A/HRC/43/30 5. Marginalized children, especially from low-income, indigenous or otherwise excluded communities, are at greatest risk, highlighting the importance of nondiscrimination, equality and accountability. Ensuring a clean, healthy and sustainable environment is fundamental to realizing children’s rights now and for future generations, and requires prioritizing children’s best interests in all environmental management and climate action decisions and eliminating childhood exposure to pollution and toxic substances. 6. Much of the environmental burden of disease on children is completely preventable through decisive and urgent climate action, pollution mitigation, safe disposal of toxic substances and chemical waste, disclosure of information and improved water, sanitation and hygiene. Despite increasing knowledge of the health and development risks of climate change, environmental degradation and exposure to toxins and pollution, children continue not to be protected through effective laws, policies and actions. Environmental protection policies and business actions frequently fail to prioritize children’s best interests and persistent gaps in legislation, or weak enforcement where relevant laws exist, render pathways for accountability and redress limited or non-existent. 7. Children’s specific vulnerability and social status impose a heightened duty on Governments and policymakers to make sustained efforts to effectively protect children from environmental harm, strengthen their capacities, consider their views and competences and provide access to effective and timely remedies.11 8. Businesses and certain industries cause environmental harm to children’s rights by producing hazardous products and toxic waste, air, land and water pollution, contributing to climate change and destroying natural ecosystems. 12 The fundamental role of a healthy environment in realizing children’s rights must be fully recognized and integrated in legal frameworks and policy actions, and States obligations and businesses’ responsibilities relating to environmental impacts on children clarified and implemented effectively, by prioritizing children’s best interests in all actions affecting them. 9. Children worldwide, particularly girls, have become key advocates for environmental rights and are exercising their right to participate in defending their right to a healthy and sustainable environment by demanding immediate climate action. Governments should urgently respond to this global child- and youth-led movement, which has resulted in, among other initiatives, the submission of a communication by 16 children to the Committee on the Rights of the Child against five major emitters (Argentina, Brazil, France, Germany and Turkey) for their failure to protect children’s health and well-being in their responses to climate change.13 In another case, Juliana et al. v. United States et al., 21 young people have filed a constitutional lawsuit asserting that actions causing climate change have violated their rights to life, liberty and property. 10. It is only in healthy environments that children can develop, grow and enjoy their rights. As set out in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the realization of children’s rights through an approach that addresses all dimensions of a healthy environment is crucial to achieving human rights, well-being and a sustainable planet. II. Effects of environmental degradation on children A. Climate change 11. The Committee on the Rights of the Child has identified climate change as one of the biggest threats to children’s health and is urging States to place it at the centre of 11 12 13 www.ohchr.org/Documents/HRBodies/CRC/Discussions/2016/DGDoutcomereport-May2017.pdf. Committee on the Rights of the Child, general comment No. 16 (2013) on State obligations regarding the impact of the business sector on children’s rights, para. 19. https://childrenvsclimatecrisis.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/2019.09.23-CRC-communicationSacchi-et-al-v.-Argentina-et-al-Redacted.pdf. 3