Children in their early years are not only uniquely susceptible to the effects of climate change, but they are also the key to solving its challenge, he says.

Capita envisions a future in which children and their families can realize their full potential in a “just, peaceful, prosperous society on a healthier, cleaner and safer planet.” In pursuit of that objective, Capita has released the first in a series of papers that will explore how young children, families and communities can flourish in this time of climate transition. Capita commissioned the paper, “,” to support the Capita/Aspen  Early Years Climate Action Task Force members in thinking about the most promising approaches to accomplish that goal. The task force will publish its first U.S. Early Years Climate Action Plan later this year.

The paper’s key messages are:

• In the face of climate change, focusing on our youngest children and families is an important avenue for ensuring an equitable, sustainable future for all.
• Aligning early years and climate change policies, practices and financing protects those most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and drives action on adaptation, mitigation and reducing loss and damage.
• The are the best framework for aligning action on climate change with action on the needs of young children.

Presently, children are barely in the picture in the global campaign to address climate disruption, though according to the World Health Organization (WHO), young children’s developing bodies and brains bear the brunt of impacts from the fossil fuel consumption that’s driving climate change.  According to the journal Pediatrics, 88% of the illnesses, injuries and deaths due to climate change occur to children, particularly those living in poor and under-served areas. Look at any devastation related to climate change, and it lands on small children and the most vulnerable communities first and hardest.

“That’s a life-altering statistic,” Waters says. “On the basis of that information alone, we have to completely reimagine our public health, health care and all the other systems of support for children in the face of climate change. How do we create environments, ecologies that enable flourishing, despite all the negative changes in our environment that are going to happen because of climate disruption?”

The redeeming news is that supporting young children and their families is a powerful tool to address both the short-term threats and long-term challenges of climate disruption, Waters says. Meeting the needs of young children and their families today can create the foundation for resilient communities going forward. Doing so doesn’t require reinventing the wheel, though it may require reallocating some resources.

A Path to Action

Climate financing is essential to implementing the quantum leap for humanity needed to successfully navigate the cascading effects of climate disruption; it also is one arena in which the failure to take young children into account is most blatant. According to a paper on climate change by the Children’s Environmental Rights Initiative — comprising UNICEF, Save the Children and Plan International and funded by Capita — an showed that children are being dramatically neglected in climate funding commitments globally. Just 2.4% of climate finance from multilateral climate funds — a cumulative $1.2 billion — can be said to support projects incorporating child-responsive activities.

The change if such child awareness were embedded in climate financing mechanisms would be comprehensive — everything from strengthening our early care and education system to be more resilient in the face of climate impacts, to altering infrastructure to offer more shade.

“I want to be very clear that we are not asking the early care and education sector to solve climate change,” Waters says. “Climate disruption demands that we take a different lens, a different frame, to all our work.

“Climate change is not an issue as much as it is a context,” he says. “So, we must reimagine all our systems and infrastructure across society for this context — as we did with Covid, which showed us that it’s doable. At the end of the day, government is the largest mechanism by which we tackle massive issues in our society. I’m unapologetic about the idea that the place where you can drive the biggest change over the long haul to deal with massive societal problems is government. It’s where we do big things together.”

Reimagining Everything

What that new context might look like is as varied as communities themselves.

“Take cities as an example,” he says. “Cities are already making investments in resilience, to adapt to the effects of climate change today. Cities are setting up cooling centers to support people who don’t have air conditioning. Are those child-friendly? Are there places to play? Are there places for parents to nurse their babies?

“That’s one low-cost adaptation a city can make. Shade equity is another. Do the areas where our lowest-income, most vulnerable children live have adequate shade? Generally, not. But they could have. And we can clearly propose that, yes, this is good for everyone – not just our youngest. Let’s focus our efforts — whether shade-equity or similar solutions — in those areas first. Let’s prioritize those things.”

Promoting the well-being of children in the face of climate disruption would involve strengthening communities and relationships, as well as providing parents and other caregivers with the knowledge and resources to support their children in a climate-related event.

“How do we strengthen our early care and education system to be more resilient in the face of climate impacts?” Waters says. “To withstand heat waves, to withstand bad air-quality days and so forth.

“Our pediatric health care system is generally not attuned to providing anticipatory guidance to parents when there is a forecast of an extreme heat wave. That’s the type of investment in an early-warning system that needs to be made so parents and other caregivers have the tools they need to protect the health of their children.

“If you take a child health and well-being lens to climate change, you’ll see that A.) All the systems that support children and families have a great deal they could be doing now with appropriate investment to support healthy development, and B.) All the other institutions that exist and are focused on resilience and adaptation could be taking much more robust child-sensitive and child-responsive lens to their work.”

