A new UNICEF UK report launched today – exactly ten years after the UK signed the Kyoto Protocol (on 29 April 1998) – reveals that the world’s poorest and most vulnerable children are being hit the hardest by the impact of climate change. The report, ‘Our climate, our children, our responsibility: the implications of climate change for the world’s children’ draws attention to the fact that climate change is impacting very seriously on children and their rights. It calls for immediate action from the UK Government to make children a priority in the climate change agenda and calls on UK companies to substantially reduce emissions and contribute to the costs of mitigating and adapting to climate change.

Written by Emma Back, a global health policy expert, and Catherine Cameron, one of the authors of the Stern Review , with a foreword by Lord Nicholas Stern, the UNICEF UK report reveals that children, especially in Africa and Asia, face a future in which disasters, violence and disease will be more frequent and intense, clean water and food supplies will diminish, and incomes and productivity will fall. It highlights how climate change is already having and will continue to have an overall adverse impact on children’s lives, as well as on all the Millennium Development Goals relating to children, including health, survival, education and gender equality.

David Bull, UNICEF UK Executive Director, said, “Those who have contributed least to climate change – the world’s poorest children – are suffering the most. If the world does not act now to mitigate and adapt to the risks and realities of climate change, we will seriously hamper efforts to reach the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015 and sustain development progress thereafter. Many more children could die.  It’s clear that a failure to address climate change is a failure to protect children.”

The report maps the consequences of climate change for children in the context of the MDGs and children’s rights, highlighting:

• Increased child poverty due to reduced incomes and threatened livelihoods (affecting MDG 1): 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.
• Increased hunger (MDG 1 and 4): 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.
• Fewer children able to attend school, especially girls (MDG 2 and 3): 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
• Increased childhood disease (waterborne/communicable) (MDG 6 and 7): Malaria: changes in environmental factors mean malaria – which already kills 800,000 children every year – is now being seen in areas which were previously outside the range of malarial mosquitoes, such as the highlands of Kenya and Jamaica. Diarrhoea: Climate change will increase the burden of diarrhoeal disease in low income countries by between 2 and 5 per cent by 2020. Dengue: Estimates suggest the population at risk could increase to 3.5 billion by 2080 (from 1.5 billion today) due to climate changes.

“Government, private sector and individuals all have a role to play,” Bull continued. “The UK Department for International Development needs to ensure that children are involved – and empowered – when they develop their policies to tackle climate change. Children’s issues were not on the agenda 10 years ago in Kyoto – nor were their voices heard. It is critical that the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) meeting in Copenhagen in December 2009 puts children at the heart of the discussions and includes their voices in the debate.”

The report highlights the ways in which UNICEF already works with children and their communities to help them adapt to climate change, such as supporting people to be prepared for natural disasters as they become more frequent, tackling the problem of contaminated or reduced water supplies by providing wells and pumps or using new techniques such as rainwater harvesting.  However, according to the report, much more needs to be done to protect children. The policy recommendations in the report include:

• Calling on the UK Government to ensure a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions of at least 80 per cent against 1990 levels by 2050 and ensure that the implications of climate change for children are on the agenda of the UNFCCC meeting in Copenhagen in December 2009.
• Urging the Department for International Development (DFID) to do development differently, by mainstreaming the climate change implications for children across its work and empowering children to have a voice in the debate.
• Calling on UK companies and individuals to substantially reduce their emissions and contribute to the costs of mitigating and adapting to climate change.

UNICEF UK is also asking the UK public to visit www.unicef.org.uk/climatechange and join the campaign by writing to their MP, calling for the UK Government to increase the 2050 emissions reduction target from 60% to at least 80% and to include aviation and shipping in the climate change bill.

For more information contact Sarah Epstein, UNICEF UK media office, 0207 312 7606 or 07766 052 658 or email sarahe@unicef.org.uk

Read the full report

Tags | Child Poverty, Children, Climate Change, Disease, Education, Gender Equality, Global Warming, Health, Millennium Development Goals, Survival, UK, UNICEF, Violence