The Climate Crisis: A Child Rights Crisis Ensuring children take their rightful place at the heart of climate change decisions and ambition

11 September 2021

Thank you, Isabelle, and my thanks also to UNICEF for organising this discussion of children’s rights in the context of our climate crisis.

As we can see everywhere at the COP – and around the world – a huge number of children and young people are working for climate justice.

With a clarity that many older people should emulate, they grasp that the triple environmental crisis of climate change, pollution and nature loss is already harming children's rights around the world.

It looms as an existential threat to our future – their future. Those who have contributed least to the climate crisis, including indigenous children and children from marginalized communities, are and will be disproportionately affected.

I fully understand the anxiety and anger that many feel. And I am inspired by how many children and young people are channelling those emotions into powerful, principled  action.

We can prevent catastrophic climate change, with immediate and ambitious action. And by bravely insisting that States act on their legal obligations to protect human rights, you are stepping up for those solutions to humanity's crisis. I want to thank you, very deeply.

As the Human Rights Council recognised last month, every human being has a fundamental right to live in a clean, healthy and sustainable environment.

The United Nations' Committee on the Rights of the Child – the guardian of the world's most widely ratified human rights treaty – has also established that States can be held liable for impacts related to climate change that occur outside their borders.

Climate action should be guided by the principles of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. They are: no discrimination of any kind. Every child's right to life, survival and development. The best interests of the child must be at the core of policy. And children's right to participate meaningfully in decisions that affect them.

Every one of you has a right to raise your voice and contribute to reforming the policies and laws that impact your human rights. And Governments must empower children and youth - through education, access to information, and access to justice – to enable your exercise of this right.

We at the UN are committed to working with States to protect the space for civic freedoms, and to advance climate justice for the children and young people of today – and tomorrow.

Working together under the Secretary-General’s Call to Action for Human Rights, every UN organisation has committed to promoting the right of children, youth and future generations to a healthy environment, and their meaningful participation in decision-making at all levels.

We need you to participate in saving our planet and people.

I applaud the Governments here today who have recognized this by signing on to the Declaration on Children, Youth and Climate Action, which my Office has supported since its inception.

I urge them to ensure that it is implemented in their concrete actions.

Thank you for stepping up to advance human rights-based climate action. We at the UN Human Rights Office stand with you.