Integrating Youth Perspectives: Adopting a Human Rights and Public Health Approach to Climate Action
Authors
Gepp, Sophie
Guerreschi, Asia
Ayowole, Damilola
Iturregui, Rodrigo Sanchez
Amer, Saad
Beaudoin, Simon
Sato, Mayumi
Publication Date
2022-04-15Journal Title
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
Publisher
MDPI
Volume
19
Issue
8
Language
en
Type
Other
This Version
VoR
Metadata
Show full item recordCitation
Gasparri, G., Tcholakov, Y., Gepp, S., Guerreschi, A., Ayowole, D., Okwudili, É., Uwandu, E., et al. (2022). Integrating Youth Perspectives: Adopting a Human Rights and Public Health Approach to Climate Action. [Other]. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph19084840
Abstract
Climate change is a multidimensional issue that affects all aspects of society, including public health and human rights. Climate change is already severely impacting people’s health and threatening people’s guaranteed fundamental rights, including those to life, health, self-determination, and education, among others. Across geographical regions, population groups and communities who are already marginalized due to age, gender, ethnicity, income, and other socioeconomic factors, are those who are disproportionately affected by climate impacts despite having contributed the least to global emissions. Although scholars have been calling for a human rights-based approach and a health perspective to climate action, the literature looking at this multidisciplinary intersection is still nascent, and governments have yet to implement such intersectoral policies. This commentary begins to reflect on the relationship between climate change, human rights, and public health from the perspective of young people engaged in climate action and discourse at the national and international levels. It presents a way forward on what we, as youth climate advocates and researchers, believe is a priority to bring intersectoral integration of human rights and public health approaches to climate change to fruition. First, scholars and practitioners should examine and support youth-led climate interventions that tackle human rights and public health violations incurred by the climate crisis. Second, participatory approaches to climate change must be designed by working synergistically with climate-vulnerable groups, including children and young people, practitioners and scholars in public health and human rights sectors to holistically address the social, health, and environmental impacts of the climate crisis and root causes of injustice. Finally, we recommend more holistic data collection to better inform evidence-based climate policies that operationalize human rights and public health co-benefits.
Keywords
climate change, public health, human rights, co-benefits, intersectionality, youth engagement
Identifiers
External DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph19084840
This record's DOI: https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.83575
Rights
Licence:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Statistics
Total file downloads (since January 2020). For more information on metrics see the
IRUS guide.