Children are more vulnerable to the effects of climate change than adults. The World Health Organization estimated that 88% of the existing global burden of disease caused by climate change affects children under five years of age. [1] A Lancet review on health and climate change lists children as the worst-affected category by climate change. [2] Children under 14 are 44 percent more likely to die from environmental factors, [3] and those in urban areas are disproportionately impacted by lower air quality and overcrowding. [4]
Children are physically more vulnerable to climate change in all its forms. [5] Climate change affects the physical health of children and their well-being. Prevailing inequalities, between and within countries, determine how climate change impacts children. [6] Children often have no voice in terms of global responses to climate change. [5]
People living in low-income countries experience a higher burden of disease and are less capable of coping with climate change-related threats. [7] Nearly every child in the world is at risk from climate change and pollution, while almost half are at extreme risk. [8]
Climate change impacts children's futures as well as their present. Children do not have the ability to control their environment and are disproportionately affected by the effects of climate change. Climate change-related disasters have impacted children in recent years, particularly children from poor communities. Children are experiencing diseases, flooding, pollution and water scarcity all due to climate change, particularly in countries of the global South. [9]
Unstable climate conditions created by the use of fossil fuels, deforestation and agriculture decrease access to clean water and food, and destroy secure living environments. Consequently, these systems lead to malnutrition, migration, and poor health, which leaves youth particularly vulnerable. [10] Children are more biologically and psychologically susceptible to these conditions compared to adults due to their ongoing developmental growth. Their systems for detoxification, temperature regulation, and immune responses, and their inability to care for themselves leave them far more impacted than adults. Their underdeveloped respiratory systems are at an increased risk from the pollution caused by fossil fuels. [11]
Children's mental health is greatly impacted by the effects of global climate change. Displacement caused by natural disasters such as floods, hurricanes and fires has a negative impact of the mental health conditions of children. 71% of middle school-aged children and 50% of preschool-aged children that experienced Hurricane Katrina experienced post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The World Health Organization has estimated that children under five years of age carry the burden of 88% of global climate change. [12]
Children are affected by the destruction of homes, threats to food security, and loss of family livelihoods brought about by climate change. The effects on children may be exacerbated by social and economic inequality, armed conflict, and health epidemics. [13] Climate change effects fall under two main dimensions: direct or indirect, instant or postponed. The effects on the child's physical health include death and injuries, heat diseases, exposure to environmental toxins, infections, and other illnesses present within warmer temperatures. [14]
Disasters caused by extreme weather result in a significant increase in mental health and learning issues in children, such as PTSD, depression, anxiety, sleep disorders, cognitive deficits, and learning difficulties. [15] Given this example about the post flood period in Pakistan in 2010, 73% of 10- to 19-year-olds displayed high levels of PTSD, where displaced girls were severely impacted. [16]
Other severe occurrences that were detected were distress, grief, and anger; loss of identity; feelings of helplessness and hopelessness; higher rates of suicide; and increased aggression and violence. [17]
Adding to the physical effects, there are the psychological and mental health influences that are threatening to a child's wellbeing. [18]
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Climate change may affect children's health more directly than adults since children's organs and immune systems are still developing and they eat and drink more for their weight. Children's lungs are also more easily damaged by air pollutants since children breathe at a faster rate. [19] Children also face increased risk of pregnancy complications, allergies and asthma, and developmental delays, as well as waterborne diseases. [19]
Children today face three times more wildfires, storms, floods, and droughts than experienced by their grandparents. [19] Extreme events caused by climate change can destroy homes, schools, child-care centers, and other critical infrastructure. [20] Typhoon Haian flattened entire cities and towns on the islands of Leyte and Samar, Philippines. Many child survivors of Typhoon Haian lost their homes and belongings. [21] In 2020, Typhoon Molave caused floods and landslides that destroyed homes, placing an estimated 2.5 million children in Vietnam at risk. It killed nine and displaced more than one million individuals in Vietnam and the Philippines. [22]
Climate events have caused severe damage to lives and livelihoods. [13] Typhoons, storm surges, and other disturbances have resulted in the loss of assets and capital and declines in family income among farmers, fishers, informal sector workers, and small business owners. [23] Families with more children are more vulnerable to catastrophic out-of-pocket health expenses. [23] After Typhoon Parma hit the Philippines, there was a rise in school dropout rates resulting from the loss of family incomes. Children who continued with school sometimes had to go to class without allowances to buy food. [23] In rural areas, fields, gardens, fishponds, crops, fishing boats, and farming equipment have been destroyed, while livestock have been lost, affecting food security for entire communities. [23]
