The consequences of climate change will be disproportionately severe for the physical and mental health of children due to their various developmental phases, cognitive and physiological immaturity, higher exposure to air, food, and water per body unit, and dependency on caregivers. Traditionally, however, children have been omitted from consideration as active contibutors to, and participants in political and legal processes affecting their future welfare. This has begun to shift with the widespread implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and the prominence of young people in the movement for Action on Climate Change.
National courts around the world have been the venue for climate change-related litigation initiated by children and youth plaintiffs. At stake has been, not just the consideration of their interests, but their active participation in processes that will profoundly affect their futures. Cases such as Juliana v United States of America (2015), Carvalho v The European Parliament and the Council (2018), Urgenda Foundation v The State of the Netherlands (2019), and Youth for Climate Justice v Austria (2020) offer an insight into the developing substantive and procedural law in response to the climate emergency and the extent to which they conform to binding international human rights standards. Secondly, they allow to examine how children's participation rights are engaged to protect their health in relation to region, jurisdiction, and political systems, including monist and dualist states and their legal conventions. Although climate change is indisputably a global threat, the different procedural rules, standing regulations, remedies, and legal thresholds, pose further difficulties in pursuing collective climate mitigating and adaptation action across States. The study will identify and address the common routes through children could exercise and realise their participation rights, forming a new global community of children linked by their opportunity to contribute to the climate change debate. The case studies provide an important proving ground for political and moral theories of voice and representation. Comparative and interdisciplinary study of climate litigation will allow the development of a normative basis for children's participation, as well as a framework for critiquing current rules and proposing reforms. The explicit focus of this study on children's participation rights as they interrelate with their rights to health at the nexus of global health, human rights, philosophy, and ethics, could contribute to the conceptual and practical enhancement of global health governance models, State policy, and domestic legislation that will realise children's citizenship and protect their health, expanding on the existing international human rights frameworks. These considerations could lead to further reflections that will contribute to empowering children's membership in the community, strengthening their voices, and realising their participatory rights in the context of climate litigation and beyond.