Child Rights and Climate Change Adaptation: Voices from Kenya and Cambodia

This report from the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) and Plan International illustrates the exposure children experience due to the changing climate, and the ways in which they see their rights being violated by a lack of climate change adaptation that accounts for children. It focuses on the potential for national adaptation planning to be made in the best interests of the child, and how a rights-based perspective on climate change adaptation must transform national adaptation planning, a response resting particularly with national governments.

The perspectives of children were collected by Plan International from children in Kenya, at a time when the country was experiencing its third consecutive year of failed rains, and in Cambodia, where families’ crops were devastated by unseasonal rains. In all cases, children prioritised:

• livelihood and food security - 1) with a focus on lack of access to water and irrigation infrastructure undermining their rights to survival and development; and 2) with a focus on insecure livelihoods requiring them to spend more time farming or generating income and thereby constraining their access to education and increasing hunger and illness.
  
• access to education - with a focus on safe physical access to school, for example, in times of flood.
  
• protection in the context of child labour, child migration, and exposure to sexual abuse - with a focus on increased vulnerability due to food scarcity and/or the need to migrate.
  
• participation in decision-making and risk reduction activities - with a focus on the lack of voice or power to stop further environmental degradation.
  

This report proposes that fulfilling child rights in a changing climate requires a two-track approach: (1) integrating child rights into national climate change responses and (2) integrating climate change into national child rights agendas. "Applying elements of Child Rights Programming to adaptation policy development would mean that adaptation would need to: address violations of children’s rights brought about by climate change; strengthen institutional and policy mechanisms for responding to climate change so that children are not hurt and their adaptive capacity strengthened; and strengthen communities and civil society’s capacity to support children’s rights under the conditions that climate change presents."

As stated here: "As the primary duty-bearers, governments have a responsibility to ensure child rights are realised in general, and thereby also in a changing climate. Civil society organisations and donors have a role in facilitating these processes through engaging in strategic research and awareness-raising and processes aimed at holding governments, donors and private actors to account....Adaptation planning and delivery should include:

• Climate vulnerability and capacity analysis disaggregated by age, gender, urban and rural.
  
• Engagement with and support for participatory spaces created by, with, and for children.
  
• Child-centred resilience projects and programmes with dedicated support and resources (dealing particularly with underlying causes of vulnerability).
  
• Child rights-based indicators for monitoring and evaluation."
  

The report emphasises the importance of raising awareness of a child-centred climate resilience agenda amongst child rights networks and other actors involved in the Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) reporting, so that this perspective is included in the agenda of the CRC in order to influence governments and non-governmental organisations (NGOs).