Children in a Changing Climate at Poznan:
CCC highlights how children can engage in tackling climate change - at all levels.
2009 will be a critical year for the international climate negotiations, if a meaningful deal is to be reached to secure a safer future. This will involve efforts at every level, from the community to the UN.
The COP14 Climate Change meetings in Poznan in December 2008 highlighted that opportunities for children and young people's voices to be heard by delegates at the UN Climate Change Negotiations are still severely limited. At an inter-generational inquiry on climate solutions session at the recent COP14 in Poznan, Poland, UNFCCC Executive Secretary Yvo de Boer agreed that "the youth voice is not being heard by the negotiators". Children's voices are quieter still.
A child delegate from Indonesia was unable to get a visa to attend COP14. Nurul won a competition to attend the conference through making her own video about climate change impacts in Indonesia and the role her and her peers are playing to address some of the issues. However the work she is doing nationally with her peers is critical.
CCC recognises that without genuine engagement at the community level, and nationally in their own countries, children's voices on climate change will continue to be absent from the international negotiations.
In Poznan CCC highlighted some examples of how children can be engaged in tackling climate change at the local and national level. CCC presented a participatory video project from Nepal. Making the films allowed the children to explore how the changing climate is impacting them and their families and how they are coping.
Most importantly the video project gave children an opportunity to discuss the changing climate with others in their community and identify concrete adaptation measures that could enhance their communities' capacity to cope with climate change.
'We cannot escape climate change, but we need to reduce its effect on people, livestock and crops.' Santosh B.K., age 17, Bageshwori, Banke, Nepal.
The resulting report and film are being used for effective local, national and international advocacy, emphasising children's right to be heard, children's right to adaptation and the need to reflect children's needs in national adaptation plans.
CCC is scaling up this effort to work with children in communities across the world and document their voices in ways that enable them to be heard in national policy processes such as National Adaptation Programmes of Action.