This paper encourages the U.S. to take a leadership role in addressing climate change and making the lives of young children a priority in that effort. As the country with the largest historical and per capita greenhouse gas on earth, it is critical that the U.S. advocates for and supports efforts to mitigate climate disruption. The group urges the U.S. to make financial contributions appropriate to the scope of the challenge, as well as bring forth the nation’s best minds and best efforts to addressing the many issues involved.

“The United States needs to be leading the world with investment, with putting children and families the world over first,” Waters says. “We’ve contributed to this problem but we’re also one of the most innovative, creative, forward-leaning countries in the world, particularly when it comes to new ideas and new technologies.

“It’s an opportunity for us to do what Americans do best and have done historically, from the New Deal to NASA. This is a moonshot opportunity for America.”

RESOURCES

• (Children’s Environmental Rights Initiative)
• (Capita)

“We know that physical activity is a foundation for children’s health,” says Dr. Andrew Koepp, a researcher with the University of Texas Department of Human Development and Family Sciences. “Physical activity promotes bone, muscle and heart health. Most medical organizations recommend that children ages 3 to 5 be involved in some non-sedentary activity for about three hours throughout the day.

“At the same time, we know with climate change we’re expecting more hot days and that will impact children’s activity levels.”

Koepp led a study to help determine just how great that impact might be — the first study of its kind on preschoolers.

“We knew there had been some studies on adults and older children about how heat impacts their physical activity outside,” he says, “but we weren’t finding any studies that were specific for preschoolers. That’s important because young children are a sensitive group — much more vulnerable to the heat than adults because their bodies are not as efficient at releasing heat.”

The paper, “,” was published in the May 2023 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association Pediatrics. The study took place over two weeks in April 2022 with 47 children aged 3 to 6 attending the university-based laboratory preschool in Austin, Texas. The playground is partially shaded, and researchers monitored air temperature and relative humidity data hourly. The preschoolers, a mix of male and female, Asian, Hispanic, White and “other race or ethnicity,” were outfitted with a hip-worn device like a very precise junior Fitbit to measure their physical activity. The ambient temperatures during their outdoor play ranged from 72 to 95 degrees Fahrenheit.

On days with higher temperatures, the children engaged in more sedentary behavior and less moderate-to-vigorous physical activity. On days when the ambient temperature was in the lower range, the children ran around, climbed, or played games 27 percent of the time. When the temps reached into the 90s, the children were only active 21 percent of the time.

Though the study is a small one, the researchers are repeating the experiment at different times of the year at other preschools in the Austin area to further develop the data. The results are important for several reasons, Koepp says, not least because they show the difference having shaded playgrounds can make.

In led by one of Koepp’s co-authors, Dr. Kevin Lanza of the Michael and Susan Dell Center for Healthy Living at The University of Texas Health Science Center, researchers noted as much as a 10-degree difference between the shaded and unshaded parts of playgrounds. On a 90 degree day, this is the difference between “extreme caution” and “danger” levels for risk of heat illness, according to the .

“This underscores that the built environment can have a really big impact on the temperature in the city,” Koepp says. In Koepp’s and Lanza’s studies, preschoolers had the option (which they exercised) of heading for the shade, situating themselves under big trees when it was really hot. For millions of U.S. children, that is not an option.

According to , a map of tree cover in the U.S. is often a map of income and race. Due to decades of discriminatory policies such as redlining, trees, with their capacity to clean and cool the air, are often sparse in neighborhoods with people of color and low-income families. Low-income and socially marginalized populations are also more at risk because they have less access to climate-controlled housing.

In urban heat islands created by extensive concrete and pavement with few trees and green spaces, daytime temperatures can be as much as 7 degrees higher than temperatures in outlying areas. In cities where the humidity is high, vegetation reduced, with buildings denser and the population greater, temperatures can climb even higher — up to a scorching 20 or more degrees hotter in the urban core of some of the largest cities in the U.S.

Heat Hits Some Kids Harder

The children in Koepp’s study had other advantages besides trees on their playground.

“The group of kids who participated in our study came from relatively affluent families in the area,” he said. “The center has a lot of green outdoor space and the children in the sample were healthy. They had BMIs that were in the normal range, and none had asthma.

“It’s remarkable that we see this pattern of findings of the children being less active on hot days among these totally healthy kids. Children who are heavier are going to heat up faster, and we may see stronger findings in children with other health concerns.”

