(CU)_In August 2018, Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg organised a youth-led global climate strike movement outside the Swedish Parliament through three weeks leading up to the country’s general election. Although she launched this protest alone, she was soon joined by others and their movement eventually sparked an international awakening, with students and activists uniting around the globe to protest outside their local parliaments and city halls.
Now, exactly three years since Thunberg’s first school strike, the UN agency responsible for the protection of children’s rights published a report which found that almost half the children worldwide are at an “extremely high risk” from the impacts of the climate crisis. According to the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), almost every child across the globe is at risk of at least one extreme climate conditions, such as droughts, floods, heat waves and cyclones. Nevertheless, about 1 billion children living in 33 countries, including India, the Philippines and much of sub-Saharan Africa, are facing three or four of these conditions simultaneously.
Nick Rees, one of the report’s authors, noted that this study was the first of its kind to combine effects of climate change with other elements of child vulnerability, such as poverty and lack of access to education, healthcare and even clean water. “It essentially [shows] the likelihood of a child’s ability to survive climate change,” he said.
According to the executive director of the UN agency, Henrietta Fore, the situation is “unimaginably dire”, as Children are more vulnerable to this global crisis in comparison to adults. “For the first time, [this report gives] a complete picture of where and how children are vulnerable to climate change, and that picture is almost unimaginably dire. Virtually no child’s life will be unaffected,” she said.
”Children are uniquely vulnerable to climate hazards. Compared to adults, children require more food and water per unit of body weight and are less able to survive extreme weather events,” Fore added.
Sharing her views in this regard, Thunberg expressed her disappointment regarding the global community’s failure to treat this matter as an emergency. “We are not just victims, we are also leading the fight. But [the world] is still not treating the climate crisis like an emergency. We are still just talking and greenwashing things instead of taking real action. But, on the other hand, there have been many millions of people mobilised, especially young people, and that is a very important step in the right direction,” the young activist said.
