Sitting with Climate Change's Direct Threats to Children
December 15, 2022
I’ll be honest: I was surprised how much climate-enhanced environmental factors hurt young kids. I always assumed that exposure to air pollution and high heat wasn’t good for them, of course, but if you had asked me to rank concern about the environment next to concern about, say, access to quality early care and education, I would’ve put the environment a rather distant second.
I was wrong.
While I’ve been sitting with the research on kids and climate for some time now, two important pieces came out in the past couple of weeks. They both drove home just how much we need to broaden understanding of the direct and causal ways in which climate injures the health and well-being of children – and, in turn, their personal development, educational attainment, health outcomes, and eventual livelihoods.
The first was a new study written up in The Washington Post:
“Young children living in neighborhoods with high rates of poverty are more likely to be exposed to many different air pollutants, and that can harm their development during early childhood, according to a study published Wednesday. The children’s increased exposure to air toxins during infancy can reduce reading and math abilities and cause them to fall behind…
While there are other issues that can affect school preparedness for early-age children, the study found that exposure to air pollutants, when isolated, accounted for a third of the impact when compared with other concerns."
When I think about the challenges of growing up in poverty, I think about the risks of unstable housing, exposure to violence, chaotic homes, lack of ECE access, and so on. I’ve certainly considered the environmental harms of lead poisoning. But I don’t usually think about air quality! Of course, no one – not me, not the study authors – is suggesting those other factors aren’t deep influences on child well-being. They are. (To be crystal clear: I’m talking about bringing environmental concerns higher, not deprioritizing other concerns)
But one-third is a huge portion of what can influence cognitive development and yet is hardly considered by our policy frameworks and interventions! What’s more, the study looked at children in Chicago from a 2001 birth year cohort, so it is likely understating the problem given that climate change nowadays causes more extreme and longer pollution-trapping heat waves, to say nothing of the portion of the country regularly blanketed by wildfire smoke.
The second article that caught my eye was a piece in Time, “What Climate Change Is Already Doing to Children's Brains” by Frederica Perera, a public health expert and author of the new book Children’s Health and the Peril of Climate Change. (Be sure to check out the recording of an event Capita recently did with Dr. Perera!). Perera writes – and I’m going to quote her at length because it’s important:
“During the last two decades, my own research and that of many other scientists has revealed the extraordinary vulnerability of children to climate change and air pollution, both largely due to fossil fuel burning. By studying pregnant women and their children, we have shown that climate change and air pollution are causing serious harm to children’s health and developing brains, even while they are in the womb. This is nothing short of a public health emergency and especially for children who, because of their skin color or family income, are hit the hardest. But policy, technological, and individual solutions exist, and there is much we can do—and should do.
The understanding that climate change and air pollution affect the developing brain has grown exponentially in the last 20 years. Research has now linked prenatal as well as postnatal air pollution exposure to reduced IQ and other cognitive problems, developmental disorders such as ADHD and autism, depression and anxiety, and even structural changes in the brains of children. Research has also shown how climate-related displacement results in disruption of education and mental health problems such as post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, and depression in children. These conditions often persist, affecting health and brain function in adulthood. They also add to the list of harms that have been more widely recognized as being related to climate change and air pollution: heat-related illness, drowning and physical trauma from severe storms and floods, premature birth and low birth weight, asthma, and other respiratory diseases.
…Of growing concern is the possible cumulative—greater than additive—effect on mental health from concurrent exposure to environmental and climate ‘shocks’ such as severe drought, flooding, water scarcity, and high levels of air pollution. An estimated 1 in 3 children in the world live in regions where at least four of these shocks overlap. We know that adverse experiences in childhood increase the risk of depression and anxiety disorders both in the short-term and in the adult years.”
What’s important about both the Chicago study and Perera’s perspective is that neither is hopeless. They should give us, as Perera says, a sense of purpose and direction as opposed to a sense of despair. We know how to improve air quality in places where young children spend a great deal of time. We know how to reduce heat island effects. We know how to maximize protection against and preparation for extreme weather.
To be sure, there is still much research & development to be done, to say nothing of getting these resilience-building elements into public policy and supported by the public sector – that’s the whole idea behind the philanthropic fund I’m working on! Philanthropy can and should kick-start this work, and soon, as it will take months and years to widely implement the needed interventions. But as James Baldwin wrote in a very different context, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” The good news about the effects of climate change on young children is that they can – and urgently must – be changed. The first step is to face the magnitude and directness of the threats.
-Elliot
P.S. If you followed the news coming out of COP27 in Sharm El-Sheik, Egypt, you may be interested in my blog post about why the new loss & damages fund needs to put children front and center. If you follow my child care work, you may be interested in an article I wrote for Deseret News about the massive impending child care cliff.
I’d love to hear what you think about any of this! Please feel free to email me at elliot@capita.org with thoughts, recommendations, or reactions!