Children are vulnerable to the lack of basic natural resources that can be caused by natural phenomena like droughts and flooding. Significantly, around 160 million children live within extremely high drought regions and over 500 million inhabit areas with extremely high frequencies of flooding. [24] Natural disasters also lead to displacement of families and children. Extreme weather events may also increase rates of physical and mental health insecurities. [25] [26]
On the global level, children are estimated to tolerate 88% of the burden of disease because of climate change. The burden is exacerbated within underprivileged areas already suffering from environmental challenges. These areas see higher rates of various diseases, disabilities, and a higher mortality rate among children. [27] In 2013, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessed that the global temperatures will likely increase by 4.8 °C by 2100 if the current emissions continue to rise. [28] Constant exposure to air pollutants affects birth weights, and leads to a small size for gestational age (SGA), and preterm birth cases. [29] Children exposed to air pollution (ozone, particulate matter, sulfur dioxide, or nitrogen dioxide) tend to suffer from asthma [30] resulting an increase airway oxidative stress and airway inflammation in asthmatic children [31] Air pollution also affects children's neurodevelopment. A comparison of children born before and after the closure of a local coal power plant, found that the children born after the closure had significantly lower cord blood levels of PAH–DNA adducts and higher levels of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), a protein needed in early brain development. [32]
School Strike for Climate (Swedish: Skolstrejk för klimatet), also known variously as Fridays for Future (FFF), Youth for Climate, Climate Strike or Youth Strike for Climate, is an international movement of school students who skip Friday classes to participate in demonstrations to demand action from political leaders to prevent climate change and for the fossil fuel industry to transition to renewable energy.
Publicity and widespread organising began after Swedish pupil Greta Thunberg staged a protest in August 2018 outside of the Swedish Riksdag (parliament), holding a sign that read "Skolstrejk för klimatet" ("School strike for climate"). [33] [34]
A global strike on 15 March 2019 gathered more than one million strikers in 2,200 strikes organised in 125 countries. [35] [36] [37] [38] On 24 May 2019, in the second global strike, 1,600 protests across 150 countries drew hundreds of thousands of strikers. The May protests were timed to coincide with the 2019 European Parliament election. [37] [39] [40] [41]
The 2019 Global Week for Future was a series of 4,500 strikes across over 150 countries, focused around Friday 20 September and Friday 27 September. Likely the largest climate strikes in world history, the 20 September strikes gathered roughly 4 million protesters, many of them schoolchildren, including 1.4 million in Germany. [42] On 27 September, an estimated two million people participated in demonstrations worldwide, including over one million protesters in Italy and several hundred thousand protesters in Canada. [43] [44] [45]Juliana v. United States was dismissed in 2020 on the grounds that the plaintiffs lacked standing to sue, but a new case has been launched on narrower grounds. [46] In the case Duarte Agostinho and Others v. Portugal and Others brought by children and young adults, the European Court of Human Rights asked 33 states to respond by May 2021 with information on how they are trying to limit climate change. [47]
Many schools have integrated climate change within their curriculums. [48] Children who learn about the existence and urgency of global environmental problems, become more aware of and engaged in improving the world's environmental status. [49]
A number of global initiatives and projects had been launched to address the impact and challenges of climate change on children.
Title | Organization(s) | Type | Year |
---|---|---|---|
Global Initiative to Advance Children's Right to a Healthy Environment | United Nations | Initiative | 2019-2021 |
Goal of NCCAP | Kenya's National Climate Change Action Plan | Action plan | 2018-2022 |
Small Grants Programme (SGP) | UNDP, Global Environmental Facility | Grants and projects | 2015 |
Climate Sensitive Humanitarian Assistance | UNICEF | Initiative | 2015 |
United Nations Joint Framework Initiative on Children, Youth and Climate Change | United Nations | Framework initiative | 2013 |
NASA's Climate Kids | NASA | Website | 2010 |
Protecting children's health in a changing environment | World Health Organization | Report | 2010 |
Climate change: Take action now | UNICEF, World YWCA, girls worldwide say, FAO, International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, World Organization of the Scout Movement, The Duke of Edinburgh's Award | Initiative | 2003 |
Youth activism plays a role in reducing the impact of global climate change on children. [50]
Over 4,500 children and young people have participated in annual United Nations Environment Programme Tunza International Conferences since 2004. Children that represent over 100 countries and have covered a multitude of issues concerning climate change, including green jobs and a green economy. [51] Involving youth in conversations around the climate adds a level of diversity and a shared understanding of how climate change affects different communities and age groups. [52]
Pollution is the introduction of contaminants into the natural environment that cause adverse change. Pollution can take the form of any substance or energy. Pollutants, the components of pollution, can be either foreign substances/energies or naturally occurring contaminants.
