Child rights and climate change adaptation: voices from Kenya and Cambodia

This report examines how children’s voices are represented and heard in climate adaptation and disaster risk reduction policy and decision-making spaces and how this process can best be facilitated and promoted. The report addresses children in Kenya experiencing a third consecutive year of failed rains, and Cambodian children's families’ crops devastated by unseasonal rains. It states that those children clearly articulates the links between worsening drought and erratic rainfall and violations of their rights as established under the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC).

The report proposes a two-track approach to fulfil child rights in a changing climate requires: (1) integrating child rights into national climate change responses and (2) integrating climate change into national child rights agendas. It advocates for applying elements of Child Rights Programming to adaptation policy development through: (i) addressing violations of children’s rights brought about by climate change; (ii) strengthening institutional and policy mechanisms for responding to climate change so that children are not hurt and their adaptive capacity strengthened; and (iii) strengthening communities and civil society’s capacity to support children’s rights under the conditions that climate change presents.

This research is part of a programme implemented by Plan International to reduce risk of disasters and conducted by Children in a Changing Climate, which is coordinated by the Institute of Development Studies.