Youth Climate Justice Project begins at the School of Law

1 Nov 2023

Prof Daly’s project will analyse the growing trend of child and youth climate activism, particularly how they are claiming and asserting their own rights under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Today the Youth Climate Justice Project begins at the School of Law. The project, which is co-hosted by UCC’s Environmental Research Institute, is led by Principal Investigator Prof Aoife Daly. She is a human rights law academic specialising in children's rights. It is supported by a €2m Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council. The funding is part of the EU's Horizon Europe Programme. 

Prof Daly's project analyses the growing trend of child and youth climate action, particularly how they are claiming and asserting their own rights under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. She will build a team of seven (five academics and two support staff) to conduct research on youth climate action in a number of different jurisdictions. The team will, together with local young climate activists, run a launch event for the project early next year.

The project examines in-depth how young climate activists, many under the age of 18, have organised and protested online and in the streets; accessing national committees and courts, and bringing UN petitions. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) – an international human rights treaty protecting the most fundamental of children’s human rights – is arguably sometimes used in a way which is unduly focused on adults ‘protecting’ children’s rights or ‘giving’ them their rights (this can be referred to as paternalism).

Child/youth climate action presents an exciting opportunity to rethink how under-18s can claim and define their own human rights under the CRC. This project examines whether we are in what Prof Daly refers to as a ‘post-paternalist’ time for the CRC, involving grassroots action from children (for the first time, on a global scale), rather than well-meaning adults giving children their rights.

The project involves talking to children and youth around the world who are taking climate cases, as well as those taking community action. Legal analysis will be conducted; as well as analysis through other disciplines such as political science and psychology to interrogate questions relating to children’s climate justice – are climate judgments showing that courts are viewing children differently? Do children feel that they are working with adults as equals, or is there sometimes tokenism in their involvement in climate cases? Do children outside court processes (e.g. in local communities) feel that climate activism has changed their status in society? The project seeks to discover what climate justice means for children, and what their global climate action means for the CRC.

Commenting on the impact of the project, Prof Daly said:

“The climate crisis threatens our futures. Many children are not accepting this, and are instead working together globally to change government inaction. It is extraordinary to see children taking cases not just in national courts but at UN level. Children and youth have often been involved in social change, from fighting Apartheid in South Africa to Malala Yousafzai's campaign for girl's education in Pakistan. Yet with climate activism they are organizing on a global scale to do this.

It is incredibly exciting to conduct research on what the consequences of this could be. This project seeks to make leaps in what we know and understand about children’s rights, the ability of children to claim their own rights, as well as their ability to transform the world.”

This research project has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. 101088453).

The European Research Council, set up by the EU in 2007, is the premiere European funding organisation for excellent frontier research. Every year, it selects and funds the very best, creative researchers of any nationality and age, to run projects based in Europe. The ERC offers four core grant schemes: Starting, Consolidator, Advanced and Synergy Grants. With its additional Proof of Concept grant scheme, the ERC helps grantees to bridge the gap between grantees' pioneering research and early phases of its communication.