate nexus between these agendas. A paucity of disaggregated data that could shed light on the specific risks faced by children at the local and national levels is both the result and the cause, hampering the development of tailored and effective interventions. Another decisive barrier is the lack of political will to undertake the long-term and transformational reforms that would truly be required to safeguard the wellbeing of children and future generations, particularly in the context of short-term political cycles which favor growth at all costs.
Child rights advocates and practitioners have been slow off the mark, but there are encouraging signs of change, not least thanks to the activism of children themselves. Children must be meaningfully integrated in climate policies, and dedicated interventions that are material to their specific needs must be developed and accompanied by much-needed finance.
At the broadest level, this means that urgent action to limit warming to a maximum of 1.5°C can no longer be treated as a technical environmental challenge, but rather as one of the most basic and essential child rights interventions that is available to us. The co-benefits of ambitious climate action are manifold and will be experienced almost immediately in developed and developing countries alike – from cleaner air, to healthier diets, more physical activity, and greater access to green space, all of which will significantly improve the quality of children’s lives.
At the same time, given the warming that is already ‘baked in’ to the Earth’s system, much greater attention must be dedicated to significantly scaling up investment in adaptation and disaster risk reduction – that is, measures designed to help vulnerable communities to prepare for and – literally – weather the effects of climate change that cannot be avoided.
“Urgent action to limit warming to a maximum of 1.5°C can no longer be treated as a technical environmental challenge, but rather as one of the most basic and essential child rights interventions that is available to us. ”
From education to health, food security, water and sanitation, housing and social protection, much more must be done to mainstream measures to both reduce emissions and enhance children’s resilience to climate impacts as central components in the strategies and budgets of these critical sectors, adopting a whole-of-systems approach.
For example, empowering children themselves, through climate and environmental education, including green skills and disaster preparedness, is a simple yet transformative measure that can save lives while preparing children – even from an early age – to be active agents of change in their communities, helping to address risk and to adopt the necessary transition to sustainable lifestyles. Beyond integration in curricula and teacher training, a holistic approach entails looking at how education systems per se can become more climate resilient and environmentally sustainable, from infrastructure that is able to withstand more extreme weather, to the use of solar panels for lighting and power that can reduce toxic pollution and emissions, while extending learning hours and even providing opportunities to bolster access to other essential services, such as solar-powered water pumps and digital connectivity.
Life as we know it may have been upended by the pandemic, but the scale of the unfolding climate emergency will dwarf this disruption in all its dimensions. It is incumbent on all of us to use every lever at our disposal, and in the words of Greta Thunberg, act as if our house is on fire, because it is.
Joni Pegram is the Founder and Director of Project Dryad, an independent organization dedicated to mainstreaming children's rights in climate and broader environmental policy processes, decision-making and action. In this capacity she provides research, analysis, technical expertise and advice on strategic advocacy to numerous international organizations. Project Dryad co-leads the Secretariat of the Children's Environmental Rights Initiative (CERI), a multi-stakeholder coalition that brings together children, youth, civil society, UN agencies, governments, academia and institutions under the auspices of the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and the Environment that seeks to secure recognition and realization of children's right to a healthy environment.