The late James P. Grant, who served as Director of UNICEF from 1980 to 1995, spoke of “the silent emergency,” embodied in the “daily tragedy of millions of children caught in the relentless downward spiral of poverty, population, and environmental degradation.”1 Were he alive today, he would undoubtedly have placed climate change, a silent emergency of enormous consequence, at the center of this vicious spiral. Indeed, the profound disruption of the earth's ecosystems has replaced environmental degradation as the operative term.
