Speaker Series 11
Recording
The 11th DevSCA Speaker Series presentation was live-streamed in December 2025. View the live stream recording via the video embedded above.
Abstract
India is among the most climate-vulnerable countries in the world, ranking 7th on the Global Climate Risk Index and 26th on the Children’s Climate Risk Index. With children making up nearly 1/3rd of the country’s population, the climate emergency has become not only an environmental and economic challenge, but a crisis of childhood itself.
Across India’s climate-vulnerable regions, the effects of a changing climate are eroding the foundations on which childhood rests — safety, education, care, and belonging. For many families, repeated climate shocks have deepened poverty and forced impossible choices: migrating to uncertain destinations, marrying off daughters early, or withdrawing children from school and sending them to work. Each of these choices undermines a child’s right to protection, health, and education, pushing the most vulnerable further into cycles of risk and deprivation.
The presentation will share insights from Aangan’s “Childproofing Climate Change” programme in the climate hazard prone Sundarbans region of West Bengal, India. The programme has embedded child protection into local climate governance across 150 village councils by forging partnerships between village councils, communities, and adolescents. More than 18,000 community members and adolescents have been mobilized and empowered to identify child safety risks, report early signs of harm, and ensure that child protection remains a core priority of local governance in climate hazard zones. By expanding the role of village councils from disaster managers to custodians of child protection, the programme has shown how local governance can evolve to safeguard children in the face of climate risks. Through structured dialogue platforms, adolescents, especially girls, now participate directly in discussions on safety, protection, and climate resilience, ensuring that their voices inform community decisions and action.
The presentation will also share key highlights from Aangan’s latest report, “The Vulnerable Child and the Climate Crisis”, which combines ground-level evidence with data to highlight how the climate crisis affects child safety and well-being, and calls for an urgent agenda where child protection is central to all forms of climate action.
Speaker
Atiya Bose
Atiya Bose is the National Director, Child Protection at Aangan, a child protection not-for-profit based in India. For over two decades, she has worked with marginalized populations in India and the United States to advance human rights, with a focus on access to justice and opportunity.
At Aangan, Atiya leads initiatives that engage government systems and legal frameworks to strengthen children’s rights and protection. She champions a community-based prevention model that empowers ‘non-experts’ to identify and prevent serious child harm before it occurs. Her guiding belief is that child protection must be everyone’s business.
Atiya’s policy advocacy has included serving on several government committees, such as the Ministry of Women and Child Development’s Working Group for Child Rights (Twelfth Five-Year Plan), the Juvenile Justice Act Review Committee, and as Convenor of the Expert Committee on Model Homes. She led Aangan’s partnership with UNICEF in 2009 to develop the Standards of Care Tool for children’s institutions in the juvenile justice system.
Her national advocacy and training efforts have focused on youth offending and rehabilitation, and on setting standards of care for children in institutional and alternative care settings. Her research and publications include studies of probation in India and due process within the juvenile justice system.