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	Even a 1.1°C temperature rise has put us into a dangerous level of climate change by Bulletin of Atomitic Scientists, agencies   May 2023   IPCC scientists show affordable ways to avoid climate catastrophe, by David Suzuki   Cutting greenhouse gas emissions to keep the world from heating to catastrophic levels is entirely possible and would save money. Although emissions continue to rise, there’s still time to reverse course. Ways to slash them by more than half over the next seven years are readily available and cost-effective — and necessary to keep the global average temperature from rising more than 1.5 C.   The recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Sixth Assessment Report includes a chart that shows how. Compiled by the world’s top scientists using the most up-to-date research, it illustrates potential emissions reductions and costs of various methods.   At the top are wind and solar power, followed by energy efficiency, stopping deforestation and reducing methane emissions. Nuclear energy, carbon capture and storage and biofuels bring much poorer results for a lot more money.   Wind and solar together can cut eight billion tonnes of emissions annually — “equivalent to the combined emissions of the US and European Union today” and “at lower cost than just continuing with today’s electricity systems,” the Guardian reports.   Nuclear power and carbon capture and storage each deliver only 10 per cent of the results of wind and solar at far higher costs. It’s telling that those less effective, more expensive pathways are the ones touted most often by government, industry and media people who are determined to keep fossil fuels burning or are resistant to power sources that offer greater energy independence.   Making buildings, industry, lighting and appliances more energy efficient could cut 4.5 billion tonnes of emissions a year by 2030 — and there’s no doubt that simply reducing energy consumption could add to that.   Because forests, wetlands and other green spaces sequester carbon, stopping deforestation could cut four billion tonnes a year by 2030, almost “double the fossil fuel emissions from the whole of Africa and South America today,” the Guardian reports.   Cutting methane emissions, especially those that leak from fossil fuel operations, could cut three billion tonnes. This is especially important because methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide over the short term. It also shows that fracking for fossil gas and production of so-called “liquefied natural gas” are not viable solutions.   Other ways to lower emissions include switching to sustainable diets, such as eating less meat (1.7 billion tonnes), shifting toward public transit and active transportation (which has more potential than electric cars) and better agricultural methods.   We’re constantly told that quickly transitioning from coal, oil and gas is not realistic and that renewables aren’t ready to replace them, and that we need expensive, often unproven or dangerous methods like nuclear and carbon capture and storage. But those claims ignore the rapid pace at which renewable energy and storage technologies have been advancing — and dropping in price.   We could get even further than this research suggests by using less energy and fewer products that require energy to produce and transport. Shifting from a consumer-based system is especially important in light of the fact that even renewable energy is not impact-free. Mining for materials, replacing aging infrastructure and making space for installations means our ultimate goal should be to use less.   Likewise with electric cars. Although electric cars are far better than fossil-fuelled, all personal vehicles waste resources, require massive infrastructure and are not efficient at moving people around, regardless of how they’re powered.   But what this chart and mountains of other research show is that even with current technologies, methods and systems, cutting emissions and avoiding catastrophic consequences of climate disruption are entirely possible and affordable.   If we fail to reach the goal of reducing emissions by 50 per cent by 2030, it won’t be for lack of options.   The problem isn’t a shortage of solutions, or exorbitant costs, or any benefits of fossil fuels over renewable energy; it’s a lack of political will, and to some extent, public support. This is driven to a large degree by the efforts of industry to protect its interests in raking in huge profits and perpetuating a system that mostly benefits a small and dwindling number of people at the expense of human health, well-being and survival.   Nature is speaking, and science is confirming that we have no time to lose. We can’t afford not to change.   http://davidsuzuki.org/story/chart-shows-affordable-ways-to-avoid-climate-catastrophe/ http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/apr/20/down-to-earth-ipcc-emissions   Apr. 2023   Faster than forecast, climate impacts trigger tipping points in the Earth system, by David Spratt for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.   “Could anthropogenic climate change result in worldwide societal collapse or even eventual human extinction? At present, this is a dangerously underexplored topic … yet there are ample reasons to suspect that climate change could result in a global catastrophe,” wrote the eminent Australian climate scientist Will Steffen and his colleagues in August 2022 in “Climate Endgame: Exploring catastrophic climate change scenarios.”   Steffen, who died earlier this year, will be remembered for some of the big, crucial ideas he contributed to the understanding of the Earth system, particularly planetary boundaries, tipping point vulnerabilities and cascades, risk and nonlinearity, and the “hothouse Earth” scenario—ideas developed with Tim Lenton, Johan Rockstrom, Katherine Richardson, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, and others.   In their 2018 “hothouse” paper, Steffen and his colleagues explored the potential for self-reinforcing feedbacks to push the Earth System toward a planetary threshold that, if crossed, “could prevent stabilization of the climate at intermediate temperature rises and cause continued warming on a ‘Hothouse Earth’ pathway even as human emissions are reduced.”   This challenged the notion that climate warming was a predictable, linear consequence of increasing levels of greenhouse gases, and instead pointed to critical thresholds, or tipping points, in which a small change causes a larger, more critical change to be initiated, taking the climate system as a whole or particular systems within it from one state to a discretely different state. The loss of polar glaciers, or the Amazon rainforest drying and being replaced by sclerophyll forest, are examples.   The change may be abrupt or non-linear—characterized by sudden change rather than smooth progress—and irreversible on relevant time frames.   It may also lead to cascading events in which the mutual interaction of individual climate tipping points and/or abrupt changes lead to more profound changes to the entire system.   This is already happening. The loss of sea ice in the Arctic is adding to regional warming, accelerating ice melt from Greenland, such that an influx of cold, non-salty water into the North Atlantic is slowing the Gulf Stream, which in turn is changing the Amazon climate.   Recent research has confirmed that tipping points and cascades are already occurring, not at 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius of warming, but right now. In one of his last published pieces, a 2022 book chapter, Steffen said, “it is clear from observations of climate change-related impacts in Australia alone—the massive bushfires of the 2019-2020 Black Summer, the third mass bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef in only five years, and long-term cool-season drying of the country’s southeast agricultural zone—that even a 1.1°C temperature rise has put us into a dangerous level of climate change.”   While observed warming has been close to climate model projections, the impacts have in many instances been faster and even more extreme than the models forecasted. William Ripple and his co-researchers show that many positive feedbacks are not fully accounted for in climate models.   And prominent climate scientist Michael Mann says that when it comes to certain important consequences of warming, including ice sheet collapse, sea level rise, and the rise in extreme weather events, “the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)] reports in my view have been overly conservative, in substantial part because of processes that are imperfectly represented in the models.”   In September 2022, Stockholm University’s David Armstrong McKay and his colleagues concluded that even global warming of 1-degree Celsius risks triggering some tipping points, just one data point in an alarming mountain of research on tipping points presented in the last year and a half.   Denman Glacier, in East Antarctic, was identified as susceptible to collapse of its ice shelf and inundation of the glacier itself, which sits on a retrograde base below sea level. Scientists announced that the Thwaites Glacier ice shelf in West Antarctica was fracturing and likely to result in a speeding up of the glacier’s flow and ice discharge, possibly heralding the collapse of the glacier itself and triggering similar increases across the Amundsen Sea glaciers. “The final collapse of Thwaites Glacier’s last remaining ice shelf may be initiated … within as little as five years,” they said.   In November 2022, the State of the Cryosphere report concluded that more than four meters of additional sea level rise was locked in “with sections of the West Antarctic ice sheet potentially collapsing even without any further emissions over the coming centuries.”   An ingenious look at the genetic history of Turquet’s octopus and its population movement across Antarctica in past warm periods led to the conclusion that “even under global heating of 1.5°C—the most ambitious goal under the global Paris climate agreement—the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could be consigned to collapse.”   