Children’s Vulnerability to Climate Change: Health, Nutrition, and Development Risks

Climate change is no longer a distant threat-it’s a present reality disproportionately affecting the world’s most vulnerable population: children. Nearly half of all children globally, approximately one billion, live in countries at extremely high risk of climate impacts. From rising temperatures to extreme weather events, the environmental crisis is reshaping childhood itself, threatening health, nutrition, education, and development in ways that will echo across generations.

Why children face unique climate vulnerabilities 🔗

Children are not simply small adults when it comes to climate risks. Their developing bodies, immature immune systems, and dependence on caregivers make them uniquely susceptible to environmental hazards. UNICEF’s 2024 report highlights that physiological, psychosocial, and behavioral factors combine to render children more vulnerable than adults to climate-related health impacts.

Consider temperature regulation: infants cannot sweat effectively to cool their bodies during extreme heat. According to UNICEF’s Deputy Executive Director Kitty van der Heijden, babies lack the same topology of sweat glands as adults, so rather than cooling down through sweating, extreme heat can lead to organ failure, including kidney failure. This biological limitation becomes increasingly dangerous as heatwaves grow more frequent, prolonged, and intense.

Additionally, children breathe faster than adults-approximately twice as fast in newborns. This means they inhale more pollutants per kilogram of body weight. When wildfires rage or fossil fuel pollution fills the air, children absorb toxic particles at alarming rates, creating lifelong impacts on their developing lungs and even affecting brain development during pregnancy.

Direct threats to physical safety 🔗

Extreme weather events pose immediate physical dangers to children. Floods, cyclones, droughts, and storms can cause injuries, displacement, and death. During disasters, children face heightened risks of drowning, separation from caregivers, and exposure to hazardous conditions. Weather-related disasters have displaced at least 43 million children over the past six years, destroying critical infrastructure and contaminating water supplies.

The impacts begin even before birth. Heat stress during pregnancy increases the risk of preterm labor, resulting in babies born with low birth weights and compromised health from the very start of life. Prolonged droughts and heatwaves also affect breast milk production-both its quantity and quality-jeopardizing the earliest and most critical nutrition for infants.

Heat exposure and its cascading effects 🔗

Heatwaves represent the leading cause of weather and climate-related deaths globally. Young children and infants are particularly vulnerable because extreme heat affects their sleep quality, which subsequently impacts mental health and contributes to poorer cognitive and physical development. Current data shows that one in three children are already highly exposed to heatwaves, increasing their risk of congenital defects and heat-related illnesses leading to chronic lifelong issues.

Rising disease susceptibility 🔗

Climate change is fundamentally altering the landscape of infectious diseases, with children bearing a disproportionate burden. Research from the World Health Organization indicates that malaria transmission is shifting both polewards and to higher altitudes, while mosquito vectors for dengue and chikungunya continue expanding their geographic range.

Vector-borne diseases are particularly sensitive to temperature and rainfall changes. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has warned that dengue, malaria, Lyme disease, and West Nile virus infections will increase in coming decades unless significant intervention occurs. Dengue cases have surged dramatically-from half a million in 2000 to over 4.2 million reported cases by late 2023, and continue rising.

The waterborne disease connection 🔗

Flooding and altered rainfall patterns create breeding grounds for mosquitoes while simultaneously contaminating drinking water sources. This double threat increases rates of cholera, diarrhea, and other waterborne diseases. Children infected with dengue are more likely than adults to face severe and long-lasting symptoms, and the disease can be fatal. Meanwhile, approximately 400,000 children under age five die annually from diseases associated with inadequate water, sanitation, and hygiene-conditions worsened by climate disruption.

Children’s developing immune systems make them less capable of fighting infections effectively. Combined with climate-driven changes in disease ecology, this biological vulnerability translates into higher morbidity and mortality rates among young populations.

Nutritional challenges and stunted futures 🔗

Food security is fundamentally linked to climate stability. As droughts intensify and crop yields decline, malnutrition rates among children rise. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s 2024 Goalkeepers Report projects that climate change could push an additional 40 million children into stunting and 28 million more into wasting between 2024 and 2050.

These are not abstract statistics. Stunting-chronic malnutrition that prevents children from reaching their full physical and cognitive potential-creates permanent damage. The World Bank reports that worsening climate conditions, such as droughts, raise the likelihood of both wasting and underweight by almost 50 percent. In 2024, approximately 150 million children under five remained too short for their age due to chronic malnutrition, while 43 million suffered from acute wasting.

The economic cost of undernourishment 🔗

The economic implications are staggering. Undernutrition costs at least $3 trillion annually in global productivity losses because malnutrition physically and cognitively limits people’s capabilities throughout their lives. For low-income countries, these losses range from 3 to 16 percent of GDP-equivalent to a permanent recession. In some regions of Africa, staple crop yields are declining by 30 to 50 percent, occurring precisely when youth populations are growing.

