The Challenges of Climate Change: Children on the Front Line

"[C]hildren are already taking an active part in making a difference on climate change. This book contains positive examples from all over the world of young people who are making a difference and offering their special perspective. They are raising awareness in their own communities, organizing conservation projects, promoting renewable energy and taking political action in support of sustainability and climate justice....Involving children and young people in the process can help to unblock the logjam that currently exists in climate negotiations."

This book brings together the knowledge and opinions of 40 contributors - scientists, development workers, and experts in health, nutrition, and children's rights - in an attempt to build up a clear picture of what climate change means for the children of today and tomorrow. The rights of children, intergenerational justice, and inequality are the central issues emerging. The book was commissioned and published by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) Office of Research at Innocenti.

As Anthony Lake, Executive Director, UNICEF, explains in the Foreword, "[a]s the effects of climate change become more visible and extreme, they are likely to affect adversely the lives of children and adolescents all over the world. For example, families that lose their livelihoods to drought will be less able to afford the costs of schooling or health care. Over 99 per cent of deaths already attributable to climate-related changes occur in developing countries - and children make up over 80 per cent of those deaths. Diseases may spread - especially diseases that threaten children more than adults, such as malaria and diarrhoea." Save the Children estimated in 2009 that, over the next decade, around 175 million children will be hit by climate-related disasters every year, and that climate change could ultimately lead to an additional 250,000 child deaths a year in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa alone.

One clear conclusion of this book is that the priority must be disaster risk reduction (DRR) rather than simply disaster relief. That is, instead of responding to extreme events when they happen, "the world needs to make a major investment in reducing the likelihood of disasters happening in the first place.

The contributors to the book stress the importance of collaboration. As outlined in the Executive Summary: "In particular, the provisions of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), although they do not mention climate change specifically, clearly require governments to protect children from the most harmful consequences of environmental pollution. States should be investigating the full impacts of climate change on the human rights of the child by, for example, gathering data measuring increases in mortality and disease owing to changing climate patterns, or monitoring the impacts on education of an increased incidence of natural disasters. Moreover...the CRC...could help to guide national governments and international bodies on to a more sustainable path."

A key theme of this book is the importance, under the CRC, of child participation and leadership on climate change. For example, interviews conducted and shared in the book with young people who are taking action on climate change locally, nationally, and internationally not only "demonstrate their personal qualities of resilience and leadership but also suggest that these have been nurtured and supported by family and community networks. Faced with the significant challenges of a changing climate, all young citizens need environmental education that links them to the lives and experiences of people on the other side of the globe and are more likely to thrive in communities (and countries) where decision-making is inclusive and transparent." The book notes that international cooperation and a global youth movement to protect the climate could be facilitated via the tools available to some of us in today's online, interconnected world.

Several of the essays focus on the importance of the post-2015 agenda, which refers to the aim on the part of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to reach an agreement on a new binding protocol to limit greenhouse-gas emissions by 2015 (considering that the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) will have expired by then). In that context, the book's contributors seem to agree that "2015 is a year of opportunity. It could be the year in which the world embarks on an ambitious agenda to end poverty, halt climate change and promote the rights of children. To have any chance of achieving this, greater cooperation and collaboration between the child rights, development and climate change communities is needed. Putting young people front and centre could help to unlock the climate change impasse - and safeguard the future of generations of children to come."

Sections 5 (Child Participation and Climate Change) and 6 (Young People Leading on Climate Change) of the book highlight communication strategies and suggestions for communication for development (C4D) practitioners seeking to strengthen their capacity to engage with youth around climate change issues, such as these contributions:

• Partnering with and Catalysing Young Innovators, by Ivana Ivana Savi´c
• Engaging Youth in Participatory Games for Learning about Climate Risks, by Carina Bachofen, Maarten van Aalst, and Pablo Suarez
• Opportunities for Child Empowerment through Participation at United Nations Climate Conferences, by Amanda Katili Niode and Adeline Tiffanie Suwana
• Engaging Children in the African Climate Change Discourse, by Mounkaila Goumandakoye and Richard Munang
• Partnering with Young People in Climate Change Action, by the United Nations Joint Framework Initiative on Children, Youth and Climate Change
• Supporting Resilient Global Citizenship in a Changing Climate: Lessons from Norway, Samoa and New Zealand, by Bronwyn Hayward and Elin Selboe
• Climate Change Activism and Youth, by June A. Flora and Connie Roser-Renouf
• Beyond Projects: Involving Children in Community Governance as a Fundamental Strategy for Facing Climate Change, by Roger Hart, Scott Fisher, and Bijan Kimiagar

Examples include how partnerships with children provide capacity and reach to coordinate community engagement, influence social movements, and focus on behaviour and social change interventions at scale: "For instance, in Cuba, children conveyed early-warning messages to help to spread the word about impending hurricanes. In Brazil, Save the Children taught children to measure rainfall to give early warning of floods or landslides.....An innovative and widely applicable approach for bridging the gap between science and practice at the local level in a more meaningful way is the use of participatory games. The games have the ability to reflect complex systems with a range of plausible futures and, during game play, players discover the likely trade-offs, feedbacks, delays and thresholds involved in the myriad effects of disaster events. This type of experiential learning can drive meaningful dialogue on what appropriate planning in climate change and disaster risk reduction programmes might look like and on the role that accessing and understanding expert information plays in this planning process." Networks that include children and young people support bridges between global/regional and local partnerships and sustain C4D efforts. For example: After an international climate change meeting where youth were trained to report what they witnessed, "the young delegates [wrote] articles, post[ed] information on social media and engage[d] in national and international events on climate change."