In August, researchers showed that the Arctic has warmed nearly four times faster than the globe since 1979 and concluded it is likely climate models systematically tend to underestimate this amplification.   A few months later, scientists reported that Greenland Ice Sheet glaciers are melting 100 times faster than previously calculated. At the end of 2021, Professor Jason Box said that the Greenland Ice Sheet has passed a tipping point: “Technically, now [at 1.2°C] Greenland is beyond its viability threshold… 1.5°C would mean the ‘beyond the threshold’ state is enhanced and the loss [of ice mass] becomes a complex, non-linear, amplified response guaranteeing the ice sheet remains beyond its viability threshold.”   Permafrost carbon emissions and the feedback loops they will initiate are not accounted for in most Earth system models or Integrated Assessment Models, including those which informed the IPCC’s special report on global warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius, nor are they fully accounted for in global emissions budgets. If carbon-cycle feedbacks such as tipping points in forest ecosystems and abrupt permafrost thaw are accounted for, the estimated remaining budget for carbon emissions could disappear altogether.   In a ground-breaking 2021 paper, Northern Arizona University’s Katharyn Duffy and colleagues mapped the relationship between increasing temperatures and carbon uptake in Amazon forests by analyzing more than 20 years of data on the transfer of carbon dioxide between plants, land, and the atmosphere; their analysis showed that in recent hot periods the thermal maximum for photosynthesis had been exceeded.   At higher temperatures, the amount of carbon dioxide absorbed by plants (photosynthesis) will decline sharply, whilst carbon dioxide released by plants (respiration) will continue to rise.   In addition, recent evidence shows human fossil fuel emissions are still rising and will not likely plateau until the end of this decade, a far cry from the “carbon law,” which requires halving emissions by 2030 to keep warming to under a 2-degree Celsius trajectory. Current analysis suggests the world is heading to around 3 degrees Celsius of warming, or perhaps 3.5 degrees Celsius in a plausible high-end trajectory.   There are fair and reasonable concerns that focusing on worst-case scenarios will cause public despair and paralysis. But when risks are existential, it is precisely those high-end possibilities of system collapse, rather than the middle-of-the-road linear probabilities, that must be the focus of concern and should spur the world to action.   Speaking in 2018, Steffen said that the dominant linear, deterministic framework for assessing climate change is flawed, especially at higher levels of temperature rise. Model projections that don’t include these feedback and cascading processes “become less useful at higher temperature levels… or, as my co-author John Schellnhuber says, we are making a big mistake when we think we can ‘park’ the Earth System at any given temperature rise – say 2°C – and expect it to stay there.”   http://thebulletin.org/2023/04/faster-than-forecast-climate-impacts-trigger-tipping-points-in-the-earth-system/ http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/oct/04/south-american-monsoon-heading-towards-tipping-point-likely-to-cause-amazon-dieback http://billmckibben.substack.com/p/maybe-we-should-have-called-this http://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2108146119 http://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abn7950   Mar. 2023   We must stop rewarding climate wreckers and punishing climate defenders - David Suzuki Foundation   During the November COP27 climate talks in Egypt, more than 30 climate protesters were jailed in the U.K., adding to more than 2,000 arrests in a campaign that began in April. On January 17, climate activist Greta Thunberg and others were arrested for protesting the demolition of a German village for a coal mine expansion. On the same day, a Reuters headline read, “Big Oil’s good times set to roll on after record 2022 profits.”   Worldwide, climate activists — and journalists and scientists — have been arrested, jailed, silenced and even killed for protesting to keep the planet livable for humans. Meanwhile, “The top executives at seven big energy companies had an average increase in their compensation of more than 21 per cent in 2021, compared with the prior year. In dollar terms, that was an extra $2.3-million for each, bringing the average pay package to $13.4-million,” the Globe and Mail reported.   For decades, oil companies covered up their own and other scientific evidence that their products could cause catastrophic climate disruption. Not only have they faced no consequences, they’ve reaped massive benefits.   