3. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and Climate Change 3.1 The role and responsibilities of State Parties The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (Convention) is one of the few human rights instruments to explicitly recognize the importance of a healthy environment in the context of the rights that it enshrines, and to place obligations on States in this regard. This occurs in two places; Article 24(2) on the right of the child to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health provides that: “States Parties shall pursue full implementation of this right and, in particular, shall take appropriate measures: […] to combat disease and malnutrition […] taking into consideration the dangers and risks of environmental pollution.” And Article 29(1) on the aims of education states that: “States Parties agree that the education of the child shall be directed to: […] the development of respect for the natural environment.” In this sense, the Convention articulates the fundamentally interdependent nature of the relationship between environmental and child rights protection – a relationship that has been overlooked for too long by both States and other actors, but which is at last the subject of increasing recognition at both international and national levels. The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child (the Committee) has aided this process by providing further guidance in interpretation of these articles with respect to climate change specifically. In its General Comment on the right of the child to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health, the Committee states that: “Environmental interventions should, inter alia, address climate change, as this is one of the biggest threats to children’s health and exacerbates health disparities. States should, therefore, put children’s health concerns at the centre of their climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies.”8 And in a growing number of Concluding Observations, the Committee has emphasized climate change as a serious impediment to the ability of State Parties to make progress in implementing the Convention, linking its adverse effects to, inter alia, the right to education (Article 28), adequate housing (Article 27), and health, safe drinking water and sanitation (Article 24).9 Since then, the Committee has gone further still, acknowledging that “almost all the substantive rights of the child may be affected by climate change”, and affirming that States must take into account the rights and best interests of the child when determining which mitigation and adaptation measures to pursue.10 The Committee has issued a number of pertinent recommendations to countries, primarily concerning adaptation interventions such as the need to mainstream child-specific and childsensitive risk and vulnerability reduction strategies into national climate and disaster risk plans; to raise awareness and preparedness for climate change through education, and to increase the physical safety and resilience of school infrastructure; to strengthen social safety nets more broadly; and to seek international cooperation in implementing these recommendations. More recently, the Committee has also addressed States’ obligations to prevent causing, or contributing to, transboundary harm through their climate mitigation strategies,11 while the outcome report from their 2016 Day of General Discussion recognized