Right to life, education and health care
Introduction
Children embody our dreams and our hopes for the future. They also inherit our legacies, including the consequences of how we treat the natural environment. At the dawn of the the equivalent of some 29,000 children dying every single day. Environmental quality is one of the key factors in determining whether a child survives the first years of life, and strongly influences the child’s subsequent physical and mental development. Excessive and wasteful consumption, social inequities and inefficient resource use perpetuate a vicious cycle of pollution and resource degradation that contribute to poverty and the erosion of livelihoods. These conditions severely harm adults and children, particularly those living in ecologically vulnerable areas. Â
Children are at greater risk from environmental hazards because of their physical size, immature organs, metabolic rate, behaviour, natural curiosity and lack of knowledge. With the current trend of environmental degradation, children have fewer and fewer places to hide. They can even be exposed to harmful environmental hazards before birth.
On the other hand, children are also dynamic and powerful forces for environmental protection. They show a natural interest in nature and are often passionate about the preservation of their planet. With proper support, children can acquire useful knowledge from participating in environmental activities and can contribute in a unique manner, with energy and vision, to finding solutions.
The link between children and the environment has been recognized in numerous international declarations and agreements over the past decade This booklet offers a succinct overview of environmental issues affecting the health, development and well-being of children and presents the state of knowledge in this field, conceding that significant gaps exist in the information and data available. For people working at the international, national, local and household levels with children, health and/or environmental issues, this document encourages inter-disciplinary thinking and suggests concrete recommendations for action.
Outcomes from two global conferences have explicitly established the linkages between children and the environment. At the 1990 World Summit for Children, leaders adopted a World Declaration and Plan of Action, recognising that “children have the greatest stake in the preservation of the environment and its judicious management for sustainable development as their survival and development depends on it.� [3] Subsequently, the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED, also known as “The Earth Summit�) adopted the Rio Declaration and Agenda 21, a world action plan for sustainable development, which includes a chapter on children and youth. Governments made a series of commitments at UNCED, which encompass the goals of the World Summit for Children.
It is useful to provide an overview of where we stand a decade later with respect to the commitments made at these two international conferences in terms of protecting our children and safeguarding the environment.
A series of goals were adopted at the World Summit for Children, which, if achieved, would fulfil the rights enshrined in the Convention on the Rights of the Child. During the 1990s, progress was made towards fulfilling these goals. Millions of young lives have been saved as a result of increased immunization coverage and expanded basic social services, including primary health care, children and women’s nutrition programmes and clean water supply and adequate sanitation. At the global level, the international community has adopted numerous critically important treaties and policies to protect children from exploitation.
Over 60 countries have achieved the Summit goal of a one third reduction in mortality among children under the age of five; in over 100 countries, under-five deaths were cut by one fifth during the decade .Most notably, the deaths of young children from diarrhoeal diseases – one of the leading causes of the under-five mortality rate – were reduced by 50 per cent, saving more than a million lives every year .
Yet in spite of these advances, many of the promises for children made at the World Summit and subsequent international conferences of the past decade remain unfulfilled and the lives of countless children and their families continue to be blighted. In addition to the nearly 11 million children dying from readily preventable causes each year, an estimated 150 million children in the developing world are malnourished Over 120 million are still out of school, 53 per cent of them girls.
Unprecedented incidences of civil wars and ethnic conflicts marked the last decade, with perhaps more children losing their lives than ever before. HIV/AIDS is reaching catastrophic levels, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, robbing millions of children of their parents, schoolteachers and village nurses. In addition, far too many children continue to live without clean drinking water and adequate sanitation.
During the 1990s, the global community recognized children’s right to a clean, healthy environment. At the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, UNICEF proclaimed “we must preserve our planet in order to nurture our children; equally, we must nurture our children if we are to preserve our planet.â€? At the 2000 United Nations Millennium Summit, the international community reinforced this. Among the resolutions was the goal to halve the proportion of people living in poverty and those suffering from hunger and lack of safe drinking water by 2015.
The Millennium Declaration’s principle is also echoed in the Say Yes Campaign of the Global Movement for Children, championed by Nelson Mandela and Graça Machel, which calls for people throughout the world to take action and protect the rights of children, including protecting the earth for children. The Special Session on Children of the United Nations General Assembly in May 2002 served to review the progress achieved in the last decade. It also provided an opportunity for world leaders to reaffirm their obligation to safeguard the rights of all children through enhanced national action and international cooperation to make the world fit for children.
