Children in a Changing Climate (CCC)

CCC has its foundations in collaborative action-research with children in the Philippines and El Salvador, where the participation and voice of children in policy-making on disasters and climate change was investigated and supported. This research was motivated by the conviction that, "[t]o date, strategies to respond to the impacts of climate change have paid little attention to how adaptation measures can be child-sensitive, let alone child led. There is little institutional knowledge and information available on child-led adaptation initiatives or autonomous action taken by children to reduce their communities' vulnerability to climate change impacts." This initial investigation led to the conception of a more extensive research programme; the research dimension then expanded to a focus on 3 other areas: action, policy, and learning. The 4 areas are mutually supporting, and comprise a body of work and series of projects that seek to ensure that the voices of excluded groups can influence community and policy responses to climate change.

Children's participation is the core programme strategy. At the December 2008 United Nations (UN) talks in Poznan, Poland, CCC highlighted examples of how children can be engaged in tackling climate change at the local and national level. CCC presented a participatory video project from Nepal. Making the films allowed the children to explore how the changing climate is impacting them and their families and how they are coping. Most importantly, according to the organisers, the video project gave children an opportunity to discuss the changing climate with others in their community and identify concrete adaptation measures that could enhance their communities' capacity to cope with climate change.

The resulting report and film are being used for local, national, and international advocacy, emphasising children's right to be heard, children's right to adaptation, and the need to reflect children's needs in national adaptation plans.

CCC is scaling up this effort to work with children in communities across the world to document their voices in ways that enable them to be heard in national policy processes such as National Adaptation Programmes of Action.

Children, Youth, Environment.

According to organisers, participation is one of the 4 fundamental principles of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). Click here to download "A Right to Participate: Securing Children's Role in Climate Change Adaptation" [PDF], a CCC publication centred around this connection between climate change and justice.  It introduces the policy spaces, the challenges, and the case for children's participation, presenting policy recommendations for addressing the needs of children under climate change and the approach that CCC is taking. It also includes various statistics, such as these (from the United Nations Children's Fund - UNICEF - 2008):

• Climate change could cause an additional 40,000 to 160,000 child deaths per year in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa through Gross Domestic Product (GDP) losses alone.
• With temperature increases of 2°C, an additional 30 - 200 million people will be placed at risk of hunger globally, rising to as many as 550 million with warming of 3°C.
• The negative impact on livelihoods may make it more likely that parents remove their children from school – and in most cultures this will almost certainly mean removing girls first – so that they can collect water and fuel and supplement household income.
• Malaria - which already kills 800,000 children every year - is now in areas which were previously outside the range of malarial mosquitoes, such as the highlands of Kenya and Jamaica. Climate change will increase the burden of diarrhoeal disease in low-income countries by between 2% and 5% by 2020. Estimates suggest the population at risk of dengue could double from 1.5 billion today to 3.5 billion by 2080 due to climate changes.