A/HRC/35/14 fossil fuel-free development. Children had already demonstrated their importance as drivers of change in the climate arena. They were increasingly engaged in strategic litigation to promote more ambitious climate action. In Juliana v. United States, children had sued the Government of the United States of America, alleging various violations of their constitutional rights to life, liberty, property and equal protection as a result of inadequate responses to climate change. In concluding her opening statement, the Director emphasized the importance of the empowerment, education and inclusion of children for more effective climate action. III. Summary of the panel discussion 8. Opening the panel discussion, the moderator — the Deputy Permanent Representative of the Philippines to the United Nations Office and other international organizations in Geneva — emphasized that this discussion on climate change and the rights of the child was deeply important to her Government. As one of the most vulnerable countries to climate change, the Philippines was counting on the effective implementation of the Paris Agreement, including a renewed push towards international cooperation to ensure effective mitigation and adaptation efforts. Climate change would increase both the frequency and the intensity of natural disasters, which were estimated to affect the lives of 250 million people worldwide each year, half of them children. The Philippines alone had recorded 274 disasters from 1995 to 2015, affecting 130 million people. Between 2007 and 2011, 10.8 million students in the Philippines had been affected by disasters, and 8,472 schools had been used as evacuation centres. In mid-October 2015, Typhoon Lando had displaced 1 million people, and had damaged 803 schools which were closed for an average of two weeks. One hundred and thirty-eight schools had been used as evacuation centres. Those disasters had also resulted in damage to socioeconomic and cultural infrastructure, further affecting the basic human rights of children. The Philippines had sought to highlight the link between climate change and the enjoyment of human rights by developing environmental policies that directly addressed and protected children’s rights, such as its Climate Change Act of 2009. The country’s Commission on Human Rights had also recently accepted a petition against 47 “carbon major” companies, which accused them of breaching millions of people’s fundamental rights. The Commission called for an investigation into the human rights implications of climate change and the accountability of major polluters. A. Contributions of the panellists 9. The Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of Viet Nam stated that there were many challenges to addressing the negative impacts of climate change on children’s rights. For developing countries, inadequate resources, weak infrastructure and limited forecasting capacity all made it harder to adapt to and mitigate the impacts of climate change on persons in vulnerable situations, including children. There was insufficient awareness of how climate change affected children’s rights. Over half a billion children — in total, 23 per cent of the world’s children — lived in extremely high flood-occurrence zones. Nearly 160 million children lived in high or extremely high drought severity zones. In Viet Nam, drought and salinization caused by the longest period of El Niño in history had affected more than 500,000 children in the previous year. 10. Child-centred climate policies were needed. The Government of Viet Nam had adopted its National Strategy on Climate Change 2012-2020 and its National Strategy for Natural Disaster Prevention, Response and Mitigation to 2020, both of which underlined the significance of addressing negative climate impacts on children and provided frameworks for provinces to build their own plans. Those plans included comprehensive childcare and protection measures at all stages, and prioritized prevention. Viet Nam was also giving climate change communication a renewed focus in the potential development of a child-centred programme on disaster risk reduction for 2017-2021. 11. The Deputy Minister called for more efforts to improve awareness of climate change and its impacts on children. This required raising climate literacy through various means, 3