Assistant Secretary-General Brands Kehris: Children, youth, women and Indigenous Peoples are key agents of effective climate action

I am honoured to join you for the Youth-led Climate Forum discussion on mainstreaming children, youth, gender, and Indigenous rights in climate policies.

Climate change has massive and ongoing impacts on the human rights of all, but children, youth, women, and Indigenous Peoples are amongst the most affected.

Children, youth, women, and Indigenous Peoples have also played an invaluable role as agents of change, advancing human rights in the context of climate change through litigation, advocacy, and innovation, including Indigenous and local knowledge.

In its General comment No. 26 (2023) on children’s rights and the environment, which was developed in consultation with children, the Committee on the Rights of the Child emphasizes that children’s views should be proactively sought and given due weight in the design and implementation of measures aimed at addressing the significant and long-term environmental challenges that are fundamentally shaping their lives.

It highlights that children in Indigenous communities face unique risks and are disproportionately affected by climate change but they can also act as educators and advocates in applying traditional knowledge to reduce the impact of local hazards and strengthen resilience, if this knowledge is passed on and supported.

The youth constituency group at the UNFCCC, YOUNGO, has long worked together with OHCHR to advance human rights in the context of climate change.

The Action for Climate Empowerment agenda, which brings together work under Article 6 of the UNFCCC and Article 12 of the Paris Agreement relating to participation, education, and access to information, among other things, has been an important space for these efforts.

This Youth-Led Climate Forum is itself a welcome initiative to expand space for youth engagement.

And, in recent years, the Climate Youth Negotiators Program has done tremendous work, in collaboration with partner countries, to train young negotiators.

Nonetheless, more remains to be done to truly mainstream the rights of children and youth, including their right to meaningful and informed participation, throughout the UNFCCC process.

In its General Recommendation No. 37, the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women recognized that environmental crises worsen existing gender inequalities and compound intersecting forms of discrimination.

States should seek to address intersecting systemic inequities and take concrete steps to overcome the participation and leadership barriers experienced by women including those who face intersectional marginalization and discrimination.

Here again, the action we need includes ensuring access to information, participation, and opportunities.

Women, including many Indigenous women, are already leading climate actions at all levels, but their voice, agency, and participation are often under-supported, under-resourced, under-valued, and under-recognized.

The new Gender Action Plan being negotiated at COP30 offers an important opportunity to uphold the rights of women, girls, and persons with diverse gender identities in this space.

OHCHR’s brief on the Plan, calls for it to, inter alia, affirm gender equality as a legal obligation, mainstream an intersectional approach, strengthen participation of women and girls, integrate just transition, address gender-based violence, develop robust and gender-responsive protection and accountability mechanisms, and advance gender-transformative climate finance.

Indigenous Peoples, including Indigenous women, children, and youth, play an essential role in the conservation and sustainable management of biodiversity, ecosystems, and natural resources that are key to keeping the 1.5°C goal within reach and enhancing resilience to climate impacts.

OHCHR’s advocacy on the Just Transition Work Program being negotiated here at COP30 has emphasized that the Program should explicitly guarantee the human rights of Indigenous Peoples and their free, prior, and informed consent in line with the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and that meaningful participation of workers, trade unions, Indigenous Peoples, women, girls, and persons with diverse gender identities, children and young people, in the design and implementation of just transition plans is critical.

Similarly, the COP30 Presidency has emphasized the importance of a whole of society movement, a “global mutirao,” to collectively address climate change.

This call for coordinated and collective action was also clearly reflected in the recent Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice on legal obligations of States with respect to climate change, in which the Court affirms human rights obligations apply in the context of climate change and highlights that cooperation to address climate change is a matter of obligation. This is of course an obligation that we have to advocate to be included throughout the current process.

We are stronger when we work together. So, I urge all of you to do so in seeking COP30 outcomes centred on human rights.

Thank you.