Extreme Weather Events Disrupt Education for 242 Million Children Globally: What's at Stake?

Extreme Weather Conditions Disrupt Education for 242 Million Children in 2024
According to a new report from UNICEF released on January 24, extreme weather conditions in 2024 have resulted in at least 242 million children across 85 countries being affected in terms of schooling. Extreme climatic disasters such as heatwaves, cyclones, and flooding greatly affected children's education, while low-income countries in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa are the most affected.

Global Disruptions in Education
Around the world, about one in seven school-age children lost at least one day of school due to extreme weather events in 2024. A report that cited that this was because of increased learning loss and dropout in countries vulnerable to the infrastructure and under-resourced, has ended.

Torrential rains and flooding in Italy have stopped schooling for more than 900,000 children near the end of the year in Europe. In Spain, storms caused a general closure of schools due to overwhelming floods. In Asia and Africa, widespread flooding and cyclones severely disrupted schools and communities.

Heatwaves also became a major cause of school closures in 2024. It emerged as the warmest year ever, with global temperature having surpassed 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial level. Just one example can be cited when it unleashed a one-week heatwave in several parts of the Middle East and Asia in April, extending its impact to Gaza and the Philippines as temperatures exceeded 40 degrees Celsius (104°F). Within one month, it even shut down schools for over 118 million children.

Low-income countries bore a disproportionate burden from the climate-related disruption of education in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, according to UNICEF. Here, even resources that were very scarce were amplified by bad infrastructure in natural disasters that could easily affect children's access to education.

GEM Stand-alone Report, July 2024, specifically mentioned the vulnerability of disadvantaged groups: Children from poor backgrounds are those who, when schools close for climate-related reasons, face challenges in re-entry into school, thus allowing them to experience higher dropout rates and long-term learning losses.

Regional Highlights
Europe: Torrents of rains force a shut-down of thousands of schools in Italy and Spain due to heavy floods. Deadly floods, however, had forced a shut-down in millions more in Europe itself.
Asia: Nearly 118 million children's school-going schedule has been affected owing to one intense week of a heat wave witnessed in April 2024 through vast portions of the Middle East and Southeast Asia. The worst sufferer was India, Philippines, and Gaza.
Africa: Cyclones and flooding cases increased with horrible forces that brought down schools in Sub-Saharan Africa from already marginalized positions to the extreme periphery.
Educational Challenges During the Climate Crisis
This has heightened the situation of the climate crisis in education systems worldwide, regularly making schools close down due to climate-related happenings. In poor nations, schools are mostly inadequately prepared for extreme weather conditions since they do not have any reinforced structures and air-conditioned buildings during heat waves.

The GEM report shows that this often interference creates higher loss in learning and drops out rates that devastate future outcomes for children. If education and climate change adaptation investment will not be furthered, then climate change will boost its influence in education.

Great Need for Action
Facts require urgent global action in response to the impacts of climate change on education. These include proposals by UNICEF and other agencies such as climate-resilient school infrastructure, increased funding for education in vulnerable regions, and policies that reduce the impact of extreme weather events on children's learning.

This calls for protecting the systems of education between governments and other international decision-making bodies with an intensification in the climate crisis. In that connection, an investment in resilient infrastructure, early warning systems, and disaster preparedness can immensely aid in minimizing disruptions in learning and exercising a child's right to education.