Children, Adolescents, and Youth Pioneering a Human Rights-Based Approach to Climate Change

Climate change is the greatest challenge of our century. Children, adolescents, and youth will bear the most severe impacts, physically, socially, economically, and psychologically. In response to this immense threat and to the failure of international climate negotiations to date, young people are taking to the streets and using global fora to call for climate justice. While these protests have received much attention, there has been limited examination of these and other youth-led efforts through the lens of a human rights-based approach and its operational principles: participation, equality and nondiscrimination, accountability, and transparency. This paper draws from academic and gray literature, as well as the authors’ experience as practitioners and young activists, to argue that young people, by promoting human rights-based operational principles at the international, national, and local levels, are pioneering a human rights-based approach to climate change. The paper concludes by suggesting how policy makers can support and empower young people to advance an explicit human rights-based agenda, while concurrently translating human rights-based operational principles into climate change policies and practice.