What is child-led adaptation all about?
Child-led adaptation is about enabling children to make a positive contribution to this process of risk reduction and climate resilient development. The negative impacts of climate change on children must be minimised but they must also be able to benefit from opportunities it may present.
Experience from other sectors demonstrates that starting from what children know about the risks they face and recognising what activities they are already engaged in to reduce these risks helps empower young people to engage further.
Since ways of adapting to climate change have to be locally specific, the views of young people who know about local conditions are particularly important. Children are not conditioned by sectoral approaches nor constrained or restricted by institutional mandates. Their relatively unblinkered perspectives mean that children can clearly identify vulnerabilities and opportunities for building resilience within their communities.
Given that climate change is expected to increase the frequency and intensity of extreme climatic events, learning lessons from child-led disaster risk reduction (DRR) is both relevant and critical.
Lessons from child-led Disaster Risk Reduction
In many developing countries children form a high proportion of the death tolls from disasters. Excluding children from the disaster planning process threatens their safety when the disaster strikes and ignores a valuable resource for risk communication, education, advocacy, and help with practical risk reduction activities.
"Children's participation in DRR activities gives them skills, confidence and psycho-social support following a devastating event such as a natural disaster. Children participate in all aspects of DRR activities including planning, identifying hazards and vulnerabilities as well as completing community emergency evacuation and preparedness plans. Children also share and communicate the results with their families and wider community." [i]
These experiences along with tools and guides developed on child-led DRR[ii] provide important lessons for climate change adaptation and support the case for greater child participation in adaptation policy and practice.
Through innovative action-research into risk communication, perceptions, knowledge and participation in different policy spaces CCC will be driving forward the engagement of children in risk reduction in their communities. CCC will facilitate the sharing amongst agencies of experiences and the development of tools and methodologies for child-led adaptation programming.
[i] Save the Children (2008 forthcoming) Children and Climate Change: In the Face of Disaster