Children with asthma, which disproportionately , are especially sensitive to heat, which can trigger an attack and irritate already narrowed airways. Though preschool children are unlikely to develop Type 2 diabetes, children as young as 10 are now being diagnosed with the disease, which puts them at particular risk from the heat. , complications related to diabetes can make it tougher for the body to cool itself, leading to heat exhaustion and heat stroke.

Heat may be one of the major human-rights issues of the coming decades. According to Frederica Perera in “Children’s Health and the Peril of Climate Change,” without rapid global action to reduce global emissions, children born in 2020 will experience two to seven times more extreme heatwaves on average in their lifetimes than people born in 1960.

While we can’t immediately turn around the forces driving climate change we can work to mitigate as much heat in children’s environments as possible. In addition to planting trees, schools, communities and urban planners can take other steps to relieve the heat, particularly for the youngest and most vulnerable residents.

Koepp and his co-researchers suggest that something as simple as providing water tables, sprinklers and hoses can help children stay cooler. Misters and fans can help, as can sending the children out to play during the coolest times of the day.

Koepp says their hope is that the research they’re doing into how heat affects small children, and the difference sufficient shade can make will be of use not only to schools but also to public health officials, urban planners and others looking to design children’s spaces.

“Climate change is happening,” he says. “And we have to learn to live with it.” That doesn’t mean that children will have to live indoors, he says, but it will take diligence and thoughtful planning to make certain they can safely get the exercise they need to grow up strong and healthy.

“Not being able to go to school was really hard on her,” Kamenetz says of her three-year-old daughter, who would sound the alarm by lying down on the floor to kick and scream. “She was kind of the weathervane for the whole family’s distress, because she really picked up everyone’s emotions and expressed them kind of in the most intense way possible.”

This distress, of course, was not limited to Kamenetz and her family. As a reporter covering education for NPR, she uncovered the many ways parents, teachers, children and caregivers were struggling. The crisis, she realized, was deep but not unprecedented. Her home city of New Orleans had undergone comparable trauma in the wake of Katrina. “That was the biggest example I could think of in recent time where all the schools had shut down in an American city in the 21st century,” she says, adding that the impact had lingered for a decade. “It was more than a storm. It was a social catastrophe across the board.”

Another noteworthy precedent: refugee camps around the world, where children’s schooling is suspended while other life-and-death needs are addressed. In April 2020, when Kamenetz published a story on Morning Edition, host Steve Inskeep was taken aback at the comparison, but she calmly predicted the high school students dropping out, the workforce shocks, the toxic stress, the multiple-year recovery journey. When kids can’t go to school, we can try to connect them through technology, but these efforts invariably fall short.

Many of her dire predictions came true. American women (resulting in a spike in liver disease), (they called it the Quarantine 19, but the consequences go beyond not being able to fit into your jeans) and . Anxiety was widespread, and women shouldered more than their fair share.

They were also in disproportionately high numbers. “The media treated it as inevitable,” she recalls. “They would say, ‘Women were forced from the workforce,’ and I was like, ‘Well, who forced them?’ Why did people pretend like this was some kind of inevitability and not just a re-instantiation of the patriarchy?”

It’s these overlapping emergencies, but also the inspiring and instructive solutions, that distinguish Kamenetz’s The Stolen Year.

She describes the interviews and research that went into the book as “an opportunity to have even more empathy for parents who cared about their kids just as much as I did, but maybe didn’t have all of the resources at their disposal that I did to make sure that their kids were okay.” It made her reflect on the factors that go into her family’s decisions about where to live and where her kids go to school. The Stolen Year chronicles the way the pandemic surfaced class and gender inequities, as well as the regional and ideological divides that beset our nation.

Opinions about school and child care closures, in particular, ran hot. “It was the first time I had a bleep on the radio,” Kamenetz notes, with regard to a in January 2022. Torn between Texas’ determination to keep schools open, the CDC’s recommendations and a boss who expected her at work, the parent was expressing rage only slightly more articulately than Kamenetz’s toddler. A San Francisco kindergarten teacher reported that the kids were doing terrible even though she was working so, so hard.

As the pandemic recedes, and social divides persist into the midterm elections and beyond, it’s understandable that we might want to let go of 2020 and 2021, but now is the time to take a hard look at what happened.

Especially because it isn’t over. Many effects of the pandemic on children continue to unfurl. Some are experiencing social deficits. For some who didn’t get the early interventions they needed, the consequences haven’t even shown up yet. “This is a decade-long project of recovery,” she says.

In The Stolen Year’s introduction, Kamenetz characterizes the book as “a little like restorative justice or therapy.” (The former term, an alternative to retributive justice, and involves elevating the role and voice of victims and community members. Its applications go beyond criminal justice.) As she said, “We need to tell the story of what happened. We can’t look away. If you think you know what you think about this already, you should maybe look at it again.”