If children do not receive adequate nutrients during their first five years, the cognitive disabilities that result are permanent. This creates a devastating cycle where climate-affected communities lose human capital needed for economic development and climate adaptation.

Educational disruption and lost childhoods 🔗

Climate change is dismantling educational systems worldwide. UNICEF analysis reveals that at least 242 million students in 85 countries had their schooling disrupted by extreme climate events in 2024 alone. Heatwaves, tropical cyclones, storms, floods, and droughts closed schools and interrupted learning across every region.

South Asia was the most affected region, with 128 million students facing climate-related school disruptions in 2024. Heatwaves proved the predominant hazard, with over 118 million students affected in April alone across Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, the Philippines, and Thailand. The World Bank reports that low-income countries lose an average of 18 school days annually to climate disruptions, compared to just 2.4 days in wealthier nations.

Displacement and its secondary effects 🔗

When families are forced to relocate due to climate disasters, children’s education often becomes an afterthought. Research from the Migration Policy Institute shows that displaced youth see their educational prospects suffer significantly. Following Pakistan’s devastating 2022 floods, more than 3.5 million children had their education disrupted, with over 2 million still unable to reach schools months later as facilities were used as shelters for displaced families.

In fragile contexts, prolonged school closures make it less likely for students to return to classrooms at all. Girls face heightened risks during and after disasters, including increased rates of dropping out, child marriage, and gender-based violence. In Africa, where over 107 million children are already out of school, climate disruptions in 2024 put an additional 20 million at risk of permanent dropout.

Child development index decline 🔗

The cumulative effect of climate impacts-disease, malnutrition, displacement, educational disruption-manifests in declining child development indicators across heavily affected regions. UNICEF’s Children’s Climate Risk Index demonstrates how exposure to climate hazards combines with existing vulnerabilities to create compounding crises.

Children living in extremely high-risk countries face multiple, overlapping climate and environmental hazards that interact with social, political, and health challenges. These overlapping hazards marginalize communities and increase inequality, making certain parts of the world increasingly precarious for child development. The index shows that children in the most vulnerable regions experience exposure to cyclones, heatwaves, flooding, and drought simultaneously, with access to essential services determining their resilience.

As UNICEF’s comprehensive report states, unless mitigation efforts are accelerated and adaptation scaled up urgently, current and future generations will continue bearing the brunt of climate change, affecting their survival, lifelong health, and wellbeing. The true measure of success in addressing climate change lies not solely in temperature metrics, but in the tangible reduction of child mortality and morbidity attributable to its impacts.

A generation’s burden, not their creation 🔗

Perhaps most troubling is the fundamental injustice at the heart of this crisis. Children have contributed nothing to climate change, yet they suffer its worst consequences. An estimated 88 percent of the global health burden associated with climate change falls on children under five years of age. A child born today will experience three times more floods, five times more droughts, and 36 times more heatwaves over their lifetime compared to a child born in 1970.

The path forward requires placing children at the center of climate action. This means adapting health, nutrition, education, and social protection systems to integrate climate considerations. It demands investment in climate-resilient infrastructure, from schools that can withstand extreme weather to healthcare systems prepared for shifting disease patterns. And it requires ambitious emissions reductions to prevent the worst projected impacts from materializing.

What do you think? How can communities better protect children from climate impacts in immediate, practical ways? And what responsibility do current generations have to ensure that children inherit a livable planet rather than a crisis they did not create?

References

1. https://www.unicef.org/reports/threat-to-progress
2. https://www.weforum.org/stories/2024/09/children-climate-change-impact-health/
3. https://ceh.unicef.org/climate-change
4. https://www.who.int/news/item/22-05-2024-new-research-flags-the-urgent-need-for-research-and-evidence-on-the-impact-of-climate-change-on-neglected-tropical-diseases-and-malaria
5. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10768291/
6. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10872406/
7. https://www.gatesfoundation.org/goalkeepers/report/2024-report/
8. https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/nutrition/overview
9. https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/nearly-quarter-billion-childrens-schooling-was-disrupted-climate-crises-2024-unicef
10. https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2024/09/04/education-for-climate-action-400m-students-affected-climate-related-school-closures
11. https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/climate-displacement-education
12. https://ceh.unicef.org/events-and-resources/knowledge-library/learning-interrupted-global-snapshot-climate-related-school
13. https://data.unicef.org/resources/childrens-climate-risk-index-report/
14. https://www.unicefusa.org/media-hub/reports/Threat-to-Progress-Climate-Change-Child-Health