‘Inheritors of the planet’: Report calls for more livable world for kids
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An independent joint commission assembled by WHO, UNICEF and The Lancet has called for immediate action to protect the health of children against the rapidly changing climate and guard them against predatory marketing practices.
The commission, co-chaired by former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark and Senegalese state minister Awa Marie Coll-Seck, MD, ranked 180 countries on the wellness of their children and their ability to provide a safe climate. The United States did not fare well on either list, barely making the top 40 in child wellness and ranking in the bottom 10 in environmental sustainability.
The commission suggested placing children at the center of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) agreed to by United Nations members in 2015.
“I think it’s important for the world to recognize that the health of the planet and the health of the people are very interlinked. Children, at the end of the day, are the inheritors of the planet,” Sunita Narain, PhD, director general of the Centre for Science and Environment in New Delhi, India, said during a news conference.
Five recommendations
The commission made four other recommendations to protect children and adolescents, in addition to making them the focus of the SDGs. It called for stopping CO2 emissions, creating new policies and investments in all sectors of government centered on children’s health and rights, incorporating adolescent voices into policy decisions, and tightening the regulation on harmful commercial advertisements.
“[Children] are the victims. They are not the cause of the emissions that are in the atmosphere today. But they are victims of climate change,” Narain said. “Poor children are suffering today; rich children face an uncertain future — that’s the conversation that perhaps will bring the world to work. There’s some idea that we need to work together; we cannot allow the world to deny this existence, this threat, because it is the future of our children.”
The commission compared children’s level of “flourishing” based on measures of survival and well-being, including health, education and nutrition. It used the proxy of a country’s greenhouse gas emissions as an indicator of the future threat to children’s well-being, and assessed countries’ level of equity or income gap.
The U.S. ranked 39th in child wellness and 173rd — eighth worst — in sustainability, as measured by per capita carbon emissions.
“We found not a single country is doing well on [all] three,” Anthony Costello, MB ChB, professor of global health and sustainable development at University College London, said during the news conference. “The poorest countries have a long way to go to get their children healthy. But the wealthier countries are threatening the future of all children through these accepted carbon emissions. This is a major, major issue.”
According to WHO, the only countries projected to beat CO2 emission per capita targets by 2030 — while also performing fairly on child flourishing measures — are Albania, Armenia, Grenada, Jordan, Moldova, Sri Lanka, Tunisia, Uruguay and Vietnam.
Narain called climate change a global issue that needs to bring the world together. The only way to do this, she said, is to get everyone to understand the gross inequity that exists now and will continue to exist.
“We are talking about countries in Africa, in Asia — even my own country, on a per capita basis — the poor of the world, they actually emit nothing,” she said. “Compared to that, the people of Europe emit six to eight times [the amount] of carbon in a year. The index is to try and make us understand the inequity.”
Involving young people
In order to protect children from adverse threats, there has to be greater commitment at all levels of government, Jennifer Requejo, PhD, MHS, senior advisor of statistics and monitoring and chief of health and HIV in the data and analytics division at UNICEF, said.
“There needs to be some sort of mechanism in place, depending on how countries’ governments are structured, that enables coordination across different sectors,” she said. “The threats to children are really multisectoral in nature, so we need for the [sectors] to all be able to work together for a comprehensive solution to some of these problems that we are facing.”
Requejo noted the commission’s recommendation that children and young adults have a say in policies and how programs are shaped, because most affect them.
“Young people are very strong in terms of social mobilization, and we need to encourage that,” she said. “We need to be more active participants in shaping of programs and follow through with what young people need.”
Costello said the school strike movement, in which students leave class to call attention to — and demand action on — climate change, showed the world how powerful children’s voices can be.
“There are a whole number of children around the world who are actively involved in this,” he said. “Our politicians have got to respond — they are simply not responding in a way that’s mature.”
Exploitative marketing
The commission also addressed commercial marketing that pushes heavily processed fast food, sugary drinks, alcohol and tobacco onto children. Costello said that it is because of the advertising that the obesity levels have risen.
“We face a massive rate of child obesity, which will have long-term, life-long effects. We have seen a 10-fold increase in obesity since 1975, from 11 million children to 125 million children,” he said. “We know that advertising preys on children and in some countries, they are seeing 30,000 [television] ads per year. In America, for example, a lot of children are seeing over four alcohol adverts a day, [and] a huge expansion of vaping adverts. In Brazil, China, India and Nigeria, we have found that 5- and 6-year-olds could identify at least one cigarette brand logo.”
Anshu Banerjee, MD, PhD, MPH, the director for maternal, newborn child and adolescent health and aging for WHO, said that one long-term effect of childhood obesity will be a rise in the need for health care.
Requejo said that commercial marking should be regulated and that kids should be protected online and on social media. She said that there is potential for social media to reach children with important health messages, rather than harmful advertisements.
“[Children] can also use social media to advocate for their needs. We also need to protect them from some of the dangers that are surfacing through harmful exposures that may appear on social media, from bullying, from gambling, and other types of issues that they may be exposed to,” she said.
Moving forward, Banerjee said that they plan to take the report forward with the independent commissioners who helped write it and launch it regionally and nationally all over the world over the course of the next 6 months. – by Ken Downey Jr.
Reference:
Clark H, et al. Lancet. 2020; doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(19)32540-1
Disclosures: Please see the study for all authors’ relevant financial disclosures.