A 10-year-old growing up in 2024 is expected to face a lifetime with three times as many floods, five times as many droughts, and 36 times more heatwaves than a 10-year-old in 1970, reveals a 2024 World Bank report.
Titled “Choosing Our Future: Education for Climate Action,” the report shows the world as it is today: battered by the climate crisis. The temperature is rising, icecaps are melting, sea levels are rising, and that’s just the beginning of it all.
What was once a future, far-flung catastrophe is knocking at our doorsteps, and while adults can find ways to cope and help find solutions to address the issue, our children remain particularly vulnerable to the slew of problems the climate crisis brings.
This is what we mean:
From floods to air pollution, the climate crisis doesn’t discriminate between those who are affected and those who aren’t. Source: AFP
How the climate crisis is impacting children’s learning
Disrupting education
Since 2022, 400 million students globally have experienced school closures due to extreme weather, according to the aforementioned World Bank report.
Adding on to that, UNICEF’s “Learning Interrupted: Global Snapshot of Climate-Related School Disruptions in 2024” reported that at least 242 million students, from pre-primary to upper secondary education, experienced school disruptions due to climate-related events in 2024 alone.
It’s worse in low-income countries. There, 18 school days are lost annually on average, compared to 2.4 days in wealthier nations.
For example, the prolonged droughts in Kenya led to significant school closures in 2017. The monsoon rains and flooding in Bangladesh, India, and Nepal from 2017 to 2019 resulted in the closure of 15,000 schools. Meanwhile, estimates show that the 2022 flooding in Pakistan disrupted the schooling of 3.5 million children.
Changing how and what we teach children about the climate
As scientist, inventor, and well-beloved TV personality Bill Nye (yes, the Science Guy), says: “If we were talking about climate change the way we talk about a bunch of other stuff, we’d be getting (things) done.”
The World Bank report found that 60% of its respondents from eight low-income countries believe they didn’t learn enough about climate change in school. However, the good news is that the report also shows that education increases climate awareness by nearly 9% (based on data from 96 countries).
Take how sustainability is taught at Thailand’s Bangkok International Preparatory & Secondary School (Bangkok Prep), for example.
Learning how to preserve our planet starts at a young age at the world’s second school to be accredited with the Green Flag, the highest Eco Schools Award. Here, students like eight-year-old Ava Rose can be one of the leaders of the Eco Team, the school’s student-led initiative focused on environmental sustainability and education within the school and community.
There’s a similar story over in Brunei’s Jerudong International School. There, students are actively involved in projects that benefit the planet and its people. Eoin Kyle, a student from the UK, has set up a fig tree nursery with NGO OneStopBorneoWildlife, deployed artificial coral reefs as part of the global Reef Balls Project, set up one of Brunei’s first-ever plastic recycling stations and kickstarted JIS’s participation in the Borneo Wildlife Ambassadors Programme.
You can never be too prepared when it comes to tackling the consequences of the climate crisis. Source: AFP
Preparing children for the effects of the climate crisis
Teaching children about the climate crisis doesn’t just make them more well-rounded individuals; it prepares them for some of the inevitable too.
The World Bank report states that those with more education exhibit greater disaster preparedness and response, experience reduced adverse effects and recover more quickly from disasters.
Case in point: the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, where children were affected proportionally less due to school drills and preparedness training on what to do in emergencies.
Over in the Land Down Under, primary school students take on the “Bushfire Patrol,” a programme run by the Department of Fire and Emergency Services. Through it, students learn about bushfires, how to identify risks around their homes, and the importance of having a survival plan. The result of this programme spoke for itself: during the 2013 bushfires in Springwood, New South Wales, schools directly in the fire’s path reported zero casualties, thanks to their thorough preparation.
We aren’t just talking about animals losing their habitats due to the climate crisis anymore; humans are facing the same problem too. Source: AFP
Impacting the health and well-being of children
Laura Schifter, who leads Aspen Institute’s This Is Planet Ed initiative, which aims to unlock the power of education as a force for climate action and solutions, puts the consequences of the climate crisis on children plainly:
“This isn’t just something impacting polar bears’ habitats, it’s impacting our habitats too, and that might mean that you can’t have soccer practice at noon on a day in the summer because it’s too hot.”
In China, higher classroom temperatures increased reported health symptoms of dry throat, dry skin, headaches, dizziness, difficulty in thinking and concentrating clearly, fatigue, and decreased well-being and mood. It goes beyond just affecting a student’s health too – exposure to air pollution lowers test scores, as shown with evidence from Brazil, Chile, China, India, Iran, Italy, and the US.
Then, there are the long-term and immensely damaging effects of the climate crisis on a child’s education.
In Mongolia, school-aged children living in severely affected districts during winter storms were less likely to have completed basic education ten years after the shock than those children in less affected districts. In Chile, school closures increased the probability of students dropping out of high school by 49-68%.
Sometimes, the words of children can change the world. Source: AFP
Teaching children to advocate about the climate crisis
According to the World Bank’s report, around 67% of youth across eight low- and middle-income countries believe they have influenced their parents to make environmentally friendly choices.
For example:
- In India, climate-related outreach to children increased their pro-climate behaviour and that of their parents by nearly 13%.
- In Indonesia, an increase in disaster risk knowledge among students led to a significant increase in parents’ attitudes and knowledge sharing.
- In the US, providing middle-school children with climate education led to higher levels of concern about climate change among parents. Effects were strongest among parents who displayed the lowest levels of climate concern before the intervention.
- In the UK, recycling rates increased by 8.6% when students shared lessons in waste education with their parents.
