Protect, prepare, prioritize a call to action on climate and children

With the climate crisis here and accelerating, every child on every continent is facing more frequent, severe and destructive climate hazards including air pollution, water scarcity, heatwaves, vector-borne disease, cyclones and river and coastal flooding.

There is a brief window of time to avoid the very worst of the climate crisis, and governments must urgently deliver rapid and ambitious emissions reductions to secure a liveable planet for all. However, some impacts of climate change are now unavoidable and irreversible. To immediately save and protect lives, we must build the resilience of every child and young person to the impacts of a crisis they did not make.

UNICEF is urgently calling on all governments, business and decision makers to PROTECT the health, safety, learning and opportunities of every child by adapting the critical social services they rely on, to PREPARE children and young people to live in a climate-changed world by improving their ‘adaptive capacity’, and to PRIORITIZE children and young people in climate funding and resources.