Addressing the Impact of Climate Change on Young Children

Our work

We are working to put young children and families at the center of the world’s climate change strategies, funding and response plans. We focus on bringing together climate change and healthy human development in the earliest years of life. 

Climate change is not a separate issue, it is the context we are all living in today. The impacts have a profound effect on the health and flourishing of young children, from birth to 8 years old, making them one of the most affected groups across society.  

Climate change poses a multifaceted threat to young children and families globally. The World Health Organization estimates that nearly 90% of the disease burden associated with climate change is borne by children under five. 

Extreme weather events, including heatwaves, floods, droughts, and storms, disproportionately impact children's health and development, with projections indicating a significant rise in deadly heat stress exposure. Food and water insecurity escalate, leading to increased malnutrition and stunting, particularly in marginalized communities. Climate-related diseases, such as malaria and cholera, become more prevalent, posing heightened risks to vulnerable young children. Mental health implications arise from disaster trauma and community displacement, for child and caregiver, potentially impacting long-term health.

But climate change does not merely impact the future today’s children will inherit; it is a problem and an opportunity here and now. 

• Every structure in our society that serves families and children needs to be reimagined in this new context - from health and human services and education, to infrastructure and urban design. 

• Leveraging climate adaptation finance to support policies and programs that build resilience in the earliest years of life is a cost-effective investment in the long-term adaptive capacity of communities and societies.

• Cities around the globe have the opportunity to put young children and families at the center of their climate adaptation plans. 

Healthy resilient children and families are the foundation of healthy, resilient communities. Ensuring child-centered action on climate change will create cleaner air and water, more green space and shade, healthier buildings, communities better prepared for extreme weather events, and much more: all benefits that ripple out far beyond the individual child and family.

Promoting safe, stable, and nurturing relationships in the early years of human development, fostering community and systems-level resilience, and building strong social connections around families with young children  will be key to promoting human flourishing in the climate era.

• Find out more about Capita’s Vision and Strategy to Support Children and Families in a Changing Climate or contact Ankita Chachra.

• We host expert discussions and workshops to develop concrete proposals for putting children at the center of city climate action plans around the globe. 

• In March 2023, Capita hosted the first Child-Centered City Climate Policy to Action Lab in Stellenbosch, South Africa. It brought together over 30 multidisciplinary specialists in climate change and early childhood development from across the African continent and Europe to workshop approaches to placing young children at the heart of climate change policies and strategies in cities.

• In May 2023, the second Child-Centered City Climate Policy to Action Lab took place in Monterrey, Mexico. The meeting brought together more than 40 people working at the intersection of early childhood, development, urban planning and research, to explore how we can ensure the prosperity of young children in cities in the era of climate change.

• In partnership with This is Planet Ed at the Aspen Institute, we published the first U.S. Early Years Climate Action Plan.
  
  Flourishing Children, Healthy Communities and a Stronger Nation, The U.S. Early Years Climate Action Plan sets out the impacts of climate change on young children, their families and their communities, and the solutions we can all advance across society to support them.
  
  The plan outlines recommendations for policymakers at the federal, state, and local level, as well as early year providers, businesses, philanthropic funders, and researchers to work together to support young children and their families in a changing climate.
  
  www.earlyyearsclimateplan.us

• In 2024, South Africa will take on the challenge of creating its own Early Years Climate Action Plan.

Our collection of insights

• Chasing Sunshine, Beating Storms: Designing Public Spaces for Children and Families
  Ankita Chachra contemplates how we can forge a stronger connection between urban design, climate resilience, and community well-being, with a focus on play spaces for young children. 

• Early Years Climate Action Task Force Podcast Series

  For Season 2 of the Early Years Climate Action Task Force podcast series, we talk with Task Force members about their experiences, their participation in the process of building the U.S. Early Years Climate Action Plan, and what they hope for the future.

• Protecting Our Future Now: A Policy Framework for Climate Change and the Early Years
  This report sheds light on the crucial interconnection between the early years and climate change. Angelica Ponguta, Jessica Scott, and Adrián Cerezo propose that, by interweaving early years and climate change policies, practices and financing, we can protect those most exposed to the immediate impacts of climate disruption, including pregnant women, young children, and their families. Meeting their needs today provides fundamental building blocks for resilient communities and drives systemic change in the short and long term.

• Falling Short: Addressing the Climate Finance Gap for Children
  Members of the Children’s Environmental Rights Initiative (CERI) coalition released a new report which analyses how “child responsive” projects funded by key multilateral climate funds are. The report concludes that children are being failed by climate funding commitments, despite bearing the brunt of the climate crisis.

• Outcomes from the Child-Centered City Climate Policy Convening in Stellenbosch, South Africa
  In March 2023, Capita hosted the first Child-Centered City Climate Policy Convening in South Africa. It brought together over 30 multidisciplinary specialists in climate change and early childhood development from across the African continent and Europe to workshop approaches to placing young children at the heart of climate change policies and strategies in cities.

• Outcomes from the Child-Centered City Climate Policy Convening in Monterrey, Mexico
  In May 2023 we met at the Tecnológico de Monterrey to talk about the ways in which cities, particularly emerging ones, can lead the development and implementation of climate change policies that have girls and boys at their center. The meeting brought together over 40 people working at the intersection of early childhood, development, urbanism and research, to explore how we can ensure the prosperity of young children in cities, in the era of climate change.

• Chief Heat Officers: An Innovation to Help Protect Our Children From Extreme Heat
  Joe Waters and Ankita Chachra write about how promising new innovations in policy and practice are emerging to help us build resilience to the effects of extreme heat. Around the globe cities have established the position of chief heat officer in city government, designed to consolidate their cities’ actions on extreme heat.

• Capita In Conversation with Surella Segu
  In this episode of Capita in Conversation Erika Pérez-León talks with Surella Segu, Architect, Urban Planner, and Loeb Fellow, Harvard Graduate School of Design, about her professional career, the role of Chief Heat Officers, and what cities can do to support the well-being of girls and boys and their families in an increasingly warmer planet.

• Connecting Cities, Young Children and Climate Action
  Capita Senior Fellow, architect and urban designer, Ankita Chachra, shares her reflections on her journey to focus on the wellbeing of young children and families in the climate change era.

• Raising our Voices as Mothers: Our Climate, Our Children’s Future
  Peck Gee and Ulziisaikhan are mothers to young children who have experienced toxic air pollution firsthand. In this article, they write about how focusing on early childhood is a climate-friendly investment, which can address poverty and inequity and foster climate resilience and adaptation.

• A Child-Centered Approach to the Climate Crisis Can No Longer Wait
  Joni Pegram explains why much more must be done to mainstream measures to both reduce emissions and enhance children’s resilience to climate impacts.

• The Need to Create Child-Centered Climate Policies

  In an interview with the Aspen Institute, Joe Waters argues that climate change is one of the most dire threats to children’s healthy development in the centuries ahead. Policymakers must do more to center young children in climate change policies.

• Think of the Children
  Capita and the Aspen Institute’s This is Planet Ed commissioned a survey on the state of public opinion on climate change, particularly as it affects children and future generations in the United States.
  
  The survey was carried out by Siena College Research Institute in August 2022.

• Finding Home: Changing Families, a Changing Planet, & Impacts on Young Children
  Young children’s connections to other people and to their hometowns, states, and countries are in flux due to shifting family structures and climate change.

• Caring Well for People and Planet
  In this essay, Gracy Olmstead explores the connections between caregiving for people and the planet. Gracy brings the eye of both an agrarian and a parent of young children to help us see our present dysfunctions a little more clearly and rise to the challenges of constructing a future in which children and families might flourish on a sustainable planet. 

• 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.

• What do we owe our children? A conversation about out duties to the children and future generations
  During COP26, Capita gathered a panel of international experts to discuss our obligations to children in light of the climate crisis.

• Bracing for Impact: Insights about Climate Change, Young Children and the 2020 Census
  Katherine Prince on what the 2020 Census data tell us about young children’s and families' futures in the context of ecological crisis.

• Extreme heat puts children’s flourishing at risk
  Joe Waters argues that extreme heat is an urgent global risk to our children’s health, well-being, and overall flourishing. Exercising responsibility for our children’s future means that we must work globally to slow emissions. Responsibility for our children’s present requires us to take immediate action to mitigate the impacts of extreme heat that we experienced in 2020 and will continue to experience in 2021 and beyond.