A fossil fuel is a carbon compound- or hydrocarbon-containing material such as coal, oil, and natural gas, formed naturally in the Earth's crust from the remains of prehistoric organisms, a process that occurs within geological formations. Reservoirs of such compound mixtures can be extracted and burned as a fuel for human consumption to provide heat for direct use, to power heat engines that can propel vehicles, or to generate electricity via steam turbine generators. Some fossil fuels are further refined into derivatives such as kerosene, gasoline and diesel.
Indoor air quality (IAQ) is the air quality within buildings and structures. Poor indoor air quality due to indoor air pollution is known to affect the health, comfort, and well-being of building occupants. It has also been linked to sick building syndrome, respiratory issues, reduced productivity, and impaired learning in schools. Common pollutants of indoor air include: secondhand tobacco smoke, air pollutants from indoor combustion, radon, molds and other allergens, carbon monoxide, volatile organic compounds, legionella and other bacteria, asbestos fibers, carbon dioxide, ozone and particulates. Source control, filtration, and the use of ventilation to dilute contaminants are the primary methods for improving indoor air quality.
Environmental health is the branch of public health concerned with all aspects of the natural and built environment affecting human health. To effectively control factors that may affect health, the requirements that must be met to create a healthy environment must be determined. The major sub-disciplines of environmental health are environmental science, toxicology, environmental epidemiology, and environmental and occupational medicine.
Environmental racism, ecological racism, or ecological apartheid is a form of racism leading to negative environmental outcomes such as landfills, incinerators, and hazardous waste disposal disproportionately impacting communities of color, violating substantive equality. Internationally, it is also associated with extractivism, which places the environmental burdens of mining, oil extraction, and industrial agriculture upon indigenous peoples and poorer nations largely inhabited by people of color.
Today, environmental problems in the Philippines include pollution, mining and logging, deforestation, threats to environmental activists, dynamite fishing, landslides, coastal erosion, biodiversity loss, extinction, global warming and climate change. Due to the paucity of extant documents, a complete history of land use in the archipelago remains unwritten. However, relevant data shows destructive land use increased significantly in the eighteenth century when Spanish colonialism enhanced its extraction of the archipelago's resources for the early modern global market. The Philippines is projected to be one of the most vulnerable countries to the impacts of climate change, which would exacerbate weather extremes. As the Philippines lies on the Pacific Ring of Fire, it is prone to natural disasters, like earthquakes, typhoons, and volcanic eruptions. In 2021, the Philippines ranked the fourth most affected country from "weather-related loss events", partly due to the close proximity of major infrastructure and residential areas to the coast and unreliable government support. One of the most devastating typhoons to hit the archipelago was Typhoon Haiyan, known locally as Yolanda, in 2013 that killed 6,300 people and left 28,689 injured. Congress passed the Clean Air Act of 1999, the Philippine Clean Water Act of 2004, the Climate Change Act of 2009 to address environmental issues. The country is also a signatory to the Paris Agreement. However, research has found that outside of cities, the general public doesn't feel equally informed. Environmental activists and land defenders, consisting mostly of Indigenous communities who have been attempting to bring attention to the environmental issues in the country have been met with violence or murder. As a result, the Philippines has been ranked one of the most dangerous places in the world for environmental activists. It also has one of the highest percentages of climate change denialists in the world.
Environmental issues in Nepal include a number of issues, such as deforestation, climate change, energy and species conservation. Many of these issues have been precipitated by rapid industrialization without major environmental regulation.
Disease burden is the impact of a health problem as measured by financial cost, mortality, morbidity, or other indicators. It is often quantified in terms of quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) or disability-adjusted life years (DALYs). Both of these metrics quantify the number of years lost due to disability (YLDs), sometimes also known as years lost due to disease or years lived with disability/disease. One DALY can be thought of as one year of healthy life lost, and the overall disease burden can be thought of as a measure of the gap between current health status and the ideal health status. According to an article published in The Lancet in June 2015, low back pain and major depressive disorder were among the top ten causes of YLDs and were the cause of more health loss than diabetes, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and asthma combined. The study based on data from 188 countries, considered to be the largest and most detailed analysis to quantify levels, patterns, and trends in ill health and disability, concluded that "the proportion of disability-adjusted life years due to YLDs increased globally from 21.1% in 1990 to 31.2% in 2013." The environmental burden of disease is defined as the number of DALYs that can be attributed to environmental factors. Similarly, the work-related burden of disease is defined as the number of deaths and DALYs that can be attributed to occupational risk factors to human health. These measures allow for comparison of disease burdens, and have also been used to forecast the possible impacts of health interventions. By 2014, DALYs per head were "40% higher in low-income and middle-income regions."
