UN Report: Climate Crisis Is a Child Rights Crisis

UNICEF Executive Director Henrietta Fore says a new UNICEF report gives for the first time “a complete picture of where and how children are vulnerable to climate change.” She adds in her statement that the “picture is almost unimaginably dire.”

The Climate Crisis Is a Child Rights Crisis: Introducing the Children’s Climate Risk Index, published Friday, is “the first comprehensive analysis of climate risk from a child’s perspective,” according to the U.N.’s children's agency. In the report, countries are ranked on children’s exposure to climate and environmental hazards.  The report says about half of the world’s nearly 2.2 billion children live in one of the countries identified as “extremely high-risk" where they also are facing “a high vulnerability due to inadequate essential services, such as water and sanitation, healthcare and education.” The risk index includes children’s exposure to coastal flooding, riverine flooding, cyclones, vector-borne diseases, lead pollution, heatwaves, water scarcity and “exceedingly high levels of air pollution.” Children living in the Central African Republic, Chad, Nigeria, Guinea, and Guinea-Bissau are the young people most at risk, according to the report.