Early Childhood & Climate Change Are Connected in More Ways Than You Might Think
“Young children … are in some ways the most vulnerable and the most disenfranchised group or population of any humans.””— Elliot Haspel
As world leaders return home from the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27), an annual international climate meeting that was held in Egypt this year, they have many action items to attend to. But few, if any, regard one of the populations most vulnerable to climate change: young children.
This is a nexus—kids and climate—where research is becoming more and more robust, yet public awareness and understanding lag far behind.
Elliot Haspel hopes to change that, and soon. Haspel is a leading voice on early childhood education and author of “Crawling Behind: America’s Child Care Crisis and How to Fix It.” He recently joined Capita, a nonpartisan think tank, as a senior fellow where he will oversee the growth of the “Childhood Climate Fund,” the first global philanthropic fund focused on the intersection of early childhood and climate change.
For someone who is regularly sounding the alarm on urgent issues plaguing the field of early childhood education, from system-wide dysfunction to poor working conditions to uncompetitive pay, we wondered: Why climate change? Why now?
So we asked Haspel to tell us more about his interest in this intersection, and to explain why the fight to improve early childhood is inextricably linked to the fight to address climate change.