Air pollution is the contamination of air due to the presence of substances called pollutants in the atmosphere that are harmful to the health of humans and other living beings, or cause damage to the climate or to materials. It is also the contamination of the indoor or outdoor environment either by chemical, physical, or biological agents that alters the natural features of the atmosphere. There are many different types of air pollutants, such as gases, particulates and biological molecules. Air pollution can cause diseases, allergies, and even death to humans; it can also cause harm to other living organisms such as animals and crops, and may damage the natural environment or built environment. Air pollution can be caused by both human activities and natural phenomena.
In Nigeria, there has been a major progress in the improvement of health since 1950. Although lower respiratory infections, neonatal disorders and HIV/AIDS have ranked the topmost causes of deaths in Nigeria, in the case of other diseases such as monkeypox, polio, malaria and tuberculosis, progress has been achieved. Among other threats to health are malnutrition, pollution and road traffic accidents. In 2020, Nigeria had the highest number of cases of COVID-19 in Africa.
Air pollution is the introduction of chemicals, particulate matter, or biological materials into the atmosphere, causing harm or discomfort to humans or other living organisms, or damaging ecosystems. Air pollution can cause health problems including, but not limited to, infections, behavioral changes, cancer, organ failure, and premature death. These health effects are not equally distributed across the U.S. population; there are demographic disparities by race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and education. Air pollution can derive from natural sources, or anthropogenic sources. Anthropogenic air pollution has affected the United States since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
Environmental issues are disruptions in the usual function of ecosystems. Further, these issues can be caused by humans or they can be natural. These issues are considered serious when the ecosystem cannot recover in the present situation, and catastrophic if the ecosystem is projected to certainly collapse.
Individual action on climate change is about personal choices that everyone can make to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of their lifestyles. Such personal choices are related to the way people travel, their diet, shopping habits, consumption of goods and services, number of children they have and so on. Individuals can also get active in local and political advocacy work around climate action. People who wish to reduce their carbon footprint, can for example reduce their air travel for holidays, use bicycles instead of cars on a daily basis, eat a plant-based diet, and use consumer products for longer. Avoiding meat and dairy products has been called "the single biggest way" how individuals can reduce their environmental impacts.
Air pollution in India is a serious environmental issue. Of the 30 most polluted cities in the world, 21 were in India in 2019. As per a study based on 2016 data, at least 140 million people in India breathe air that is 10 times or more over the WHO safe limit and 13 of the world's 20 cities with the highest annual levels of air pollution are in India. 51% of the pollution is caused by industrial pollution, 27% by vehicles, 17% by crop burning and 5% by other sources. Air pollution contributes to the premature deaths of 2 million Indians every year. Emissions come from vehicles and industry, whereas in rural areas, much of the pollution stems from biomass burning for cooking and keeping warm. In autumn and spring months, large scale crop residue burning in agriculture fields – a cheaper alternative to mechanical tilling – is a major source of smoke, smog and particulate pollution. India has a low per capita emissions of greenhouse gases but the country as a whole is the third largest greenhouse gas producer after China and the United States. A 2013 study on non-smokers has found that Indians have 30% weaker lung function than Europeans.
The effects of climate change on human health are increasingly well studied and quantified. Rising temperatures and changes in weather patterns are increasing the severity of heat waves, extreme weather and other causes of illness, injury or death. Heat waves and extreme weather events have a big impact on health both directly and indirectly. When people are exposed to higher temperatures for longer time periods they might experience heat illness and heat-related death.
In Turkey, air pollution is the most lethal of the nation's environmental issues, with almost everyone across the country exposed to more than World Health Organization guidelines. Over 30,000 people die each year from air pollution-related illnesses; over 8% of the country's deaths. Air pollution is particularly damaging to children's health. Researchers estimate that reducing air pollution to World Health Organization limits would save seven times the number of lives that were lost in traffic accidents in 2017.
The climate movement is a global social movement focused on pressuring governments and industry to take action addressing the causes and impacts of climate change. Environmental non-profit organizations have engaged in significant climate activism since the late 1980s and early 1990s, as they sought to influence the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Climate activism has become increasingly prominent over time, gaining significant momentum during the 2009 Copenhagen Summit and particularly following the signing of the Paris Agreement in 2016.
Climate change is having serious impacts in the Philippines such as increased frequency and severity of natural disasters, sea level rise, extreme rainfall, resource shortages, and environmental degradation. All of these impacts together have greatly affected the Philippines' agriculture, water, infrastructure, human health, and coastal ecosystems and they are projected to continue having devastating damages to the economy and society of the Philippines.
One aspect of energy poverty is lack of access to clean, modern fuels and technologies for cooking. As of 2020, more than 2.6 billion people in developing countries routinely cook with fuels such as wood, animal dung, coal, or kerosene. Burning these types of fuels in open fires or traditional stoves causes harmful household air pollution, resulting in an estimated 3.8 million deaths annually according to the World Health Organization (WHO), and contributes to various health, socio-economic, and environmental problems.
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