#InvestInClimateInvestInChildren

#InvestInClimateInvestInChildren

Today and tomorrow, children call for investment in child-centred climate interventions for a greener and safer society.

Climate change is impacting the lives of children worldwide, including in Zimbabwe. The Climate Change Crisis is a Child Rights Crisis. It creates scarcity in access to safe water and food, impacts the health of children, increases children’s vulnerability to exploitation and abuse, and jeopardises their well-being, even threatening their survival. Effectively, climate change is infringing on the rights of children as embodied in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Join us in supporting Child-Centred Climate Financing by signing our Petition HERE

Climate funding needs to be more child-focused. Today, only 2.4 % of Multilateral Climate Funds globally are set aside for children and young people. More funds need to be allocated directly to interventions that benefit children.

Children are growlingly exposed to climate or environmental hazards like flooding, drought, heat waves, cyclones, and air pollution. As these extreme weather events increase in frequency and ferocity, they threaten children’s lives, jeopardise their access to the healthy food they need for their development, and destroy infrastructure critical to their well-being, such as schools, healthcare facilities, and children’s playgrounds. For the most vulnerable children, climate impacts worsen their situation, placing additional risk to their rights and further reducing their access to essential services. 

Zimbabwe is also impacted by climate change, which causes frequent occurrences and increasing severity of floods, tropical cyclones, droughts, and heat waves. The Country is ranked high in the 2021 UNICEF Children’s Climate Risk Index.

While children are the least responsible for climate change, suffer the biggest brunt. Still, children need to be included in the climate dialogue.

To deal with the challenges of climate change, energy, and environment, UNICEF calls for urgent action on four fronts:

• Make climate change policies, strategies, plans, and budgets child-sensitive and place children at the centre of them.
• Empower children and young people to be environmental stewards and climate change agents, allowing them to realise their potential with full participation.
• Enable children’s participation in the climate agenda, which is critical to ensure the future is fit for today’s children and today’s children are fit for the future.
• Provide climate resilience services in health, nutrition, water, sanitation and hygiene, education, and protection so that children can survive, develop, and thrive.