Session 1: Why Should the Early Years Sector Move Towards Climate Action?
Capita and This is Planet Ed (the Aspen Institute) have co-convened the Early Years Climate Action Task Force to draft the first-ever U.S. Early Years Climate Action Plan. The plan will recommend ways the country can help young children, ages zero to 8, flourish in the face of climate change. It will be published in late 2023.
Climate change is a direct threat to our children’s health, safety, and ability to flourish. Yet experts in child development and climate have been slow to join forces to address this crisis.We are proud to bring together experts from both worlds to share, learn, and unite their efforts.
This listening session (the first of six) considered the array of effects of climate change on young children, along with reasons the early years sector should move toward climate action. After presentations from five expert panelists, the session opened up for questions.
The experts:
Aaron Bernstein, Boston Children's Hospital
Laurence Chandy, UNICEF
Luz Drada, Moms Clean Air Force
Joan Lombardi, Georgetown Collaborative on Global Children's Issues
Jacqueline Patterson, Chisholm Legacy Project
Climate change will affect every child on the planet.
Today’s children will experience many more extreme climate-related events than their parents or grandparents did. Bernstein and Chandy cited studies estimating the increases. For instance, a child born in 2020 is probably four times more likely to experience a life-threatening heatwave, fire, flood, drought, or food shortage than a child born in 1960. UNICEF found that 99% of children are exposed to climate-related hazards. More than two-thirds of the world’s children are exposed to at least three of these hazards.
Some children will suffer more than others. Climate change has inequitable impacts on different populations.
Black, Latino, and other communities of color, other marginalized communities, and low-income countries face disproportionate threats from climate change. Panelists covered a host of reasons why.
For instance, Patterson discussed how Black people are more likely to live near oil and gas facilities, coal-fired power plants, and incinerators; are more likely to live in flood plains; and are more likely to experience food and housing insecurity. Black people are 40% more likely than other groups to live in places where extreme temperature driven by climate change will raise mortality rates. She noted the roles of segregation, redlining, and the overall dehumanization of Black people in these disproportionate risks. These inequities multiply the risks children already face because of their developing bodies.
“Adverse events on steroids”: Climate change causes a huge range of health, social, and economic problems. Young children are particularly vulnerable to both immediate and lifelong effects.
Lombardi noted that environmental issues, including climate change, affect the trajectory of child development. Health, nutrition, access to early learning, even parents’ ability to be responsive to their children’s needs are affected. Drada discussed the impacts of climate change on maternal health and pregnancy outcomes, including a greater risk of preterm birth. Patterson noted evidence on the connections between urban heat and maternal mortality—even the ability to survive childbirth may be affected by climate change.
Adverse events are always part of childhood, but climate change is “like adverse events on steroids,” in Bernstein’s words. For instance, children who are displaced from their homes—perhaps by fire or flood, or by utility bills their parents can no longer afford—suffer not only from the immediate shock, but also from health effects later in life, including cancer and heart disease. Bernstein explained how this trauma also shapes children’s developing brains, often in ways that encourage addiction, mental health disorders, or other tendencies to emerge.
Chandy also discussed the devastating impacts of insecurity on young children when their brains are developing, “the time in life when timing matters most.” He argued for investing in the early years to help children build resilience to the increasing number of shocks they will face during this particularly vulnerable time in their lives.
The climate crisis exposes how little we value children. They are least responsible for the crisis but will suffer its worst consequences.
Panelists spoke eloquently and passionately about the injustice we are inflicting on our youngest citizens. As Lombardi said, “The impacts of air pollution, drought, heat, lack of access to clean water—young children bear the biggest burden from climate change despite the fact that they have the least responsibility for causing it.”
Many noted that “we’ve measured but not acted,” as Bernstein put it. We have the data on how climate change harms children. But we haven’t mustered the will to act on that data. “Children don’t vote, they don’t have money, so when push comes to shove, they’re discounted.”
Climate and early childhood advocates are natural allies. The early years sector must be involved in the fight against climate change, but we must acknowledge that it is in crisis.
Climate change is an early childhood issue because, as Lombardi said, it’s an issue of children’s rights.
Climate change will increasingly throw obstacles and traumas into children’s path. As a result, building children’s resilience and adaptability is now an essential part of the early childhood sector’s mission to support healthy development. Drada pointed out that providers need comprehensive education on climate change and its effects on children’s physical and emotional health. In addition, climate change threatens equity and justice, also critical parts of the early childhood mission. “We’re part of the solution,” according to Lombardi. “We have to be involved.”
But the imperative to fight climate change comes at a difficult time for the early childhood field, which is already dealing with COVID, underinvestment, and other stresses. The capacity of the field is severely strained. But, Lombardi argued, that’s precisely why the field needs to be involved. This is the time for early childhood professionals to build partnerships with advocates from the climate field and other areas, uniting around their shared commitment to a better future for coming generations.
Climate change requires a new way of thinking about social policy and economic development.
Climate change compels us to radically rethink our strategies on social policy and economic development. Bernstein stressed that we can no longer create policies geared only to adults, assuming that benefits will trickle down to children. We must put children at the center, from the start.
We are now in an era of more frequent and intense shocks, many driven by climate change. As a result, Chandy argued, insecurity must replace deprivation as the focus of advocates and policy makers.
“Slowly waking up to climate reality”: signs of progress are emerging.
Chandy believes that the world is “slowly waking up to climate reality.” An increasing number of countries are trying to act on climate, although recognition of the centrality of children is lagging. For instance, UNICEF recently surveyed countries implementing the Paris climate accords. It found that about two-thirds of the countries referenced children in their policies, although only a minority of those policies are truly child-sensitive.
But some countries have taken bold steps to protect children from the impacts of climate change. India’s risk-management plans for disasters put children’s needs at the center. Mongolia has created social assistance programs that can flex in response to shocks. And in Indonesia, community health workers are teaching families about changing disease vectors.
“When you look around the world you can see powerful examples that the U.S. can learn from and emulate,” Chandy says. In fact, the country has just made an unprecedented investment in clean energy, infrastructure, and other strategies to tackle climate change through the Inflation Reduction Act.