Children from marginalized farming families of Seven States of India between the age group of 12 to 18 united with our commitment to protecting the only earth we have to make it a livable one for every human being, especially for us as well future children, and concerned about protecting the same.

‘Children Movement for Climate Justice – CMCJ’ stems out of the Rights Based Approach practiced by the “Palar Panchayat” under the wider support of Child Focused Community Development (CFCD) intervention initiated by Kindernothilfe (KNH), Germany and Resource Centre for Participatory Development Studies, (RCPDS) Madurai. CMCJ started in the year 2008 in four blocks of Virudunagar District (using the existing Palar Panchayats as their hub) and emerged as National movement with link with other National and International networks. Ever since we heard of the climate change and its scientific base, there is a grave fear that haunts our minds about our future. We do understand that our ground water reserves are depleting, draught animals which our families once used for agriculture are being wiped off, traditional food crop varieties and medicinal plants are vanishing. We are sure this trend, if continued, will create a clear vacuum of our future.

CMCJ aims to create more equitable and just use of Natural Resources to reassure that Universal Child Right encompass the Ecological rights for children and climate justice has to be rendered by all stakeholders. Since this has emerged from the Palar Panchayat, which is a democratic good governance platform for children the movement reiterate the need for social political, economic and legal systems to enable the realization of children’s’ rights. Children rights violations eventually end up in the vicious cycle of indifferent attitude of the adult towards mainstreaming child rights as corridor to welfare nation.

We, members of Children Movement for Climate justice- CMCJ, strongly feel that WE NEED TO and WE CAN DO SOMETHING TO SAVE OUR ONLY PLANET EARTH by mustering our strength and respond to the situation in a organized manner. We realize that we should not wait for others to do something about this; instead each one of us should immediately act to address the issue. The decision we make today, for sure, will have significant impact on our future lives, lest we feel that we will experience the consequences. Unfortunately there is not much space created for children to express themselves and are often unable to access services that they rightfully own.
Since then we gradually evolved various strategies to address the issue of climate justice by bring out simple child friendly write ups, lobby, advocacy, direct interventions, children actions, direct eco friendly learning experiments and strengthening the membership base. Currently we have grown to a size of 10000 plus members in the Movement. This concern was operationalised through series of debates, discussions among our peers at the community level, school centres, child clubs and Palar panchayats (children parliament) and evolved as structured association called “Children movement for Climate Justice”. We do have our senior members who have become our focal point for further contacts – Jone Raj in Tamilnadu, Ananthalakshmi in Andhra and Karnataka, Jibbon in Odisha.