New evidence shows the lengths to which they’ll go to enrich themselves and shareholders — even if it means supporting brutal governments. The world’s largest oil and gas service companies have been raking in enormous profits in Myanmar, propping up a murderous military regime. In 2021, oil giant Chevron lobbied against proposed sanctions that would hinder operations in the country.   Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is driving fossil fuel profits to record highs — as global average temperatures also break records.   The rewards aren’t just monetary; former ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson, who has dismissed evidence about climate change from his and other company’s scientists, was appointed secretary of state in the Trump administration.   Under our outdated economic systems, those who knowingly fuel a crisis that threatens human health and survival are richly rewarded, while those who try to halt the destruction — often young people whose future is most at stake — are punished.   Governments aren’t just subsidizing coal, oil and gas companies with tax and royalty breaks, loans and direct financing; they’re also using tax dollars to provide security for these companies through aggressive policing and enforcement.   The same is true of companies destroying forests and other natural areas critical to life on Earth, and the courageous people standing up to them. The latter often includes Indigenous Peoples, whose rights are being trampled as their knowledge of the function and importance of ecosystems is ignored. Many have paid with their lives.   It makes no sense. But it’s all considered reasonable in the context of global systems that prioritize wealth ac cumulation and rampant consumerism over everything else.   The problems won’t go away by stopping a pipeline project, coal mine, old-growth clearcut, oilsands operation or massive dam. That’s just playing “Whac-A-Mole.”   Governments should be working for the best interests of all people, not just wealthy corporations. If protecting the systems our health and survival depend on — from carbon and water cycles to forests, wetlands and more — isn’t in the public interest, what is?   Even the false promise of “jobs, jobs, jobs” is an anachronistic method of trapping working people in a system that does far more harm than good. If we were to reimagine our economic systems as ways to improve human health, well-being and happiness, we’d all be enjoying more leisure time — time with families and friends, time in nature, time pursuing education and interests. Instead, we’re caught in a seemingly endless vortex of working, consuming and spending.   We need to change our ways of thinking and acting. It’s not too late, but every delay increases the challenges and costs. A better world is possible. We just need to imagine it and make it real.   http://davidsuzuki.org/story/we-must-stop-rewarding-destroyers-and-punishing-defenders/ http://www.globalwitness.org/en/press-releases/poll-almost-500-global-climate-scientists-reveals-many-are-having-their-work-hindered-online-abuse/ http://www.globalwitness.org/en/campaigns/fossil-gas/636-fossil-fuel-lobbyists-granted-access-cop27/ http://insideclimatenews.org/news/19052023/fossil-fuel-companies-climate-reparations/ http://www.icij.org/investigations/deforestation-inc/auditors-green-labels-sustainability-environmental-harm/ http://www.icij.org/investigations/deforestation-inc/ http://www.un.org/en/climatechange/high-level-expert-group http://stopthemoneypipeline.com/shareholder-showdown-campaign-launch/ http://www.bankingonclimatechaos.org/ http://investinginclimatechaos.org/reports http://reliefweb.int/report/world/what-right-healthy-environment Visit the related web page
	Children’s rights in the face of environmental and climate crises by United Nations Child Rights Committee, agencies   The urgent need for a child-centred Loss and Damage Fund   The world’s most marginalised children are already suffering the unavoidable impacts of climate change – death, displacement, malnutrition, the loss of education, and the destruction of traditional ways of life. These consequences are collectively known as climate-related loss and damage.   Since children have their whole lives ahead of them, such losses or damages suffered at an early age can lead to a lifetime of lost opportunity and can even affect future generations. That makes loss and damage related to climate change one of the greatest intergenerational injustices facing children today, threatening the rights enshrined in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child – such as the rights to survive and thrive, to protection, to clean water and food, to education and health, and to cultural heritage and indigenous knowledge.   Children have contributed the least to the climate crisis, yet they are suffering from its impacts more acutely than any previous generation.   The world has looked to climate finance to compensate those who have suffered the most due to climate change. Unfortunately, children’s unique needs and concerns have been largely overlooked in climate finance debates, a trend also reflected in climate finance allocations.   