Delegates from one of the oldest early childhood education organizations in the world adopted a declaration in a conference room in Bangkok on a July afternoon in 2024 that did something truly unique: it informed governments that the childhood crisis and the climate crisis are not two distinct crises. They are identical.
The 76th OMEP World Assembly Declaration, officially known as the Declaration on Promoting a UN Decade for Early Childhood Care and Education, came at a time when advocates for education and environmental organizations had been occupying adjacent but largely distinct spaces for years. Emissions, policy goals, and systemic change were the main concerns of climate groups. Early childhood advocates fought for financing, access, and acknowledgment that a child’s first eight years of life shape much of their future. Both groups recognized that children were in pain. Neither had discovered a long-term solution to cooperate. The conversation’s grammar was altered by the Bangkok Declaration.
Although it is an ecological emergency, the document reframes climate change as a child rights crisis. That framing is more important than it first appears. Typhoons, droughts, and floods directly disrupt the conditions that early childhood development depends on, such as stable shelter, consistent nutrition, safety, and the presence of caregivers, and nearly one billion children live in areas designated as high climate risk. As a result, the two crises are already functionally one. That was made clear in the declaration. The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child’s General Comment 26 provided environmental organizations and education advocates with a common legal and ethical basis to stand on.
There’s a feeling that the timing was perfect in a way it hadn’t been before as you watch this develop over the months since Bangkok. The disjointed approaches to child welfare—health and education are handled independently, and social protection and environmental planning are carried out independently—have caused frustration in both communities. This is explicitly addressed in the OMEP declaration, which calls on governments and international organizations to put an end to this division and form multisectoral alliances that approach early childhood development as a system rather than a collection of discrete initiatives.
With regional structures in Africa, Asia Pacific, Europe, Latin America, North America, and the Caribbean, OMEP has been involved in early childhood education since 1948. However, the Bangkok Declaration’s scope is unprecedented in its recent history. The main demand is the official adoption of a UN Decade for Early Childhood Care and Education, a structured international framework that would unify funding, harmonize national policies, and establish accountability mechanisms—all of which are currently lacking in any coherent form. This push might actually catch on. It might also be added to a long list of well-meaning international statements that result in consensus in conference rooms and little action in national budgets.
The research basis for this specific declaration is what gives it some durability. OMEP has been working on education for sustainable development for more than ten years. A groundbreaking study conducted in 28 countries with over 44,000 children revealed that young children have a greater awareness of the environment than adults usually believe, and that teaching sustainability in early childhood settings results in quantifiable changes in children’s perspectives on their responsibility to the natural world. The data did not garner much attention.
However, it influenced the Bangkok Declaration and provides advocates with a tangible argument when governments question why early childhood education should be discussed in relation to climate change.
Another layer was added by the Bologna World Assembly in 2025, which adopted a declaration on Foundational Learning, Creativity, and Culture in Early Childhood that clearly connects early learning to environmental responsibility and cultural identity. It’s an extension of what Bangkok initiated and a sign that OMEP isn’t considering the climate declaration to be a one-time event. Declaration by declaration, the organization is constructing a framework that views children not only as victims of global crises but also as active stakeholders in determining the response, according to the 2024 document.
It’s difficult to ignore how OMEP’s work differs from most institutional climate discourse in that it uses language of child agency—children as participants, as capable thinkers, and as people whose voices matter in climate discussions. It’s still unclear if that language results in the structural changes required by the declaration. However, the dialogue has begun, and the two communities that must participate are at last, if tentatively, in the same room.
