By Nneka Nwogwugwu
Researchers have revealed in a study that climate change will affect children in developing countries even more acutely.
A child born in 2021 will live on average through seven times as many heat waves, twice as many wildfires and nearly three times as many droughts, crop failures and river floods as their grandparents, according to a study released Sunday that looks at how different generations will be affected by climate change.
The results, published in the journal Science, found that global warming will disproportionately affect the lives of young people and children, particularly when it comes to extreme events worsened by climate change.
The research, according to NBC news is the first to extensively model extreme events and future climate scenarios and to apply the projections across demographic groups to quantify how people in different age groups around the world will experience climate disasters across their lifetimes.
The outlook is troubling if the pace of global warming continues unchecked, said Wim Thiery, a climate scientist at Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium, who led the research.
“We found that everyone under 40 today will live an unprecedented life in terms of their lifetime exposure to heat waves, droughts and floods,” Thiery said. “This is true even under the most conservative scenarios.”
The burden will remain disproportionate even with cuts in greenhouse gas emissions that countries have pledged under the Paris Agreement, a global climate pact signed by more than 190 countries.
With what has currently been pledged, 172 million children in sub-Saharan Africa could live through 50 times more heat waves and a sixfold increase in extreme events over their lifetimes, compared to 53 million children in the same age group in Europe and Central Asia, the researchers said.