In 2022, nations agreed to set up a dedicated Loss and Damage Fund (L&D Fund), which is not only a significant milestone in climate negotiations, but also a chance to learn from past experiences of financing climate action. In fact, it is an opportunity to deliver climate justice for children on the frontline of the climate crisis.   Children’s first-hand accounts corroborate that climate-related loss and damage is part of their everyday realities. In a new report, Loss and Damage Finance for Children, 55 children, aged between 11 and 18, from diverse geographies share their experiences of loss and damage and recount memories of missing out on schooling, the loss or damage to their family home or livelihood, and even the loss of friends and family.   The children who shared with us their experiences unanimously demanded a seat at the table where discussions and decisions about loss and damage finance allocations take place. Their experiences and words make it clear that putting children’s rights at the heart of loss and damage finance is a matter of climate justice.   While the COP28 decision to launch the new L&D Fund recognizes youth as key stakeholders to participate in and shape the design, development and implementation of activities financed by the Fund, it only mentions children twice. To date, less than 2.4 per cent of climate finance has gone towards projects incorporating activities responsive to children’s needs.   At the same time, the way climate finance works now is pushing the countries most affected by the climate crisis into a debt crisis. When countries vulnerable to climate change are locked into a vicious cycle of indebtedness, with debt accumulating in tandem with accelerating losses and damages, compromises in public spending on essential services like education and healthcare often become inevitable. This has dire implications for children’s well-being and development.   It is important that the new L&D Fund, and loss and damage finance more broadly, break away from existing climate finance approaches.   The L&D Fund is a chance to ensure that present and future generations of children can thrive and fully exercise their rights. But this requires:   Recognizing children’s unique needs and vulnerabilities; facilitating their participation in decisions about the allocation and use of funding; ensuring the equitable distribution of loss and damage finance; and restoring children’s dignity when losses and damages are unavoidable.   Above all, it requires funding – sufficient, equitable, accessible and sustainable resources for meaningfully addressing the losses and damages suffered by children and their families.   It is crucial then that children’s rights are elevated, and their voices are amplified in discussions about implementing the L&D Fund as well as in setting the new global goal on climate finance. It is essential that this goal – called the New Common Quantified Goal – not only recognizes loss and damage as a critical pillar of climate finance, but that it is informed by the needs of climate-vulnerable children. We must not miss this opportunity to deliver climate justice for children.   * Cristina Coloon is Policy Specialist, UNICEF Innocenti; Lucy Szaboova is Climate Change and Environment Research Fellow, University of Exeter.   # Read the report Loss and Damage Finance for Children by UNICEF, Save the Children, Plan International, the International Centre for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD) and the Loss and Damage Youth Coalition (LDYC).   http://www.unicef.org/blog/urgent-need-child-centred-loss-and-damage-fund http://www.unicef.org/innocenti/reports/loss-and-damage-finance-children http://www.endchildhoodpoverty.org/publications-feed/climatechange   Urgent action by States needed to tackle climate change, says UN Committee in guidance on children’s rights and environment. (OHCHR)   The United Nations Child Rights Committee has published an authoritative guidance on children’s rights and the environment with a special focus on climate change. The guidance specifies the legislative and administrative measures States should urgently implement to address the adverse effects of environmental degradation and climate change on the enjoyment of children’s rights, and to ensure a clean, healthy, and sustainable world now and to preserve it for future generations.   The Committee has adopted its guidance, formally known as General Comment No. 26, after two rounds of consultation with States, national human rights institutions, international organizations, civil society, thematic experts and children.   The Committee received 16,331 contributions from children in 121 countries; children shared and reported on the negative effects of environmental degradation and climate change on their lives and communities and asserted their right to live in a clean, healthy and sustainable environment.   “Children are architects, leaders, thinkers and changemakers of today’s world. Our voices matter, and they deserve to be listened to,” said 17-year-old Kartik, a climate and child rights activist from India and one of the Committee’s child advisers. “General Comment No. 26 is the instrument that will help us understand and exercise our rights in the face of environmental and climate crises,” he added.   “This general comment is of great and far-reaching legal significance,” said Ann Skelton, Chair of the Committee, emphasising, “as it details States’ obligations under the Child Rights Convention to address environmental harms and guarantee that children are able to exercise their rights. This encompasses their rights to information, participation, and access to justice to ensure that they will be protected from and receive remedies for the harms caused by environmental degradation and climate change.”   The general comment clarifies how children’s rights apply to environmental protection and underscores that children have the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment. This right is implicit in the Convention and directly linked to, in particular, the rights to life, survival and development, the highest attainable standard of health, an adequate living standard, and education. This right is also necessary for the full enjoyment of children’s rights.   The general comment further asserts that States shall protect children against environmental damage from commercial activities. It specifies that States are obliged to provide legislative, regulative and enforcement frameworks to ensure that businesses respect children’s rights, and should require businesses to undertake due diligence regarding children’s rights and the environment. Immediate steps should be taken when children are identified as victims to prevent further harm to their health and development and to repair the damage done.   The Committee observes that, in many countries, children encounter barriers to attaining legal standing due to their status, limiting their means of asserting their rights in relation to the environment. States should therefore provide pathways for children to access justice for violations of their rights relating to environmental harm, including through complaints mechanisms that are child-friendly, gender-responsive and disability-inclusive. In addition, mechanisms should be available for claims of imminent or foreseeable harms and past or current violations of children’s rights.   With regard to climate change, the general comment underlines that States must take all necessary measures to protect against harms to children’s rights related to climate change caused by business enterprises, such as by ensuring that businesses rapidly reduce their emissions.   The guidance also emphasises the urgent and collective need for developed States to address the present climate finance gap, including through grants rather than loans to developing States to avoid negative impacts on children’s rights. It also notes that climate finance is overly slanted toward mitigation at the cost of adaptation and loss and damage measures, which has discriminatory effects on children who live in areas where more adaptation measures are needed.   The Committee urges immediate collective States actions to tackle environmental harm and climate change.   http://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2023/08/urgent-action-states-needed-tackle-climate-change-says-un-committee-guidance http://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/general-comments-and-recommendations/general-comment-no-26-2023-childrens-rights-and http://www.unicef.org/press-releases/un-committee-rights-child-calls-states-take-action-first-guidance-childrens-rights http://news.un.org/en/story/2023/08/1140122 http://www.savethechildren.net/news/geneva-landmark-recognition-says-inaction-climate-crisis-child-rights-violation http://childrightsenvironment.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Press-Release_GC26.pdf http://www.rightsoffuturegenerations.org/the-principles http://resourcecentre.savethechildren.net/document/born-climate-crisis-why-we-must-act-now-secure-childrens-rights/ http://www.unicef.org/media/105376/file/UNICEF-climate-crisis-child-rights-crisis.pdf http://violenceagainstchildren.un.org/climate-crisis http://public.wmo.int/en/media/press-release/earth-had-hottest-three-month-period-record-unprecedented-sea-surface   June 2023   Children are being failed by climate funding commitments, despite bearing the brunt of the climate crisis, according to a new report from members of the Children’s Environmental Rights Initiative (CERI) coalition; Plan International, Save the Children, and UNICEF.   Just 2.4% of key global climate funds can be classified as supporting child-responsive activities, the report finds. According to UNICEF’s Children’s Climate Risk Index, more than a billion children are at extremely high risk of the impacts of the climate crisis.   Maria Marshall, a 13-year-old UNICEF child advocate and climate activist from Barbados said, “Children are the future, but our future is shaped by the actions of those making decisions in the present, and our voices are not being heard. As this report shows, funding climate solutions is an obligation, but how that money is spent also matters. Children’s needs and perspectives must be included.”   