COP25 climate summit: put children at heart of tackling crisis, says UN

Extract from The Guardian

COP 25: UN climate change conference

Young activists including Greta Thunberg put pressure on negotiators to break deadlock

Fiona Harvey in Madrid

Tue 10 Dec 2019 05.33 AEDT Last modified on Tue 10 Dec 2019 05.52 AEDT

Greta Thunberg and other young activists at the COP25 summit in Madrid as it entered its second week. Photograph: Andrea Comas/AP

Children and young people must be at the heart of dealing with the climate crisis, the UN and campaigners have said as climate talks in Madrid enter their second week with little concrete progress.
Young people, including Greta Thunberg, played a leading role in protests at COP25 over the weekend, and on Monday appeared at the conference to put pressure on negotiators to come up with a plan for reducing greenhouse gases and tackling the impacts of climate breakdown.
Penelope Lea, a 15-year old from Norway, was the first climate activist chosen to be a Unicef ambassador. She said: “We need to keep giving the decisionmakers the power to make the changes we need to see. People have a right to knowledge, and an obligation to get knowledge. Some say we have to wait for people to get ready for change. But we need to make people ready. These are some of the things the youth movement is trying to do, and have to do to ensure progress at COP25.”
She spoke as governments including the intended conference host Chile, the co-hosts Costa Rica and Spain, and several other countries signed up to an international declaration that the climate emergency was a crisis for the rights of children. The organisers, including Unicef, hope this will encourage countries to include special consideration for children in their climate action plans.
Michelle Bachelet, the UN high commissioner for human rights, applauded the young activists. “I understand the despair and rage that so many young people and older ones too are feeling. All of us know the facts and so far there has been far too little real action. Children and young people have a right to participate. We need to implement the principle of intergenerational equity that the Paris agreement sets out.”

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Mary Robinson, a former president of Ireland, said: “The children have called out the adult world, called us out very effectively, as this is a grave injustice. When I was growing up I did not have that shadow [of climate breakdown]. It’s not fair that we have made children have that fear.”
Unicef warned that climate breakdown would reverse the gains made in recent years in protecting children and enshrining their rights in law.
More than 500 million children live in areas judged to be at extremely high risk of floods, due to cyclones, hurricanes, storms and rising sea levels. In the Caribbean alone, the number of children displaced by extreme weather events has risen sixfold in five years, with more than 760,000 children displaced between 2014 and 2018.
More than 160 million children are living in areas with high levels of drought, with severe impacts on their development and exposure to disease. That number is expected to rise dramatically, so that on current trends as many as one in four children around the world will live in areas of extreme water stress, according to the UN.

Diseases, including mosquito-borne illnesses such as malaria and dengue fever, are forecast to spread to new areas as a result of global heating. Children under five are likely to be most at risk.
Air pollution, which is made worse by coal-burning power stations, fossil fuels burned for transport and biomass burning in homes without clean energy sources, also hurts children disproportionately. Breathing toxic air can stunt children’s lungs permanently, and has a long-term impact on their health, brain function and development.
Toxic air contributes to the deaths of about 600,000 deaths of children under five every year, from pneumonia and other respiratory problems. But the measures needed to tackle the climate crisis – replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy, creating green spaces and planting trees – would also help to clean up dirty air.

Gautam Narasimhan, a senior adviser on climate change, energy and environment at Unicef, said: “From hurricanes to droughts to floods to wildfires, the consequences of the climate crisis are all around us, affecting children the most and threatening their health, education, protection and very survival. Children are essential actors in responding to the climate crisis. We owe it to them to put all our efforts behind solutions we know can make a difference.”