Poverty, Environmental Risk, Conflict, and Governance – Part 1

This is part one of two sessions designed to provide answers to and facilitate further discussions about how societies can continue to reduce poverty amidst the challenges of environmental change and conflict. We do so by bringing together researchers who utilize novel approaches to elucidate how individuals, often children, are affected by environmental externalities – the changes they are exposed to and must accommodate. Part one of the session will consist of four presentations followed by a question-and-answer session chaired by Delamónica, UNICEF Statistics and Monitoring Senior Adviser for Child Poverty and Gender Equality.

Kicking off with a discussion, Gordon will explore whether progress in fulfilling children’s rights will continue as the planet warms or if it is likely to falter in the next century. It has been a century since the Declaration of the Rights of the Child was adopted by the League of Nations in 1924. Despite being the bloodiest and most violent in world history, the 20th century also witnessed significant improvements in fulfilling children’s rights. Today, many children can expect to live into their 70s, attend school, access healthcare when needed, and live in secure housing with adequate water and sanitation facilities. However, despite improvements in living standards and declining poverty rates, poor children are among the most vulnerable to climate change-related extreme weather events, which are likely to become more frequent and severe in the coming decades. The central question is: can we protect children from the consequences of extreme weather events?

In the subsequent presentation, Eltigani, Rudgard, Hurtado, and Fiala will present research on how extreme weather events affect child outcomes, offering new insights into three dimensions of this research area. Firstly, they will discuss a theoretical framework linking major environmental risks with multidimensional child poverty. Secondly, they will provide multicountry empirical evidence regarding the relationship between child poverty and overlapping environmental risks across Africa. The analyses will be based on child-level survey data drawn from Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS), overlaid with environmental risk data extracted from databases such as the Global Flood Database. Regression models will be estimated to evaluate whether poverty rates are higher among children exposed to floods and/or droughts in the year preceding the survey. Thirdly, they will discuss how the findings can inform the design of social protection interventions that depart from traditionally shaped paradigms. These findings will offer valuable insights into the intersection of extreme weather events, child poverty, and social protection. The theoretical lens, proposed methodology, and empirical analysis provide new avenues for generating evidence to inform innovative social policy models that respond to the specific needs of children and their families in the context of climate change.

A concrete example of how children can be protected from another type of externality will be provided by Eltigani, Fiala, Rudgard, and Hurtado, who will present a study exploring the protective impact of cash transfers on children’s welfare during armed conflict. Utilizing cross-sectional household survey data combined with geo-coded conflict records from Nigeria, they will implement propensity score matching to analyse how cash transfers can mitigate the adverse effects of violence on educational attendance and food security. Their findings reveal a significant mitigating effect: children residing within a 5km radius of a recent violent attack are less likely to attend school compared to those in safer areas. However, recipients of cash transfers in these high-risk zones exhibit a markedly improved likelihood of attending school. Similar results are found in the case of food security. These findings underscore the effectiveness of cash transfers as a strategic social protection measure to enhance resilience among vulnerable children in conflict-affected regions.

Reliable statistical analyses are pivotal for scientific advances and for providing decision-makers with the necessary facts. However, they often say little about what is at stake in people’s daily lives. Indigenous communities, in particular, are facing precarious futures; within a century, most Indigenous languages may become extinct, leading to the loss of entire bodies of knowledge. For this reason, empowering indigenous communities is recognized as a key priority in the UN 2030 Agenda, and urgent action towards preserving Indigenous languages and traditional knowledge is imperative. In our sixth presentation, Morelli will discuss ethnographic research conducted in Amazonia over the past 15 years. Working with indigenous children and young people, she has developed practice-based methods to help them tell their own stories and gain wider visibility. Collaborating with Indigenous researchers, Amazonian artists, and professional animators, she teaches children and youth how to produce animated films based on their endangered heritage and imagined futures, actively engaging them in strategies for the sustainable development of their societies.

Key decision-makers are now invited to listen to the needs and concerns of young people in Amazonia so that we can work together towards an inclusive future – one where Indigenous youth can benefit from the opportunities offered by urban society while seeing their cultural heritage thrive.