For Earth Day 2022, we need to act (boldly), innovate (broadly), and implement (equitably).

As children are disproportionately affected by the impacts of climate change, it is fundamental for them to be positioned at the centre of all developments in research, policy, decision-making, and practice, and for them to be recognised as agents capable of determining their own futures as envisaged in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). Opportunities for children to exercise their agency and for research to be conducted in partnership with children to coproduce and utilise qualitative forms of inquiry to understand their real-life experiences of climate risk are critical to future development.

As part of our Climate Change project, our social sciences team, Professor Lena Dominelli and Dr Irena Connon from the University of Stirling, compiled a report based on the work undertaken for the systematic literature review.

This report considers:

• How and to what extent the existing research and policy literature has examined the interactions and intersections between all the individual, structural, institutional, cultural factors, policies, and wider geographical domains that determine the risks, vulnerabilities, mitigation strategies and outcomes for individuals, including children, experiencing climate change hazards, risks, and related disasters.

• The extent to which the agency, decision-making capacity, and rights of children, adolescents and young people has been captured within the existing academic research literature.

The Children’s Climate Change Index (CCRI) helps pinpoint areas at the global scale where children are most at risk now by highlighting those locations where the severity of climate risks is at its highest. However, the mitigation of children’s vulnerabilities to these risks requires an understanding of the ways in which individual, structural, institutional, cultural, policy and wider geographic factors shape children’s vulnerability to these risks. Furthermore, developments designed to mitigate vulnerabilities among children must allow them to exercise their rights, and express their own voices, agencies, and decision-making capacities.

Social and environmental justice are first-order priorities for policy and decision-making around climate change at sub-national, national, and international levels. In professional and academic settings, most social justice discourse has been expert-led, leaving a gap regarding the absence of the voices of marginalized groups.

This is particularly the case for children, whose direct voices on climate change are missing from the National Action Plans demanded by the Paris Agreement and by countries committed to the United Nation’s Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), although this Convention emphasized the importance of children’s agency and right to be heard in decisions that affect them. Understanding the risks climate change poses to children and (including young people) is fundamental to meeting the challenges undermining children’s current and future wellbeing.

For children’s rights to be fully realised, their voices and agencies have a key role to play in how new knowledge is developed and how their understandings of risk and vulnerabilities are incorporated in risk mitigation decision-making aimed at safeguarding their futures.

Action should follow such insights to safeguard children’s futures. Societal efforts in mitigating climate risk must involve children fully as agents as envisaged in the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC).