Droughts will become so common that children born from last year will confront them four to five times in their lifetimes compared to adults born in 1960, a new report suggests.
Although scientists are still cautious about linking human-caused climate change to the frequent droughts, building evidence now supports this connection.
Currently, 11 counties, mostly in Northeastern, are facing severe drought. Families are being forced to walk dozens of kilometres in search of water and food for themselves and their livestock.
The research, released yesterday by the non-profit Save the Children, shows that as the planet warms, the heat in many places in Africa may become unbearable.
It projects that today's newborns will experience an average of 6.8 times as many heatwaves in their lifetimes than a person born in 1960.
“Increased exposure to heatwaves is by far the most striking and severe climate-related change facing children compared to previous generations,” Save the Children says in the report.
“During heatwaves, children are at a high risk of electrolyte imbalance, fever, respiratory disease, and kidney disease.”
The charity is now using the findings to demand urgent climate action from rich states ahead of the climate change conference in the UK next month.
“Actions should include scaled-up financing for adaptation and support to the most-affected low- and middle-income countries already working to manage the impacts of climate change,” the report, Born Into The Climate Crisis, says.
It projects a cruel future for children, especially in Africa, if nothing is done to mitigate the effects of climate change.
For Born Into The Climate Crisis, Save the Children worked with an international team of climate researchers led by the Vrije Universiteit Brussels, which calculated the impact of a range of extreme climate-related events on children born in 2020 compared to people born in 1960.
The findings painted a harrowing picture of devastating wildfires, river floods, droughts, crop failures and suffocating heatwaves for this and future generations.
“Our report shows the terrifying reality for this generation of Kenyan children and future ones if we don’t act now,” the country director of the NGO, Yvonne Arunga said.
“Children in poorer counties will be the worst affected, but every child will feel the ravaging impact of this climate emergency."
She noted that people in dry parts of Kenya are already struggling to cope with the impacts of climate change, which she said has triggered harsher and more frequent droughts.
“Sadly, in food crises like this one, children are always the most vulnerable – without enough to eat and the right nutritional balance, children can’t develop as they should and are at high risk of acute malnutrition,” she said.
To draw their conclusions, the climate researchers led by the Vrije Universiteit Brussels used five sources of data.
These include the newly-generated simulations of climate impacts across six extreme event categories, the United Nations World Population Prospects, and the global mean temperature scenarios compiled in support of the IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 degrees Celcius.
Others are population reconstructions and projections, and country-scale cohort size data provided by the Wittgenstein Centre’s Human Capital Data Explorer.
Edited by A.N