She regards the book as a chance for us all to absorb the stories of what happened and where our choices led. “Whether you think that they were absolutely justified or completely wrongheaded, they had the consequences,” she asserts.

Having left NPR earlier this year, Kamenetz is shifting from one crisis to another, with the climate featuring in a number of current and planned projects, including . The initiative of the Aspen institute builds upon the , mobilizing the education sector to take on climate change and enact solutions.

“There’s a huge amount of climate despair and eco anxiety among young people,” she says, “And talking about it is not going to be enough. You have to act, and you have to do things differently and listen to the kids that are upset, because they have good points.”

COVID was a lesson. It’s up to us to study it now and to do our homework, which Kamenetz describes as “thinking about what we learned, and what we now know that we’re able to do.”

at the Aspen Institute champions two-generation solutions, supporting the educational and career goals of children and their caregivers. Through the , among other programs, Ascend engages systems, and policy and social impact leaders, to embrace these solutions.

Ascend recognizes that climate change and its consequences demand approaches that go beyond just two generations. With the recently launched Early Years Climate Action Task Force, Joe Waters, 2021 Ascend Fellow, aims to mobilize thinking and action for the next century and beyond. “There’s a huge need to rethink systems, and that’s why there’s a huge opportunity,” says Waters, cofounder and CEO of the think tank , and a to Early Learning Nation.

The Task Force is dedicated to forging new connections between the early education sectors (including allied fields such as pediatrics) and the growing movement to tackle the climate crisis. It is co-chaired by Diana Rauner, president of ; and Antwanye Ford, president and CEO of Enlightened, Inc.

After a series of listening sessions beginning this fall, the Task Force will issue an Early Years Climate Action Plan featuring recommendations that encompass child-serving systems, businesses, nonprofits and philanthropy, and all levels of government. For example, foundations might be encouraged to target place-based grantmaking in regions that are particularly vulnerable to extreme weather and other manifestations of climate change.

Waters’ organization, founded in 2018, has consistently focused on climate. For example, Katherine Prince, vice president of Strategic Foresight at KnowledgeWorks, has  that southeastern states are “prone to severe storms and have relatively high poverty levels.” : “Policy-makers need to start to address issues related to climate displacement and housing systemically and inclusively. Without their coordinated and concerted action, young children’s flourishing will falter.”

Waters credits Aspen Institute senior fellow Laura Schifter for spearheading climate action at the school level and laying the groundwork for viewing child development through a climate lens. , the magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where she is a lecturer, Schifter captures the moment when she saw the overlap between education and climate. Watching her daughters play while reading a brought the urgency home for her.

Schifter’s identity as a mother reinforced her realization that climate change isn’t a “tomorrow problem,” telling me, “I kept thinking about the world that my daughters were going to inherit, and it’s not some apocalyptic climate disaster world that I picture but all the fights our country is having about migrants crossing our southern border.” Food and water scarcity puts pressure on all our geopolitical systems. Participation in the founded by Al Gore helped her frame her vision of equity-focused action prioritizing the communities most impacted by climate change as well as education inequities.

as “a natural and necessary focus for early childhood philanthropists, policy and systems leaders, providers and advocates.” He had his climate moment while reading David Wallace-Wells’s 2019 book . “That book,” he says, “underscored the degree to which the crisis is transforming the world of our grandchildren — and their grandchildren, and so on.”

Wallace-Wells uses the phrase “climate caste system” to describe the poorest, living “in the marshes, the swamps, the floodplains, the inadequately irrigated places with the most vulnerable infrastructure,” and Waters sees evidence of this system across the country. He cites about Louisiana’s Birthmark Doula Collective that trains emergency responders in best practices, filling a crucial gap in disaster response. The doulas distribute lifesaving kits and train emergency response professionals, advancing perinatal health but also building community resilience.

Waters points to the leadership of fellow Ascend Fellow Atiya Weiss, who leads the Burke Foundation in New Jersey, as an example of philanthropic efforts to .

“In partnership with community doulas,” Weiss explains, “We are creating new systems of support for expecting families through trusted messengers and community support. is critical in laying the groundwork for the resilience needed as climate change becomes even more dire.”

“Climate change,” Weiss continues, “is one of the greatest threats to all future generations and we know its impact is worse for children living in communities of color. Joe understands the importance of safe, stable, nurturing relationships in these communities.”

While Schifter’s work in the education sector represents a novel approach to climate change, at least the K-12 sector has systems to build on. The far less cohesive early learning sector provides the Task Force with less infrastructure, but also less bureaucracy to navigate. “We have so much to learn about what’s going on across the country,” Waters says. “People on the ground are already doing the work.”

