Climate change is threatening childhood as we know it
Joe Waters and Katherine Prince argue that the dangers of climate change are particularly acute for children across the American South.
The following commentary was published by the (Charleston, SC) Post and Courier on November 25, 2021.
Lower 9th Ward, New Orleans. Photo by John Middelkoop on Unsplash.
Young children everywhere need the same things: safe housing, nutritious food, high-quality medical care and learning opportunities, and strong social and emotional support. Climate change threatens the ability of families and communities to provide these foundations.
The dangers are particularly acute across the American South. A recent analysis by Capita helps us see why. We looked at 2020 census data and climate change vulnerability, discovering ominous trends. For instance, a report from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Trust for America’s Health finds that Southern states like Florida, Arkansas, Mississippi, Kentucky, and South Carolina are most vulnerable to the public health effects of climate change--and also the least prepared. According to the CDC, cities across the Southeast are experiencing more and longer summer heat waves, which exacerbate poor air quality and limit the ability of children to play outside.
Indeed, the full impact of climate change on kids is becoming clearer and more alarming. Children’s developing brains and growing bodies make them particularly vulnerable. But the impacts stretch beyond their physical health. The very experience of childhood is at risk. With the increasing frequency and severity of hurricanes, tornadoes, and other extreme weather events, young children are at risk of severe trauma during the period of life when neural connections in the brain are forming and susceptible to disruption. For example, in a study cited in David Wallace-Wells’s The Uninhabitable Earth, soldiers returning from war were estimated to suffer PTSD at a rate between 11 and 31 percent. Compare those findings of another study Wallace-Wells cites that thirty-two weeks after Hurricane Andrew hit Florida in 1992: more than half of children surveyed had moderate PTSD. In the storm’s high-impact areas, 70 percent of children scored in the moderate to severe range twenty-one months after the storm. This trauma can have lifelong impacts on learning, health, and the ability to form meaningful relationships.
At the same time, the population of children in this most vulnerable region of the United States has increased more than in any other region. In other words, the South has the highest percentage of young people in the country, and those kids face the greatest risk from the impacts of climate change.
Given this heightened risk, the systems that serve children in the American South--health care, education, foster care, and others--have a heightened obligation to respond. They can take four key actions, as outlined by the World Health Organization, to prepare for the continuing impacts of climate change in the region.
First, systems leaders must understand the extent of climate-related vulnerabilities facing child-serving systems. As Alex Steffen has written, the planetary crisis is not an issue, but a change in era. The entirety of our human world--including health, education, foster care, and other systems--was built for another era altogether. Preparing for the future must begin with assessing the vulnerabilities of those systems: schools built in flood-prone areas; extreme weather events that will cause new mental health crises for children; and schools, child care centers, playgrounds, and parks in heat islands.
Second, building climate resilience requires cooperation across governments and sectors. State, city, and county governments, public health systems and private health care providers, school districts, parks and recreation departments, and more will need to collaborate to build resilience across systems and governments capable of meeting this challenge.
Third, systems should reserve some portion of their overall budgets to build resilience. While politicians often sell climate adaptation as a net jobs creator, resilience is costly. It is expensive to update air conditioning for schools or to plant trees in urban areas so children can play outside. Governments in the South should start building these future costs into their budget planning now. Reducing children’s overall vulnerability by making investments to address poverty, hunger, and poor educational outcomes will increase resilience overall.
Fourth, systems should develop new metrics of children’s climate resilience. It is not enough to track children’s exposure and vulnerability to climate impacts. These metrics must also track their resilience. For instance, they might explore the role of early relational health as a buffer to climate shocks.
As we continue our transition into the “era of planetary crisis,” ensuring that children across the South flourish will become increasingly difficult unless governments begin to build their resilience now.
Joe Waters is co-founder and CEO of Capita. Katherine Prince is vice president of Strategic Foresight at KnowledgeWorks.