Every Nation On Earth Is Failing Childrens' Hope For A Livable Planet; WHO, UNICEF, Lancet Report
'Damning New Report Says Every Nation Undermining Children's Hopes for a Livable Planet,' Children's "collective concerns must now be heard, and effective actions taken to prevent the next generation inheriting an irreversibly damaged planet." Common Dreams, Feb. 19, 2020.
A major new report released Wednesday says every nation on the planet is failing children because of the threats to their health and wellbeing from the climate and ecological crises and commercial exploitation. The damming assessment comes from 40 global child and adolescent health experts in "A Future for the World's Children?" The expert commission was convened by the World Health Organization (WHO), UNICEF, and the prestigious medical journal The Lancet.
No single country in the world is adequately protecting children’s health, their environment & their future.
New report from @UNICEF, @WHO and @TheLancet calls for greater investment in child health & development. https://t.co/OOZYn6OU4u #HealthForAll pic.twitter.com/1V8YJJAKSD — United Nations (@UN) February 19, 2020
"This report shows that the world's decision makers are, too often, failing today's children and youth: failing to protect their health, failing to protect their rights, and failing to protect their planet," said WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who urged nations to seize the publication as a "wake-up call." The climate crisis is already unleashing harmful impacts on children around the world, the report notes, and, thanks to the global community's failure to act with the ambition science requires, those impacts are set to worsen. "Under widely used business-as-usual scenarios, there is a 93% chance that global warming will exceed 4°C by the year 2100," says the report.
Runaway warming threatens "devastating health consequences," the report adds, as a result of "disruption of water and ecosystems, rising ocean levels, inundation of coastal cities and small island nations, increased mortality from heatwaves, proliferation of vector-borne disease, and a crisis of malnutrition because of disruption to food production systems."
But it's not only climate crisis undermining children's hopes for a livable planet. As commission co-chair and former Prime Minister of New Zealand Helen Clark, explained, children are under a "commercial assault," which she linked to the obesity epidemic and poor health outcomes. "Children worldwide are also highly exposed to advertising for products nominally for use by adults only, such as alcohol, tobacco and e-cigarettes," the report says, and are victims of "insidious advertising which encourages formula feeding" over breastfeeding. Children's data and their images are also being exploited. And industry self-regulation just won't work, the report adds.
The commission provides the public with an interactive tool to see how individual countries fare on supporting a healthy childhood. The tool includes a "flourishing" ranking, which measures factors like children's health, nutrition, and education. By that assessment, the United States is ranked 39 out of 180 countries...
More, https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/02/19/damning-new-report-says-every-nation-undermining-childrens-hopes-livable-planet
- A new report from a World Health Organization (WHO), UNICEF, & The Lancet commission calls for a new child-centric movement to address the climate & ecological crisis & exploitative marketing that are threatening the world's children.
