The United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child recently adopted General Comment 26 on children’s right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment. This comment emphasizes how climate change and environmental degradation jeopardize the rights of children in general. It calls for urgent action to protect those who are most vulnerable.
What is climate change and how does it affect children’s early years?
Climate change is the long-term shifts in temperature and weather patterns that make extreme weather events and disasters more frequent and intense. As a recent IDB publication explains, the Latin America and the Caribbean region is the second most prone to natural disasters—like storms, hurricanes, or droughts—and poor households are particularly exposed to their consequences. This puts the region’s children in an especially vulnerable predicament.
Studies on Latin America and the Caribbean have documented how floods, tropical storms, and extreme temperatures impact pregnancies, negatively affect the health of newborns, and undermine nutrition and academic performance in early childhood. Other studies have demonstrated that early exposure to climate shocks has consequences for vocabulary acquisition and academic performance in contexts as disparate as Peru and India. At the global level, the World Health Organization has declared that 1.7 million children under age five die from environmental pollution each year.
These climate-related consequences for children are driven by several factors, like diminished household income, water or food scarcities, higher disease rates, or health services that are disrupted or used less. The climate crisis also puts children at risk of emotional and physical violence or being abandoned. This can happen in several ways: some children are separated from their families and left unprotected during natural disasters or the displacements they cause, while others face violence within their homes as stressful situations erode their caregivers’ self-control.
Measures to protect our youngest from the impacts of climate change
In the wake of extreme climate events, it is often difficult to reach households to help families meet their children’s needs. These episodes can also cut off access to medical facilities or damage their infrastructure.
One way to prepare for this type of crisis is to design hybrid care protocols to use when in-person services are impossible. Ecuador, for example, uses the hybrid model it developed during the pandemic in emergency situations like natural disasters or conflicts. The country is currently preparing for the El Niño warming event, a phenomenon forecasted for the second half of 2023 that triggers powerful storms and floods, among other serious consequences.
In addition to contingency plans that ensure continued service during and after shocks, resilient infrastructure is also key when new centers are built to expand early childhood. Countries should perform climate risk analyses as part of their strategy for building out more centers, and adopt resilient construction standards. It is especially important to make sure that centers are adapted to higher temperatures, because evidence shows that exposure to heat can affect concentration and learning.
Countries also need to identify the geographical areas where families with vulnerable children live and where harmful climate events can occur, in order to plan cash transfers in advance to help them through the shocks and safeguard children’s well-being. To execute this strategy, countries need more evidence, along with maps and geo-localized data.
The pace of climate change is picking up, and so too should our efforts to protect children to ensure the quality of their childhood and future.
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