A new report from the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) reveals a startling reality: nearly every child on the planet faces exposure to at least one climate-related danger, with up to 1.8 billion children at risk from droughts and 1.2 billion threatened by extreme heat.
Released on Tuesday, UNICEF’s Children’s Climate Risk Report warns that children are “disproportionately affected” by a growing number of climate-related threats. The agency is urging governments around the world to immediately step up investments in infrastructure, adaptation strategies, and disaster management to better shield children from these dangers.
The report examined a wide range of climate hazards, including air pollution and the threat of diseases spread by insects, such as malaria. Researchers also took into account how well children across the globe can access clean water, healthcare, and social services.
Among the report’s most alarming findings: as many as 1.1 billion children worldwide are simultaneously exposed to at least three overlapping climate risks. UNICEF cautioned that this creates a “dangerous cascade of multiple, overlapping hazards” that could overwhelm governments and social service systems.
Rohini Sampoornam Swaminathan, a UNICEF statistics manager and one of the report’s authors, emphasized the compounding nature of these threats. “It’s not just the exposure to the single hazards like floods or droughts or heat waves and extreme heat that children face, but it is the exposure to multiple hazards,” she said.
The numbers are staggering across multiple categories of risk. Up to 662 million children face danger from tropical storms, while 337 million are at risk from river flooding and 33 million from coastal flooding. Additionally, around 1 billion children — the majority living in Africa — are exposed to malaria.
The report also found that in 2024, climate hazards disrupted the education of 242 million children across 85 countries.
UNICEF identified Somalia, Madagascar, Myanmar, Cambodia, and Pakistan as the nations most vulnerable to climate-related risks. Countries with economies heavily dependent on farming — including Bangladesh, Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Tanzania — are home to the largest numbers of children exposed to drought.
Children living in landlocked countries are also facing what the report calls “disproportionate” risks, including drought, desertification, heat stress, and flash flooding. Nations such as Botswana and Burkina Faso are expected to see worsening water shortages in the years ahead.