Community as base for Child Development:
A woman’s health directly influences the health and development of her child. Ensuring that pregnancies are healthy can be of profound benefit to women, children and society at large. It is now recognized that prenatal conditions, many of which are significantly influenced by environmental conditions, account for 20 per cent of the under-five mortality rate worldwide It is also recognized that a woman’s well-being helps determine the well being of her entire family. A healthy mother is better able in all ways to care for her family and participate fully in the life of her society.
Protein energy malnutrition in pregnant women is a significant threat, causing anaemia, which can severely impact a foetus’ growth and development. An expectant mother’s malnourishment can result in long-term consequences for her child’s development. It has been estimated that eliminating malnutrition among pregnant women would reduce disabilities among their infants by almost one third. Another risk comes from the presence of parasitic worms in the pregnant woman, which can adversely affect or even kill the developing foetus. Approximately 44 million pregnant women in developing countries have hookworm infections that are directly related to environmental factors such as waste disposal. Women can be exposed to harmful chemicals at home or through their work, and pass them to a foetus, such as in the case of lead exposure, raising the risks of abortion, birth defects, foetal growth retardation and prenatal death Scientific studies reveal that exposure during the early months of pregnancy can lead to an increased likelihood of mental retardation and development disabilities
Children require the care, love and stimulation of parents and families, as well as the best and safest of environments to survive and develop to their full potential. The environment influences children at all stages of their lives, before birth and in their homes, schools and communities. They are affected by media such as water, air, food, objects or soil; and they are affected by their daily activities or circumstances, including eating, drinking, working and playing. As children develop and grow, they interact with and explore a world that can offer either an array of life-enhancing discoveries and opportunities or a series of perils that can cause disease and suffering. This chapter reviews children’s special vulnerability and susceptibility to environmental threats at their each developmental stage.
Children in Need of Special Protection
Every day, children of all ages are exposed to a harsh world, with few or no protections from environmental hazards, ill health and injuries. They may be orphans, or living on the streets, begging or selling goods or even their bodies to survive. Many others labour (There are also millions of children and adults with physical and mental disabilities who lack access to basic health, education and other social services, a denial of their rights that increases their vulnerability to environmental risks and hazards.
Approximately half of the worldwide refugee and internally displaced populations are children]. At least 10 million people are estimated to be environmental refugees, more than half of them believed to be in sub-Saharan Africa These are people displaced from their homes because of weather-related catastrophes, such as earthquakes, floods and cyclones, degraded land, lack of natural resources to support livelihoods or armed conflict and land mines. In the past decade two million children have been killed in armed conflict Children are hardest hit by all these catastrophes, the ensuing outbreaks of diseases and famines in refugee conditions, and the associated psychological traumas.
Since UNCED
The concept of sustainable development adopted at UNCED provides an over-arching policy framework within which the international community addresses the environmental, social and economic dimensions of development. From the environmental dimension, notable progress has been made on several fronts since 1992, from the negotiation and implementation of a remarkable number of multilateral environmental agreements, to the widespread efforts on the local level to implement the recommendations of Agenda 21. Furthermore, the realization that environmental challenges need to be addressed in all their complexity is increasingly entering the mainstream. This is reflected, for example, in the attention accorded environmental issues in national and local political processes; in the vibrancy of the non-governmental sector; in the unprecedented media coverage devoted to environmental degradation and its impacts; and in the innovations and initiatives being undertaken by the private sector in response to changing consumer attitudes.
Nonetheless, in the context of the gravity and urgency of the environmental challenges facing the international community, the relatively gradual improvements achieved since UNCED are widely regarded as insufficient to meet the commitments made at that time.
Global environmental degradation continues at an alarming rate, fuelled by social and economic problems such as pervasive poverty, unsustainable production and consumption patterns, inequity in distribution of wealth, unequal access to resources, uneven impacts of globalisation and the debt burden. Numerous studies offer compelling evidence of the immensity of the environmental challenges facing us.
[To be continued next week]
Sam.A.Chelladurai
Executive Director
Anekal Rehabilitation Education And Development (READ) Centre
26.13th Main, Puttenahlli, JP.Nagar 7th Phase
Bangalore. 560078. India
Email: readcentre@yahoo.com www.readcentre.org
