Missing Children: The Lack of Youth Perspective in Climate Migration Research & Policymaking

Climate Change & Child Migration

Compared to a person born about 60 years ago, a child born today will experience between two and seven times more disasters. In fact, 1.2 billion children live in areas of high climate risk, and in 2022 alone, 12 million children were displaced as a result of weather-related events. Not only are children more exposed to climate events, but they are also more anatomically vulnerable. For instance, children are especially vulnerable to dehydration and a myriad of conditions that accompany heat stress, such as respiratory and kidney disease. Along with these direct impacts that children face, kids are also more vulnerable to the indirect health impacts of climate change. For example, high temperatures increase the spread of vector-borne diseases, such as Dengue or Zika, which can have long-term implications for children’s health. Additionally, droughts may lead to food insecurity and therefore changes in a child’s diet that impact their development.

While children are among the most acutely impacted by climate events, they are also among the most likely to migrate in order to find work when climate events strike.  Migration can be risky for all people, but children are especially at risk when making a move. Children are often targeted by traffickers who can force them into criminal activities, like transporting drugs, or recruit them into armed groups. Kids are also at risk of abuse at the hands of immigration officials, especially when separated from their parents or caregivers. In many places, children can be detained for indefinite amounts of time, making them vulnerable to abuse and leading to physical and mental trauma. Often the detention centers that children are placed in are not created for children, making it so that kids are held in jail-like centers, often without information about the situation or access to legal representation. Upon arrival in a new place, children may also face discrimination, which can lead to a denial of healthcare, education, and housing.

While all children are at risk of the aforementioned impacts, these risks do not manifest themselves or impact all kids in the same way. For instance, girls are more vulnerable to gender-based violence and sexual assault along the migration journey as well as within the detention system. For every three boys that are trafficked along the way, there are four girls. Furthermore, during climate-related events human trafficking increases by about 20 to 30 percent, thereby disproportionately impacting girls. Notably, in some regions, the proportion of girls traveling as unaccompanied minors is increasing as the amount of girls arriving at the U.S. border from Central America increased by eight percent from 2012 to 2019. While girls are less likely to be detained than boys, in some contexts they have been found to spend more time in detention (an average of 27 days versus 17 days).

The Missing Child Perspective

Even though children face the brunt of climate change and thus are more likely to be displaced and face the negative impacts of migration, they are almost entirely missing from research and policy around climate migration. When searching for peer-reviewed academic literature on the subject, only one article appears which explicitly focuses on climate change and migration from the child perspective (note that a few high-quality research reports on the topic exist). While I cannot provide a systematic analysis of the child perspective in climate migration literature broadly, as someone who has read much of this literature and contributed to it, I can confidently say that the child perspective is almost never included. This is critical because, as previously discussed, since children are uniquely vulnerable, the kinds of policy solutions proposed may differ when children are considered. For instance, when child migration increases to cities as a result of climate impacts, local policymakers may consider housing options for unaccompanied minors or systems for registering for local services without parental signature or extensive documentation, policy measures that would not be considered when thinking solely about adult migration. Furthermore, in order to plan for child climate migration or prevent it by implementing climate adaptation measures, policymakers need data around the climate tipping points for child migrants, how their migration patterns differ from adults, and their unique needs upon arrival.

While major gaps exist around the incorporation of a child perspective into the climate migration literature, climate change poses unique advocacy opportunities for youth that migration does not. Climate change is an intergenerational issue, in that the emissions released today will not impact those who emitted them but rather the subsequent generations. As such, youth, such as Greta Thunberg and Leah Thomas, are organizing around climate change and pushing policymakers to implement climate policies that center on justice. In the climate space, youth have a larger platform to share their voice than with almost any other global issue, as evidenced by the Youth and Future Generations Day at COP27, the 2022 climate change negotiations. And youth advocacy is working. In 2019, 42 percent of all Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), the national climate change plans that each country creates, mentioned youth or children with 20 percent explicitly mentioning children. While this still is not enough, it is far beyond the amount of climate migration research or policies that focus on children. Furthermore, much of the global litigation around climate change focuses on the rights of children. In 2018, for instance, the Colombia Supreme Court ruled that the government has a duty to protect children’s right to a healthy environment. And in 2023, a Montana court held in a case brought by youth that climate change must be considered in the state’s fossil fuel project approval process based on the Montanan constitutional duty to maintain the environment for “future generations.” The harm caused specifically to children as a result of climate change poses a unique opportunity for advancing legal theories not only around broad climate impacts, but potentially around the specific links to climate migration and the harms children face as a result of the displacement. While these specific theories remain untested, the youth advocacy network and infrastructure provide a unique organizing opportunity for children and their allies in preventing forced climate migration and receiving damages in cases where it has already occurred.