Failing to limit global warming to 1.5°C would condemn 83 per cent of today’s five-year olds to dangerous levels of extreme heat in their lifetimes, new research published today has found.
The report, which has been published by Save the Children and Vrije Universiteit Brussel, maps out the impact of the climate crisis on children by simulating climate outcomes across several temperature extremes.
The world is currently on track for 2.7°C of warming, according to the latest policies and commitments. Such a scenario is expected to result in 100 million of the children born in 2020 – 83 per cent of the total born that year – having to face unprecedented lifetime exposure to extreme heatwaves, which disrupt access to food and clean water and force schools to close.
Hitting the 1.5°C Paris Agreement target would reduce this number to 62 million, protecting 38 million children from dangerous heatwaves, and safeguarding their mental and physical development, the researchers found.
Other climate outcomes modelled by researchers include cyclones, crop failures, river floods, wildfires and droughts.
For children born in 2020, holding global temperatures to a 1.5°C rise rather than 2.7°C by 2100 would spare eight million children from unprecedented exposure to crop failures; five million from unprecedented exposure to river floods; and five million from unprecedented exposure to tropical cyclones.
Limiting the global temperatures rise to 1.5°C rather than 2.7°C would also spare two million children from unprecedented exposure to droughts and 1.5 million children from unprecedented exposure to wildfires.
Shruti Agarwal, senior climate adviser at Save the Children, added that the new research shows how it is children who are “forced to bear the brunt of a crisis they are not responsible for”.
“This new research shows there is still hope, but only if we act urgently and ambitiously to rapidly limit warming temperatures to 1.5°C, and truly put children front and centre of our response to climate change at every level,” she said.
Martina Bogado Duffner, senior climate advocacy adviser at Save the Children International, told The Independent that current pressures on international aid budgets are set to increase the likelihood of negative impacts.
“At a time when nearly 200 million children worldwide rely on lifesaving assistance, and the climate crisis is jeopardising their rights and futures, some of the world’s wealthiest countries are turning their backs on children and cutting their aid budgets,” she said.
“These sudden funding cuts are putting children in life threatening situations while climate extremes like dangerous heat, cyclones and crop failures are getting more frequent and severe.
Many programmes supporting lower-income countries with both climate mitigation and adaptation are already being impacted by aid cut decisions, she added.
With global temperatures already having increased by an average of 1.3°C compared to pre-industrial levels, extreme climate outcomes are already impacting millions of children globally.
Zain, a 13-year-old from rural Pakistan, recently described the daily struggles faced by his community due to climate and heat-related challenges.
“When we wake up in the morning and we feel hot. When we go to school, there aren’t any fans or water there. There is no solar and electricity is scarce. When we come back, we faint because of the intense heat,” he said. “When we come back home, we often faint from the intense heat or suffer from diarrhoea, stomach aches, and dizziness.”
At the time of Zain’s interview, temperatures in the region were over 50°C, during a heatwave that killed hundreds of people. But his region has also been ravaged by flooding, including floods in 2022 that left thousands of people displaced and 1,700 dead.
Those same floods forced Zain and his family from his village after it destroyed their home, leaving them for days without proper shelter or food for days.
“Previously, our hut was often blown away in storms, and we would get drenched in the rain. We had to work hard to rebuild it, only for it to be blown away again,” he said.
The family have been provided with a new home by Save the Children, which is resilient to the climate threats they face in the area, with a bamboo roof keeps them cool and raised flooring to protect them from flooding.
But the charity warns in its new report that such support is under threat from “worryingly low” climate finance flows. The authors add that a headline global climate finance target of $300 billion for low-income countries by 2035, which was agreed to at the COP29 climate conference last year, “falls far short of climate finance needs”.
“Mainstreaming children’s rights and needs in decision-making on financial flows is equally important to address their distinct and heightened vulnerabilities,” the authors continue.
The first ever child-focused review of international climate finance, which was published in 2023, shows, only 2.4 per cent of the funding from major climate funds is being allocated to projects that include child-responsive activities.
“The climate finance goal agreed to at COP29 last year failed children and their families bearing the brunt of climate change,” Save the Children’s Martina Bogado Duffner told The Independent.
“We have always said that climate finance needs to be additional to what is already coming from traditional aid budgets. With both funding streams now shrinking, children’s rights and futures are at risk without urgent and ambitious action.”
This story is part of The Independent’s Rethinking Global Aid series
