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The full -screen destroyed school is visible to the right in Mamoudzou in the cycling -affected French archipelago of Mayotte in mid -January. Children in Mayotte missed the school for six weeks as a result of repeated natural disasters. Photo: Chafion Madi/AP/TT
Every seventh children of school age missed lessons sometime last year due to extreme weather. It shows a new report from UNICEF.
Heat waves, cyclones and other extreme weather meant that at least 242 million children in 85 different countries miss the school in 2024. Particularly severely affected countries in Asia and Africa south of the Sahara.
But even in southern Europe, extreme weather had catastrophic consequences during the year. Skyfall and flooding in Italy disturbed schooling for more than 900,000 children, while thousands missed the school in Spain for the catastrophic floods that hit the country during the fall.
However, the dominant climate danger to children’s schooling during the year was heat waves, according to UNICEF. More than 118 million children missed the school only in April, when large parts of the Middle East and Asia were hit by a week -long heat wave with temperatures that exceeded 40 degrees.
Children are more vulnerable to the effects of weather-related crises, points out Unicef chief Catherine Russell in a statement.
“Children’s bodies are uniquely vulnerable. They are heated faster, sweat less efficiently and cooled down more slowly than adults, ”says Russell.
“Children cannot concentrate in classrooms that do not offer any break from suffocating heat and they cannot get to school if the path is flooded or if schools are flushed away”.
About 74 percent of children who were affected in 2024 lived in middle and low-income countries.
According to UNICEF, schools and education systems around the world are largely poorly equipped to manage the effects of extreme weather.