Enhancing Climate Justice for Children: The Children’s Climate Change Risk Index (CCRI)

Citation

Connon I, Dominelli L, Hutton C, Henley S, Watmough G, Bollasina M, Mollard J, Sargent K, Marcinko C, Macdonald F, Rees N, Fassio A & Hutchison A (2022) Enhancing Climate Justice for Children: The Children’s Climate Change Risk Index (CCRI). Scottish Alliance for Geoscience, Environment and Society (SAGES) Annual Science Meeting, Dundee, Scotland, UK, 03.05.2022-05.05.2022.

Abstract
Introduction: The Children’s Climate Change Index (CCRI) reveals where children are most at risk from climate and environmental shocks, including coastal and riverine floods. However, mitigation of children’s vulnerabilities requires understanding of the diverse factors that shape these vulnerabilities and the intersections between them. Developments designed to mitigate vulnerabilities must allow children to exercise their rights, and express their own voices, agencies, and decision-making capacities. Project Description : Understanding the risks climate change poses to children is fundamental to meeting the challenges undermining children’s current and future wellbeing. For children’s rights to be fully realized, their voices and agencies have a key role to play in how new knowledge is developed. A study, undertaken as part of the Children’s Climate Risk Index (CCRI) project, examined: 1) what is known about the interactions and intersections between the diverse factors that determine risks and vulnerabilities amongst children, and 2) the extent to which the agency, decision-making capacity, and rights of children has been captured within existing research and developments. From this, a Child-Centered Iterative Loop Framework for Action was developed that repositions children as agents of change. Results and Conclusions: The intersections between the multiple and multi-layered factors remain less well understood in relation to climate change risk for children than adults. Little is known about children’s lived experience of climate risk and how the risks are understood by children themselves. As children are disproportionately affected by the impacts of climate change, it is fundamental for them to be positioned at the center of all developments in research, policy, decision-making, and practice, and for them to recognized as agents capable of determining their own futures as envisaged in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). Future research should be conducted in partnership with children and utilize qualitative forms of inquiry to understand their real-life experiences of climate risk.