The study, Falling short: addressing the climate finance gap for children used a set of three criteria to assess if climate finance from key multilateral climate funds (MCFs) serving the UNFCCC and Paris Agreement were: addressing the distinct and heightened risks they experience from the climate crisis, strengthening the resilience of child-critical social services and empowering children as agents of change.   “The findings are stark,” said Kabita Bose, Country Director at Plan International Bangladesh. “Urgent and effective investment is key to adapting to climate change, and is particularly critical for children, especially girls who are highly susceptible to the short and long-term impacts. Yet current spending almost ignores children entirely – this needs to change.”   The report found that out of all the money given by MCFs for climate-related projects over a period of 17 years until March 2023, only a small portion (2.4%) met all three of the requirements which amounted to only $1.2 billion. The report also says that this number likely reflects an overestimate, meaning that even less money may have met all the requirements.   Children most affected by climate emergency   “Children, especially those already affected by inequality and discrimination, have done the least to cause climate change but are most affected by it. Climate finance offers an opportunity to tackle these injustices by considering the needs and perspectives of children,” said Kelley Toole, Global Head of Climate Change at Save the Children.   “This has been woefully inadequate to date but can and must change. To really tackle the climate crisis, we must put child rights at the heart of our response and ensure children’s voices are heard”.   While MCFs provide a relatively small share of overall climate finance, the degree to which these funds consider children matters greatly.   MCFs have a vital role to play in agenda-setting, and in catalysing and coordinating investments by other public and private finance institutions, including at national levels, which are necessary to drive a broader change.   Children are disproportionately vulnerable to water and food scarcity, water-borne diseases, and physical and psychological trauma, all of which have been linked to both extreme weather events and slow-onset climate effects.   There is also evidence that changing weather patterns are disrupting children’s access to basic services such as education, healthcare, and clean drinking water.   We must fund adaptation   “Every child is exposed to at least one – and often multiple – climate hazards. The finance and investment that is desperately needed to adapt critical social services like health and water to climate hazards is insufficient and largely blind to the urgent and unique needs of children. This must change. The climate crisis is a child rights crisis, and climate finance must reflect this,” said Paloma Escudero, Special Adviser for Climate Advocacy at UNICEF.   The report highlights that when it comes to children, they are often viewed as a vulnerable group rather than being recognised as active stakeholders or agents of change. Less than 4% of projects, amounting to just 7% of MCF investment ($2.58 billion), give explicit and meaningful consideration to the needs and involvement of girls.   Children face increased risks because of climate crisis   The report is informed by the voices of children from around the world, who said that they face increased risks because of climate change.   A teenage girl in Zimbabwe said, “In Chiredzi, we learned that some girls cannot swim across flooded rivers to go to school or go home whilst boys can. Girls must walk for up to 10-15km to get to school. They get tired along the way before they even start classes.”   A 13-year-old boy from Bangladesh added, “Lots of large-scale disasters hit our district which causes people to become impoverished, and children like us are engaged in child labour.”   The Children’s Environmental Rights Initiative coalition is urging multilateral climate funds, as well as other climate finance providers providing climate finance at both the international and national levels, to act quickly and address the adaptation gap.   They are specifically calling for funding to cover losses and damages caused by climate change. This funding should prioritise the well-being of children and critical social services that support them. The focus should be on reaching and assisting the children who are most vulnerable and at high risk due to climate impacts.   http://plan-international.org/news/2023/06/22/climate-funds-neglect-childrens-needs-report/ http://www.unicef.org/press-releases/funds-worlds-climate-hotspots-woefully-neglect-needs-children-new-report-finds http://www.savethechildren.net/news/five-ways-which-heatwaves-threaten-child-rights-education-daily-meals http://resourcecentre.savethechildren.net/pdf/born-into-the-climate-crisis.pdf/
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