Where are children most vulnerable to the impact of climate change, both now and in the future?
The Issue
All countries are facing the challenges of climate change and a degrading natural environment. Some countries, and children within those countries, are more at risk of the impacts of climate change than others. Moreover, some countries have in place mechanisms that make them more resilient and ready to address the negative effects of climate change.
Why Does it Matter?
The climate crisis is leading to another crisis altogether – a child’s rights crisis. Not only must UNICEF continue to focus their efforts today on building a better world for every child, every day, everywhere, but they must also look to mitigate against threats in the future that compromise any progress made so far.
Sustainable Development Goal 13 seeks for countries to take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts. From massive wildfires to droughts, from hurricanes to floods, climate change is affecting people everywhere. But some people and some groups, particularly children, are affected more than others due to their vulnerabilities. Where, and on what, should countries be focusing their efforts? What effect will certain interventions have on children’s risk to climate change? How can countries build their capacity and resilience to support the most vulnerable? What data is needed to be able to understand climate change risk to children better?
Our Project
Leveraging existing work carried out by UNICEF to build a Climate Change Vulnerability Index (CCVI), which uses past and current data to assess climate hazards, child wellbeing and macro resilience, we would like to be able to predict where children are going to be most vulnerable to the impact of climate change. The aim of this project is to provide UNICEF with the information required to target their climate change response and resilience investments to best serve the most vulnerable children of today and tomorrow.
The Child Climate Risk Index (CCRI) adopts the IPPC standard Risk model (IPCC, 2014) and as such will aim to capture child specific exposure to: climate-related and environmental hazards, the degree to which children are vulnerable to these hazards, and how resilient and ready countries are to address the effects of climate and environmental change both now and in 2050, at a global level.
Vulnerability is made up of both sensitivity to hazards and adaptive capacity to respond to hazards. As children are focused in sensitivity, having little or no agency for adaptation, the index will focus on sensitivity and consider adaptive capacity as a comparative context by which to assess the relationship between the two.
Our approach will take account of the latest available data as well as providing strong links with UNICEF programming. This will include the use of climate and socio-economic context reflected in the SSP/RCP to 2050.
The selected indicators reflect these domains and, more specifically, the risks associated with children of diverse communities exposure to climate change hazards. One of the key aims of this work is to identify a Risk index that is specifically sensitive to the experience of children, and in so doing shows not only that children are uniquely at risk to environmental hazards but that this risk is not simply a fixed proportion of overall community or geographical risk but a semi-independent variable that provides unique information of deep relevance to the mitigation of child risk from environmental drivers.
The Index is built from a hazard and exposure index which includes such variables as temperature, flood, disease prevalence and drought amongst others in combination with a child relevant Vulnerability index which considers child health, food security and education amongst others. In combination these make up the CCCRI for 2020. Comparison of the CCRI 2020 with independent external poverty and social welfare indicators derived from World Bank and IIASA that project to 2050 allows the CCRI 2020 to be projected forwards to 2050 in the form of a statistical estimate.
The resulting CCRI 2020 map can be compared to current HDI 2020 to determine where child climate risk deviates from more standard measures of poverty, providing a context for understanding where climate is uniquely a threat to children and their welfare.