Children’s voices must be heard on climate crisis, says UN rights body

An Indigenous Fijian girl walks over flooded land after Cyclone Winston in 2016. The UN committee says the planetary crisis is is ‘an urgent and systemic threat to children’s rights globally’. Photograph: Chameleonseye/Getty Images

Governments must respond to growing concerns expressed by children about the effects of the climate crisis and other environmental emergencies on their lives and futures, a UN body has said.

In a strongly worded formal opinion published on Monday, the Committee on the Rights of the Child concludes that the triple planetary crisis – the climate emergency, the collapse of biodiversity and pervasive pollution – “is an urgent and systemic threat to children’s rights globally”.