For most of human history, women and children, along with slaves, were considered to be property. Children’s rights are a recent development. They replaced the ugly traditions where children were silenced, abused and treated with almost total disregard.
Human rights in general have not been accepted throughout history. Typically, the interests of the powerful have been considered more important than the rights of individuals.
The Enlightenment, a movement in Western philosophy during the 17th and 18th centuries, challenged older traditions which gave absolute power to monarchs, religious institutions or aristocracies. Instead, Enlightenment philosophers emphasized the moral, social and scientific importance of reason. Ordinary people thinking for themselves and not merely relying on authorities, became an important value for the movement. Chief among early Enlightenment philosophers was John Locke, an English philosopher who theorized that all were created free and equal in the original state of nature. Locke believed that humans had a natural right to life, liberty and property. Property rights, in his theory, were derived from human labor’s manipulation of the natural environment.
Climate change is a threat to life because it brings increasing extreme weather events, droughts and floods. Also, labor productivity in the poorest and hottest nation’s of the world are destine to decrease as weather gets even hotter. As natural habitats decline, survival of the world’s most vulnerable economies and the world’s most vulnerable people is threatened. Increased poverty will mean fewer choices for the world’s poorest in terms of opportunities, travel, food and reproduction.
From these arguments, it’s clear that climate inaction is a violation of what was one of the first modern declarations of human rights. Though adults are suffering from climate inaction, it is today’s children who will suffer the most from the negative impact of climate change because they are the one’s with many decades more to live. For these reasons, climate inaction should be seen as a massive global violation of children’s rights.