Elsewhere in the world, covered mudslide The Japanese town of Atami in Shizuoka Prefecture, the entire village is flooded in torrential rains in West Germany, and a destroyed forest fire The Canadian town of Lytton.
Some of these disasters pose real risks of physical harm to children. Handling high temperatures and heat waves: Pregnant people, infants, and young children are all more susceptible to overheating than older children and most adults because their bodies don’t cool as well and stay that way. Studies have even shown that a unborn child exposed to extreme heat in the womb can lead to negative health outcomes later in life, such as lower birth weight.
For older children, as the number of hot days increases with global warming, they are at greater risk of being exposed to the heat in non-air-conditioned schools and during outdoor activities, such as sports.
This latest IPCC review also discusses how disasters, including acute exposure to a disaster and subsequent long-term recovery from a disaster, can damage mental health. and the happiness of everyone, especially children.
After the great flood occurred in Great Britain in 2000For instance, researchers tracked the health of people whose homes were flooded and not flooded, according to Kristie Ebi from the University of Washington, who helped co-write the chapter on the health report. “There were very clear differences in anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder” between the different groups, she explains.
The headline disasters, becoming more frequent and more intense, are perhaps the most obvious signs that 1.1 degrees Celsius of warming, relative to pre-industrial times, is decreasing. But there are more climate impacts here, as the new report details it fully.
For example, even before my daughter was born, two species that became extinct and climate change played a role: the Golden Toad in Costa Rica in 1990, as well as in Australia Bramble Spicy melomys, a type of rodent, in 2016. And a third species is close to extinction: the Australian lemuroid marsupial. And there have been more local extinctions: Climate-related local extinctions were detected in 47% of the 976 animal and plant species examined.
The impact of climate change on existing food problems and high prices could be a “combination,” said Rachel Bezner Kerr of Cornell University, co-author of the IPCC chapter on food systems. lethal to children”. countries, especially low-income households, especially in rural areas. ”
“So we have a study that shows that between 1993 and 2012, increased temperatures were significantly associated with child stunting in 30 countries in Africa,” she added. According to the World Health Organization, children are too thin for their height.
Malnutrition is already a serious problem among children in a number of developing countries, and it will only become more serious in a warmer world if no concrete action is taken to avoid the possibility of malnutrition. that ability.
How Hot Will It Be In My Daughter’s Lifetime?
When world leaders signed the Paris climate agreement in 2016, they agreed to work together to limit global warming to below 2 degrees Celsius (about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), ideally 1.5 degrees Celsius. poison.
Now, scientists predict that it is “more likely than not” that the average global temperature will surpass 1.5 degrees Celsius in the coming decades, no matter what. It could happen in 2030, when my daughter is 10 years old.
That’s why the next few years are so important. How quickly people cut their greenhouse gas emissions this decade will help determine how far the 1.5-degree threshold is exceeded and what happens next. Will the temperatures continue to rise or will they start to drop?
Furthermore, what people do now to begin adapting to the warming already here and limiting in the future will minimize the damage associated with the crisis.
For example, by 2030, it is possible that countries will have taken on the bold goal of protecting at least 30% of the planet’s land and water. If so, that could have many benefits, from keeping some species alive to strengthening natural ecosystems that protect against flooding, helping to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and even doing so. more than that. And if China shifts to providing semi-decarbonized electricity for homes and vehicles by 2030, the report says, the country can be expected to avert 55,000-69,000 deaths that year.
It is also possible that urban areas could see a 2.7-fold increase in exposure to floods by 2030 compared with 2000, or an additional 48,000 children under the age of 15 globally could die from diarrhea, or The number of people living in extreme poverty could increase by 122 million, or an extreme drought in the Amazon would accelerate the migration of indigenous and traditional communities to cities, or fresh water would be lost. severe restrictions on some small islands.
By 2040, when my daughter is 20, the glacier on Africa’s highest mountain, Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, could disappear.
