„ENRICH: Environment, Rights, Children”

Defending children’s rights in the face of the looming climate crisis requires a holistic, comprehensive, and rights-based approach, which includes protecting their rights to life, survival, and a healthy development as well as ensuring their participation in policy- and decision-making. Despite an extensive legal-policy framework regulating child rights and participation, there is still a huge rhetoric-reality gap between theoretical participation principles and concrete, practical realization of children’s meaningful participation in the design and implementation of environmental decisions that greatly affect them. The main goal of our project “Environment, Rights, Children” (ENRICH) is to raise awareness of how the climate crisis and children’s rights intersect and to advance children’s right to have a voice in environmental/climate change matters.

The method to attain this goal is to undertake

1. research and stakeholder surveys to assess the current level of awareness of key stakeholders regarding child rights in environmental and climate policymaking
2. a number of national trainings, aimed at educating key environmental stakeholders about child participation rights and methods to enforce them, and
3. two international events to share experiences, research results, and present concrete recommendations to EU policymakers regarding EU guidelines and the practical implementation of child participation policies in climate action.

Our main target groups are environmental and child rights NGOs and activists, environmental educators and NGOs, and official bodies and policymakers dealing with children and environmental matters. Project outputs will be international research with data from 7 EU countries, 21 national events, 2 international events, 1 set of advocacy submission. The project supports the EU Strategy on the Rights of the Child and provides practical support for state parties regarding the implementation of concrete measures.

UfU participates in the project as one of seven European project implementers. During the year of 2025, we will organise three workshops on children’s rights and environmental and climate participation rights, on implementation of children’s rights assessment requirements in practice, presentation of related EU legislation, presentation of national research results. The workshops will target different stakeholder groups:

• environmental and children’s right experts and activists
• environmental educators and education NGOs on children’s participation rights
• official bodies dealing with children on children’s participation rights