(2017) 1 African Human Rights Yearbook 27 Children in Africa come from different cultural, religious, ethnic and social backgrounds among many other identity markers, which means that they have many-varied lived experiences, which may compound or decrease their vulnerability to climate change. The category of ‘children’ also includes everyone below the age of 18 years, which means that the category includes persons with vastly different capacities, e.g. a three-year-old and fifteen-year-old would have completely different lived experiences and capacities to cope with climate stressors. Despite this, and as identified above, the category of ‘children’ is still a useful delimitation, because what children share is a physical, psychological and emotional immaturity as well as the fact that they are at the beginning of their lives, with many years of their lives ahead, which makes their collective vulnerability of significant concern. In the case of girl children, their particular vulnerability to the effects of climate change result from the intersectionality of their vulnerabilities based on sex, age and in the African context, often also religious and socio-economic circumstances. A first instance in which children are particularly affected as a result of a changing climate, is the right to education. In rural communities where families depend on subsistence farming or another form of reliance on natural resources for sustenance, the consequences of variations in rainfall patterns, soil salinisation and shrinking water resources may be dire. The Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change in its fifth Assessment Report of 2014 indicate that major crops in Africa, such as maize, millet and sorghum, are highly sensitive to changes in temperature, and crop losses across Sub-Saharan Africa could average 22 per cent, and up to 30 per cent in South Africa by the year 2050.14 Apart from food security which affects all people, in Sub-Saharan Africa currently agriculture accounts for ‘65 percent of Africa’s labour force’.15 This may result in children being taken out of school (a) because parents no longer have the means to pay for education, (b) to work on the family farm in an attempt to increase crop output or to find alternative employment as a means of supplementing the family income, (c) to take over the household and food production duties from parents who may migrate to the cities in search of better employment opportunities or (d) as water and fuel becomes less accessible, to perform water and fuel sourcing duties from further locations.16 Most 14 CDKN (n 4 above) 20. World Bank ‘Fact Sheet: The World Bank and agriculture in Africa’ http:// web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/COUNTRIES/AFRICAEXT/0,,contentMDK: 21935583~pagePK:146736~piPK:146830~theSitePK:258644,00.html (accessed 12 October 2017). 16 Children in a Changing Climate Coalition ‘Child-centred adaptation: Realising children’s rights in a changing climate’ (2015) 24; OC Ruppel ‘Climate change and human vulnerability in Africa’ in OC Ruppel & K Ruppel-Schlichting (eds) Environmental law and policy in Namibia 284; PLAN International ‘We stand as one: children, young people and climate change’ (2015) 28-31; UNICEF (n 11 above) 13. 15