DHC Statement to COP23 side event: Child rights, climate change and climate action

15 November 2017 16:45 – 18:15 (Bonn)

The unprecedented now

When we consider that the population under 25 globally is at its highest level ever in human history, if we factor in where it is that those children and young people are most concentrated, if we examine how current policy and practice is treating them, if we look to the world that we are bequeathing to them, then the urgency of our acting more decisively, more inclusively and more conclusively right now becomes clear – acting NOW to ensure that the enormous reserve of potential that is children, is not denied its contribution, but rather enabled to emerge into our world challenges as influential and powerful agents of positive change.

And, our need to act to direct change positively for this planet’s future has never been greater.  For we are the first generation that could choose to be the last and we are the last generation that can afford to choose to live this way.

Thus this, friends, is the unprecedented NOW

Climate instability, conflict, contagion, the cruel crises of famine and feud – these are interrelated dynamics shaping harsh realities for unprecedented numbers of people and those countries suffering the gravest of these impacts have the youngest of populations.

Globally, approximately 160 million children inhabit areas at risk of drought, 500 million children live in flood zones, and 115 million children are highly exposed to cyclone risk.

Due to their social and biological developmental needs, children – younger and older - are hit in particular ways by more frequent and intense extreme weather events as well as longer term climate change, with their brain’s and their bodies’ development process delayed, if not derailed entirely by climate crises – whether rapid or slow in onset.  Consequences that extend then for decades longer.

In the city unplanned and the sprawling slum; exposed to contaminated water supplies and insecure food chains; caught up by rising armed conflict and casualties of deepening corruption, subjected to graver inequality – within and between countries - today 40 per cent of the world’s population is under the age of 25.  It is estimated that around 70 per cent of the world’s people on the move internally are women and those aged under 18, while more than 12 per cent of the world’s 15-to-24-year-olds are migrating across borders with children making up perhaps more than a third of those crossing by sea into Europe and accounting for at least 30 percent of recorded deaths (UNICEF 2015).

And yet, more educated, more interconnected and more politically active, if being an adolescent were a nationality, if being an older child were an ethnicity, then they would form a country as large as India.

Friends, the largest generation we have ever seen, it is children that make of this an unprecedented NOW - A unique moment, which if lost, will escalate otherwise preventable suffering, sorrow and indignity for generations to come – a burden that most certainly will bend the backs of our children and our children’s children.

We do know more or less what to do – how to make this world work for the better – not for some of us but for each of us.

The world’s governments have set out the formula through such as the Paris Agreement and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development for a more just, peaceful and sustainable world.  A commitment to and plan for people, planet, peace and prosperity, governments have pledged to leave no one behind.

Frankly, we know why change is inevitable, we have set out what to do to ensure that change is positive … we even know how to go about it and yet?  ….  From a human rights standpoint?  There is a missing link - which mostly is a question of WHO?

Just by sheer scale in this century age will join gender and ethnicity as this century’s pivotal identities.   How we interact with age will be a key determinant of the future of this planet, our peace and their prosperity. And as yet buried under this new reality lurks a destabiliser of positive change and an impediment to the best of our efforts – an unseen and unnamed inequality which is age-based inequality - not merely age-old discrimination.  An inequality that is being intensified by climate change impacts.

Today 90 per cent of the world’s young and older children are living in low income countries.  90 per cent of those who are aged and aging further – living longest - are in high income high consumption countries.

The median age of Niger, of Uganda? 15.  Of South Sudan, of CAR, of Somalia, of Yemen –  17, 18, 19.  The median age of relative prosperity, relative privilege: Japan 47, Germany 45. The median age of parliamentarians - 53.   The median age of entry to the UN, I am told, is 42.

Youth is poor.  Subjected to grave insecurity.  On the front lines of conflict and climate change. Populating the roads of escape. Locked in the backrooms of neglect.  Kept outside the rooms in which decisions affecting them are made. If we want – and goodness knows we need - to affect positive change we have to dismantle this exclusion.

Yet children too have the right to be protected, and to participate in decisions that affect their lives. They also have the capacity to be energetic and influential proponents of disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation in their families, schools and communities.  They must be brought in as active participants in resilience-building interventions.

As Einstein has said, we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.  We need new thinkers, different thinkers, younger thinkers.

Friends,

Whenever people are involved so too are rights, human rights. Rights?  They are but a binding definition of what it means to be human.  Medical science gives us the concepts that codify our anatomy, physiology, our musculature.  Human rights give us the concepts, values and norms – collectively and internationally negotiated definitions – that codify the ways in which each of us is precious, unique, equal.

 Human rights – legal and normative principles that do not prevent our diversity – they protect it.  Principles that do not limit our diverse expression – they ensure it.  Principles that do not restrict our access to culture or belief or opinion – they guarantee those things and what’s more, they set out the terms and conditions under which we may exercise our rights without cost to the exercise of any other person’s rights.

And however desperate is your current state, nothing and no one can erase your rights!

And, the opposite of human rights upheld?  Selfishness, bullying, bigotry, injustice, tyranny and oppression – toxic stepping stones – a perverse paving of pathways to privation, suffering, conflict and, ultimately, atrocity. 

In this struggle against exclusion, there is no north or south, no right or left, neither east nor west.   There is only the humane and the inhumane.

And in this world, it is a fallacy that borders, walls and fences can erode our obligations to each others’ rights.  Walls within the human family, on a small, distressed planet in a globalized world, home to the largest population of youngest people in all of human history?  Walls are untruths. There is no country on this planet, at this time, in this interconnected world, that can rightfully stand apart, bury its head or absent itself from the global table of rights-filled solutions.

Instead: we must

• Integrate children’s rights into our deliberations on climate, disaster risk reduction and in our development efforts.  Our silo-ed operations and strategies undermine this.
• Empower children to participate in climate policymaking including through climate change education and consultative mechanisms.
• Provide children access to effective remedies when they suffer harm from climate actions and inactions including by businesses.
• Reveal and assess at a deeper level the relationship between climate change and children’s rights including through better research, more inclusive consultation and more comprehensive data collection.
• Mobilise resources domestically and through international cooperation for effective climate action that benefits children, particularly those most affected by climate change.

Friends,

We must also confront that the greater threat to their future is now those of us who are not children, by age at least. 

If we are to take these dynamics of an interdependent, interconnected world of change and shift and turn them so that the opportunities are maximized and the threats minimized - so that preventable human suffering is eliminated; so that hate is never the basis of public or private action, so that the ecology of our planet is rescued from our greed;  so that innovation in technology, science, philosophy, art, literature, music can evolve us into a greater compassion, a greater humility, and a less self-first approach to daily and global action, then we must uphold our duties to the generations to come after us.  This makes inter-generational equity founded in human rights a top strategic priority and one that demands that we invest quite differently.

Invest in children and young people.  Pave their way, dismantle barriers that block their way and then get out of their way – for while we may have not left a better world for our children we can and we must leave better youth – better young men and women - to the world.