Adolescent Girls, Human Rights and the Expanding Climate Emergency

In recent history, the number and scale of natural disasters, one of the major causes of humanitarian emergencies, have increased markedly. From 2000 to 2009, compared with the period from 1980 to 1989, there were 3 times more natural disasters across the globe, with climate-related events accounting for nearly 80% of the increase. Since 2008, natural disasters such as floods, storms, and earthquakes have displaced an average of 26.4 million people per year. Even after adjusting for growth in population, the likelihood of being displaced by a disaster today is 60% higher than it was 40 years ago. In 2013 alone, 97 million people were affected by natural disasters. Man-made disasters, the other major cause of humanitarian emergencies (by means, for example, of violence and conflict), remain a leading driver of displacement as well. According to the UN High Commissioner of Refugees (UNHCR), mass displacement reached unprecedented levels in 2014: "59.5 million individuals were forcibly displaced worldwide as a result of persecution, conflict, generalized violence, or human rights violations." Particularly in fragile and conflict-affected states, a complex mix of overlapping hazards--both armed conflict and natural disasters--plays a role in creating humanitarian crises, one that climate change is expected only to exacerbate. The University College London-Lancet Commission, in its landmark 2009 report, said, "Climate change is the biggest global health threat of the 21st century. Effects of climate change on health will affect most populations in the next decades and put the lives and wellbeing of billions of people at increased risk." Among the billions of people at increased risk are adolescents (10- to 19-year-olds), who account for 1 in 5 people in the world, or about 1.2 billion. The vast majority--90%--of adolescents live in developing countries (including China), and approximately 510 million of this group are girls. The poorest adolescent girls living in the poorest communities--roughly more than 200 million girls living in households in the bottom 2 wealth quintiles--are at special risk for being deleteriously affected by climate change. Nonetheless, adolescent girls are not currently a specifically targeted, high-risk group in humanitarian relief efforts during emergencies, nor are they specifically engaged as a population whose involvement could advance national adaptation plans to mitigate the effects of climate change. In 2011, Plan Internationali published a valuable monograph entitled "Weathering the Storm: Adolescent Girls and Climate Change," that called attention to the particular vulnerability of adolescent girls to the effects of climate change. It was a prescient analysis. In the intervening 4 years, the effect of climate change has become more pronounced, and there is a clearer vision of its consequences. The human rights community has more urgently addressed the effect of climate change, especially on socially excluded groups, and practitioners have begun to organize an increasingly accelerated response to the plight of adolescent girls in humanitarian emergencies, both those caused by natural disasters and armed conflicts. The overall reaction to the cataclysm suffered by adolescent girls, however, has been slower than the data warrant. Language: en