Considering the challenges humanity is facing and looking objectively at difficulties in finding appropriate solutions to address them, activism and civic engagement should be considered the springboard to promote long lasting and sustainable changes.

Yet, even with governments taking the lead with unprecedented resolve and determination, humanity won't be able to tackle issues such as climate warming, biodiversity degradation, air pollution and pervasive plastics, and ensure the planet's survivability unless we engage the people. In particular, it is going to be paramount to find successful strategies to involve children, young citizens under 17 years of age.

An interdisciplinary, transnational research being conducted by the University College Cork, Ireland, is trying to find some answers to effective grassroots level children's participation. The Youth Climate Justice project that is being conducted in Canada, Ireland, South Africa and Nepal aims to better understand the dynamics and determinants for meaningful children's participation for climate justice.

We can see plenty of exercises engaging and involving children and young people in implementing Agenda 2030, the overarching framework that, if implemented, would save humanity. Yet the vast majority of them are simply exercises in tokenism. This is a problem at the heart of the work that the Youth Climate Justice team at UCC is confronting and challenging.

The theoretical framework of the project is based on an academic article entitled "Climate Action and the UNCRC: A 'Postpaternalist' World Where Children Claim Their Own Rights", published at the end of September last year by the team of academicians and practitioners at UCC. The article offers an interesting, even daring, criticism of how the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) is being applied so far.

According to the paper, the CRC has been promoted in such a way that some of the most fundamental rights of children enshrined in it, for example, the right to be heard (Article 12); the right to have their best interests considered (Article 3); the right to freedom from discrimination (Article 2); and the right to protest (Article 15) are only pursued nominally or paternalistically.

Another challenge compounding the issue is that very often children from marginalised and disadvantaged communities, like children from indigenous communities, are left behind. The paper calls for a different way of implementing the Convention, through a so called "post-paternalistic" approach.

It is crucial to no longer consider children as passive actors who are involved just for the sake of doing something with no impact. The team at UCC calls for a new reckoning, according to which, children, in a post-paternalistic approach, should be rightly considered as "human rights leaders on a global scale". That's why we need a massive infusion of resources to spearhead bottom up, participatory processes that can better train children and youths to act as leaders committed to climate justice.

To have a better sense of the ambitious scope of the UCC's work, I spoke with one of the researchers of the project. Nabin Maharjan, a native of Patan, is a Ph.D. holder from Brock University in Canada with a thesis entitled "Understanding Nepali Youth's Community Participation in the Post-Disaster Context'. Now a Post-Doctoral Researcher at UCC, Maharjan guided me through the theoretical and practical framework of the initiative.

I was told that Nepal's part of the research is going to be conducted using the Participatory Action Research approach to create a space for children and young people to work as co-inquirers where the research is not on children but with children. The project is in partnership with Jyapu Samaj-Yala, a not-for-profit organisation led by members of the Jyapu community, which for a century has been marginalised and discriminated by other Newari castes.

Making effort to involve children from such groups is paramount because activism and civic engagement should be co-led by all youths, regardless of their backgrounds. The project is now in the process of selecting 36 indigenous children divided into two groups: those aged 8 to 12 years and those aged between 13 to 17 years. They will be engaged in a series of workshops in which they will use arts and photography to better understand the relevance of environmental and climate crises to their lives.

"It's about leveraging children' rights in a way that was initially unimaginable for adults," said Maharjan. They might even, according to Maharjan, come up with propositions and ideas, but it will be entirely up to them because they will be really in charge of the whole exercise.

Throughout their inquiry processes, they will try to answer several questions. "How are children/youth leading on climate, and what does that mean for their place in society and their relationship with adults? What does this recent phenomenon of child/youth climate action mean for the framework of international children's rights?" he explained.

At the end of the project, in few months from now, their final works and analysis will be displayed in Patan Durbar Square, where the young climate leaders will share their own views and also interact with some adults.

Climate justice can be a powerful tool to re-think the way children's rights have been pursued so far. Concludes Maharjan: "The way children/young people are disrupting the traditional norms of passive recipient and setting climate action agenda around the globe either by organising climate actions or filing lawsuits against government agencies, we are hopeful that at the end of these country specific-case studies, we will be able to review the human rights concepts to children/youth connecting to the present realities. The participatory research with children and young people not only helps us to understand their perceptions about their rights and climate change, but also allows us to work with them to explore their grassroots actions or participation at the local level."