Climate change and children’s health: Participation, rhetoric and human rights

Chatzinikola, Asteropi 2026. Climate change and children’s health: Participation, rhetoric and human rights. PhD Thesis, Cardiff University. Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

Climate change poses unprecedented challenges to child health. The effects of climate change are expected to have a severe impact on children’s physical, mental, and social well-being. Yet children face a history of exclusion from participating in decision-making affecting their health and from being considered as a distinct group of rights holders with specific needs and vulnerabilities. This has started to change with children’s driven involvement in the youth climate movement and climate change litigation. This is a positive development towards reiterating children’s status as actors rather than passive recipients of decisions. But climate litigation poses unique challenges in theorising and observing child participation. Due to its nature, climate change is a disruptive phenomenon that challenges existing practices and norms. The fact that children rarely participate directly in climate litigation coupled with a lack of empirical evidence on children’s experiences, pose additional hurdles. The present work investigates child participation and health considering principles of philosophy and law. It first examines the application of two interconnected Articles under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC): Article 12 on the right to be heard and Article 24 on the right to health. It subsequently explores the meaning of participation in the philosophical theories of Plato and Arendt. It examines how the notion of participation in the Platonic and Arendtian tradition could support and inform the application of Article 12 CRC in the climate context and beyond. Relying on the Socratic dialectic as a core interviewing method, the study conducts interviews with the participants in a climate-related case it considers prototypical: the communication in Sacchi v. Argentina. The study concludes by theorising child participation as a performance, where children as actors share their stories of climate harm.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Status:	Unpublished
Schools:	Schools > Law
Subjects:	K Law > K Law (General)
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Children’s rights, Participation, Health, UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, Climate, Litigation, Philosophy, Plato, Arendt, Human rights, Performance, Rhetoric
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	2 July 2026
Last Modified:	02 Jul 2026 14:49
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/187872

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