This November, COP 31 will be held in Türkiye, and there is one group it is very important we hear from.
Our MSc student, Ashima Gulati, has published an opinion piece in world-leading medical journal The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health, calling for the voices of children to be central to COP 31. The article reminds us that children are among those most impacted by the climate crisis; for example, they are more vulnerable to extreme heat (with a larger surface area for mass, and less thermoregulatory capacity) and also to drowning.
Ashima Gulati
Children can also play a part in working towards solutions: the article explores children’s participation and agency in responding to the interconnected challenges of climate change, health and wellbeing. It draws, in part, on Ashima’s work with children and communities in India, alongside the wider research of the Children and Climate Initiative.
Ashima is reading for the MSc in Sustainability Enterprise and the Environment at Somerville, and is the Indira Gandhi Scholar at the Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development. She co-authored this comment piece with her colleagues from the Children and Climate Initiative at the Blavatnik School of Government.
Ashima commented that, “Climate action will remain incomplete if children are seen only as those most vulnerable to its consequences. Our call is for the world leaders to place child and adolescent health at the centre of climate-resilient health systems, while ensuring that young people are meaningfully included in the decision-making process themselves. Recognising children’s diverse needs, lived experiences and agency is not an optional addition to climate policy; it is essential to building responses that work.”
You can read the full article here. Ashima has also recently worked with Somerville’s communications team to curate the social media series Green Fridays at Somerville, which you can view here.