Climate Justice Imperatives for Children’s Rights in Zimbabwe: A Critical Analysis
摘要
This chapter examines the intersection of climate change and children’s rights in Zimbabwe through a climate justice analytical framework. With children constituting 47% of Zimbabwe’s population and the nation classified among 25 African countries at extremely high risk for climate impacts, the analysis reveals how climate-induced environmental changes create and intensify inequalities that disproportionately burden vulnerable child populations. Drawing from extensive secondary evidence, the study demonstrates how climate change functions simultaneously as an environmental and children’s rights crisis, creating cascading failures across multiple Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) domains, including education, health, nutrition, and child protection. The chapter addresses critical gaps in mainstream climate vulnerability assessments that treat children as a uniform demographic while overlooking geographic, socio-economic, and contextual variations. Employing three core justice principles, distributive, procedural, and recognition justice, the study examines how climate impacts produce differentiated outcomes across Zimbabwe’s diverse contexts. The findings contribute to emerging discussions about post-2030 development frameworks, advocating for integrated, justice-oriented approaches that centre children’s rights and voices in climate-vulnerable contexts. The chapter provides evidence-based recommendations for equitable climate adaptation strategies and children’s rights protection mechanisms that align with the SDG principle of leaving no one behind.