Expert Response to Climate Change, An Unwelcome Legacy: The Need to Support Children's Rights to Participate in Global Conversations

Abstract

 2018 Children, Youth and Environments Children, Youth and Environments 28(1), 2018 Expert Response to Climate Change, An Unwelcome Legacy: The Need to Support Children’s Rights to Participate in Global Conversations Pravin Bhiwapurkar College of Design, Art, Architecture, and Planning University of Cincinnati Citation: Bhiwapurkar, P. (2018). Expert response to Climate change, an unwelcome legacy: The need to support children’s rights to participate in global conversations. Children, Youth and Environments, 28(1), 115-118. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublication?journalCode=chilyoutenvi “Climate Change, an Unwelcome Legacy” highlights the lack of child representation in climate change-related policies and decision-making since the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) was established in 1989. The CRC treats as core principles children’s right to participate and to be heard. It is one of the most rapidly and widely ratified international human rights treaties in history. The CRC depicts children as agents with independent minds and ideas; they are subjects, not objects, of rights. Child participation is an important step towards climate justice, safeguarding the rights of the most vulnerable age group, and emphasizing the need for intergenerational and international equity. As children are at a defenseless stage of human development, they are at a higher risk of being negatively impacted by climate change. Important negative impacts resulting from climate change include malnutrition, health hazards, health, violence, migration and exploitation. These impacts are interconnected and CRC Article 6 acknowledges how climate change threatens children’s rights to life and survival. The paper highlights effective efforts to improve child engagement and participation that are centered on the four conditions of Space, Voice, Audience, and Influence as suggested by the Lundy Model to fully implement Article 12 of the CRC. Successful models of child participation described in the paper include national-level children’s parliaments and youth councils, such as the National Congress of Children and Young People in Bolivia, as well as local-level decision-making processes, such as children’s ability to officially vote in a school-relocation referendum in the Philippines. Child participation can clearly impact climate change-related policies from the local to the global scale. Further, children are able to engage families, Expert Response to Climate Change, An Unwelcome Legacy… 116 schools, and societies and connect them with regional, national and global authorities to help minimize the effects of climate change. Nonetheless, child participation in ratifying countries is still limited. The paper emphasized that there was little to no mention of or participation by young people in three major climate-change related global events, namely the 1992 Rio Summit; the 2008 UN Joint Framework Initiative on Children, Youth, and Climate Change; or the 2013 Conference of Parties that ratified the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC). Consequently, the paper argues that the authorities responding to global climate crises are violating children’s rights by not acknowledging their right to express their opinion (CRC Article 13), not hearing them, and not including them in decision making (CRC Article 12). Collins (2016) points out that the important question to be answered is: how is children’s participation understood? Shedding light onto the ways that young people’s participation is interpreted and incorporated into decision making will help explain—among other things—why the UN Joint Framework Initiative on Children, Youth, and Climate Change and other efforts have consistently failed to influence the Conference of Parties. To make significant progress toward honoring children’s rights and meaningfully involving them in climate-change policy, it is essential to more fully understand the variations in children’s participatory opportunities, as well as the causes of those disparities. First, it is important to understand the variation in participation between countries. For example, in some countries, long-standing practices and attitudes (e.g., it is adults’ responsibility to make decisions on children’s behalf), as well as political and economic realities, create major barriers to child participation in government decision making. Moreover, in some countries more than others, a lack of funding and staffing, lack of recognition, and adult-dominated forums are cited as common concerns. Further, structuring an analysis of participation disparities in terms of developed versus developing...