The continued burning of fossil fuels is closing schools around the world for days, sometimes weeks at a time, and threatening to undermine one of the greatest global gains of recent decades: children’s education.
It’s a glimpse into one of the starkest divides of climate change. Children today are living through many more abnormally hot days in their lifetimes than their grandparents, according to data released Wednesday by Unicef, the United Nations Children’s Fund.
Consider the scale of some recent school closures.
Pakistan closed schools for half its students, that’s 26 million children, for a full week in May, when temperatures were projected to soar to more than 40 degrees Celsius. Bangladesh shuttered schools for half its students during an April heat wave, affecting 33 million children. So too South Sudan in April. The Philippines ordered school closures for two days, when heat reached what the country’s meteorological department called “danger” levels.
And in the United States, heat days prompted school closures or early dismissal in districts from Massachusetts to Colorado during the last school year. They still represent a small share of total school days, though one recent estimate suggests that the numbers are increasing quickly, from about three days a year a few years ago to double that number now, with many more expected by midcentury.
In short, heat waves, exacerbated by the accumulation of planet-heating gases in the atmosphere, are making it harder to learn. Even if schools are open, extremely high temperatures, especially over several hours, affects learning outcomes, including test scores, research shows.
“We are deeply concerned that the number of extreme heat days is going to indirectly lead to learning loss,” Lily Caprani, chief of advocacy for Unicef, said in a telephone interview on Tuesday.
A generation gap
The effects on school closures are a glimpse into the stark generation gap of climate hazards. One in five children around the world are experiencing twice as many days of extreme heat today, compared with their grandparents, according to the Unicef data.
All told, 466 million children worldwide live today in areas experiencing at least twice as many extremely hot days, defined as over 35 degrees Celsius, as their grandparents.
That gap is most stark for children in low- and middle-income countries. Children in 16 countries, including most of the countries in the Sahel, now experience at least 30 additional extremely hot days a year, compared with six decades ago.
Extreme weather hazards, especially unusually high temperatures, are a hallmark of human-made climate change, driven by the burning of coal, oil and gas. Global average temperatures have demonstrably risen over the past 150 years of industrialization. Aggravating that trend this year is a natural cyclical weather phenomenon known asENSO, or the El Niño-Southern Oscillation. The El Niño phase that ended in June helped supersized heat waves, making 2024 a contender for the hottest year on record, alongside 2023.
Location matters
The generation gap is most stark in some of the poorest countries in the world.
Nearly 40 percent of children in Benin and 66 percent of children in Ivory Coast, for instance, are expected to experience twice as many extreme heat days in their lifetimes, compared with their grandparents. That’s also true for two out of three children in Palestine and nearly half of all children in Honduras.
Some wealthy countries are feeling the gap too. An estimated 85 percent of children in France and 76 percent in Greece are due to experience twice as many of those extreme heat days as compared to the 1960s.
Countries in South Asia are outliers, in some sense, according to the data. Unicef analysts point out that they have long had many days with temperatures greater than 35 degrees C, or 95 degrees F, and while India, Pakistan and Bangladesh have all experienced deadly heat waves in recent years, the data doesn’t show a significant increase in their frequency across three generations.
There is no comprehensive global data on school closure days resulting from extreme weather. The decisions are often taken locally and often quickly, based on weather forecasts. Still, based on media reports, the United Nations Secretary General’s office recently estimated that at least 80 million children were out of school in 2024 because of extreme heat alone.
Climate shocks on schooling matter all the more because of the huge progress that’s been made in education in recent decades. School enrollment has grown sharply, and literacy rates have improved as well. That progress seems to be stagnating. For a variety of reasons including war and the coronavirus pandemic, the number of out-of-school children is rising, according to the latest global data.
Around half of those out-of-school children live in the world’s most climate-vulnerable countries, according to a separate analysis by the global charity Save the Children.
Then there’s the flooding
Floods have wreaked havoc on schools as well.
In Brazil, deadly floods amplified by climate change closed schools for weeks, affecting tens of thousands of students. In India, schools closed for days in several parts of the country in July and August, including in the state of Kerala, which were made more intense by human-caused climate change and killed more than 200 people.
An earlier report, based on climate models and published by Save the Children, found that, on average, a child born in 2020 is projected to experience, nearly three times as many river floods and twice as many wildfires over their lifetimes, compared with a person born in 1960.
The generation gap is sharpest, though, when it comes to heat. A child born in 2020 is projected to experience nearly seven times as many heat waves in their lifetime than a person born in 1960, the analysis found.
Children in low- and middle-income countries — parts of the world that are least responsible for the greenhouse gas emissions driving climate change — are projected to feel “the most dangerous impacts,” the analysis found.
Heat adaptation needed in schools
Scientists say that the only way to address rising global temperatures is to pivot away from burning fossil fuels, the main driver of global warming. Even if that were to happen, and there’s little evidence that it’s happening at the speed and scale required, schools need to figure out how to cope with higher temperatures.
The most obvious measure is to fix school buildings to keep heat out of the classroom more effectively, with better insulation, white reflective paint or green plants on rooftops and shade trees on the school’s periphery.
Air-conditioning is a luxury out of reach of most schools. Even in the United States, around half of all school districts need to install or fix their air conditioning systems, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office.