Eight reasons why I’m worried, and hopeful, about the next generation
DEAR children of today and of tomorrow, Thirty years ago, against the backdrop of a changing world order — the fall of the Berlin Wall, the decline of apartheid, the birth of the world wide web — the world united in defence of children and childhood.
While most of the world’s parents at the time had grown up under dictatorships or failing governments, they hoped for better lives, greater opportunities and more rights for their children.
So, when leaders came together in 1989 in a moment of rare global unity to make a historic commitment to the world’s children to protect and fulfil their rights, there was a real sense of hope for the next generation.
So how much progress have we made?
In the three decades following the adoption of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, in spite of an exploding global population, we have reduced the number of children missing out on primary school by almost 40 per cent.
The number of stunted children under five years of age dropped by over 100 million. Three decades ago, polio paralysed or killed almost 1 000 children every day.
Today, 99 percent of those cases have been eliminated.
Many of the interventions behind this progress — such as vaccines, oral rehydration salts and better nutrition
— have been practical and cost-effective.
The rise of digital and mobile technology and other innovations have made it easier and more efficient to deliver critical services in hard-to reach communities and to expand opportunities.
Yet poverty, inequality, discrimination and distance continue to deny millions of children their rights every year, as 15 000 children under five still die every day, mostly from treatable diseases and other preventable causes.
We are facing an alarming rise in overweight children, but also girls suffering from anaemia.
The stubborn challenges of open defecation and child marriage continue to threaten children’s health and futures.
Whilst the numbers of children in school are higher than ever, the challenge of achieving quality education is not being met.
Being in school is not the same as learning; more than 60 percent of primary school children in developing countries still fail to achieve minimum proficiency in learning and half the world’s teens face violence in and around school, so it doesn’t feel like a place of safety.
Conflicts continue to deny children the protection, health and futures they deserve. The list of ongoing child rights challenges is long.
And your generation, the children of today, are facing a new set of challenges and global shifts that were unimaginable to your parents.
Our climate is changing beyond recognition. Inequality is deepening. Technology is transforming how we perceive the world. And more families are migrating than ever before. Childhood has changed, and we need to change our approaches along with it.
So, as we look back on 30 years of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, we should also look ahead, to the next 30 years.
We must listen to you — today’s children and young people — about the issues of greatest concern to you now and begin working with you on twenty-first century solutions to 21st century problems.
With that in mind, here are eight reasons why I’m worried for your future, and eight reasons why I think there is hope:
1. You need clean water, clean air
and a safe climate
Why I’m worried: It sounds obvious that all children need these basics to sustain healthy lives — a clean environment to live in, clean air to breathe, water to drink and food to eat — and it sounds strange to be making this point in 2019.
Yet climate change has the potential to undermine all of these basic rights and indeed most of the gains made in child survival and development over the past 30 years. There is perhaps no greater threat facing the rights of the next generation of children.
The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) noted last year that climate change is becoming a key force behind the recent continued rise in global hunger, and as escalating droughts and flooding degrade food production, the next generation of children will bear the greatest burden of hunger and malnutrition. We are already seeing evidence of extreme weather events driven by climate change creating more frequent and more destructive natural disasters, and while future forecasts vary, according to the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), the most frequently cited number of environmental migrants expected worldwide by 2050 is 200 million, with estimates as high as 1 billion.
As temperatures increase and water becomes scarcer it is children who will feel the deadliest impact of waterborne diseases.
Today, more than half a billion children live in areas with extremely high flood occurrence and almost 160 million in high-drought severity zones. Regions like the Sahel, which are especially reliant on agriculture, grazing and fishing, are especially vulnerable to the effects of climate change. In this arid region, rains are projected to get even shorter and less predictable in the future, and alarmingly, the region is warming up at a rate one and a half times faster than the global average.
In the Sahel, the climate gets hotter and the poor get poorer, and it is all too common for armed groups to exploit the social grievances that arise under such pressurized conditions.
These challenges will only be compounded by the impact of air pollution, toxic waste and groundwater pollution damaging children’s health.
In 2017 approximately 300 million children were living in areas with the most toxic levels of outdoor air pollution — six or more times higher than international guidelines, and it contributes to the deaths of around 600 000 children under the age of five. Even more will suffer lasting damage to their developing brains and lungs.
And, by 2040, one in four children will live in areas of extreme water stress and thousands will be made sick by polluted water. The management and protection of clean, plentiful, accessible groundwater supplies, and the management of plastic waste are very fast becoming defining child health issues for our time.
Why there is hope: To mitigate climate change, governments and business must work together to tackle the root causes by reducing greenhouse gas emissions in line with the Paris Agreement.
Meanwhile, we must give the highest priority to efforts to find adaptations that reduce environmental impacts on children.
UNICEF works to curb the impact of extreme weather events including by designing water systems that can withstand cyclones and salt-water contamination; strengthening school structures and supporting preparedness drills; and supporting community health systems. Innovations such as Managed Aquifer Recharge (MAR) schemes — if deployed at scale — could preserve reservoirs of clean water to protect millions of children from the dangers of water scarcity and disease.
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