Recommendations include ways schools can reduce carbon emissions, utilize infrastructure as a teaching tool, support communities of color disproportionately affected by weather crises and create pathways for students to pursue green jobs.

“Ultimately, there are a lot of technical fixes that we need in addressing climate change. But we will need people to actually advance a sustainable society,” said Laura Schifter, senior fellow with the Aspen Institute and founder of the new initiative, .

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Synthesizing a year of listening tours and research, the connects one of the country’s most sizable public sectors to actionable climate solutions — like warming effects by replacing the nation’s largest diesel fleet with electric school buses and swapping the common asphalt plots that surround schools with green spaces.

Organized by federal, state and local impact, all recommendations detail what partnerships can and do look like with business, philanthropy, media and advocacy organizations across the country.

In comparison with private homes, public safety offices and businesses, , according to the New Buildings Institute, a nonprofit that tracks and helps to redesign commercial spaces’ energy performance. Annually, K-12 schools in the U.S. produce emissions equivalent to or roughly 15 million cars. Energy is the second most costly expense for school districts on average.

The K12 Climate Action of students, teachers, education administrators and environmental leaders includes incoming Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez, researcher and president of the Learning Policy Institute and the presidents of the country’s two largest teachers unions, representing roughly 4 million educators combined. The group is co-led by Republican Christine Todd Whitman, former New Jersey governor and head of the Environmental Protection Agency under President George W. Bush, and Democrat John King, former U.S. secretary of education under President Obama who is now running for Maryland governor.

With the action plan now live, the commission is coalition building with districts and businesses nationwide. Their focus is educating more leaders about how small and large school infrastructure changes or partnerships can support a cleaner environment, so that they’re able to follow through on recommendations.

“All the things that we’re calling for are achievable. There’s someplace somewhere that is doing each of the things we recommend,” King told ����Ӱ��.

Some suggested changes, like improving air quality for students, are highly anticipated by parents and already underway in efforts to ameliorate pandemic health concerns. Beginning next year, more than 500 schools across New York state will further improve air quality, reduce emissions and add energy career and tech opportunities under Gov. Kathy Hochul’s just-announced $59 million . New York officials are partnering with the New Buildings Institute on the effort.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers who sometimes clashed with King in her role as a labor leader, told ����Ӱ�� that the union “leaped” at the opportunity to be involved in K12 Climate Action, seeing it as part of the AFT’s broader goal to make schools safe and healthy spaces for learning.

“The way you teach people is by not telling them, but having them see, feel, touch, use whatever senses they have to really envision a future,” she said.

Weingarten and other commission leaders toured Alice West Fleet Elementary School in Arlington, Virginia Sept. 21 to learn how a small school has become a model of sustainability for the affluent, D.C. area county. The school’s geothermal heating system and solar panels save roughly $100,000 in energy costs each year, enough to fund two teachers’ starting salaries, according to the Aspen Institute’s Laura Schifter.

In the center of Alice West Fleet, the red and blue lights of a “solar pole” show students how much energy is being produced and used at any given moment. Any surplus goes to greater Arlington County, and upper grade students use data collected to make comparisons and predictions about how much energy will be produced at different points in the year.

On the first floor is the yet-to-be-named “Power Pole,” showing students the amount of power the school has generated. The blue is from the solar panels, the red is the power being used. Extra power goes back to the county.

— AFT (@AFTunion)

Weingarten, whose enthusiasm was evident during the tour when she slid down a slide that connects Fleet’s third and second floors, added that the AFT recently established a climate task force, including members from states heavily dependent on the fossil fuel industry, like Texas, West Virginia and Alaska. The growing urgency to address climate needs across political parties and geography gives her hope that what unites us is greater than what divides us.

“Just like our responsibility to educate kids, there’s a responsibility to keep a climate that’s going to be there,” Weingarten said.

Commission member Nikki Pitre, executive director for the told ����Ӱ�� that there’s also a responsibility to keep Indigenous people and values at the forefront of climate solutions, given that Native peoples have always stewarded the land and acted as environmentalists.

The action plan emphasizes that Indigenous communities’ knowledge systems — their local culture and ecological practices — must be included in climate solutions.

Pitre said she walked away from the tour of Alice Fleet questioning, “What do we need to advocate for in our policies to ensure that these schools are not the exception? That we’re providing equal access across the country — including tribal reservations, including urban spaces?”

School leaders on the commission say that equity considerations play a key part in deciding which sustainable infrastructure improvements are prioritized because solutions cannot be one-size-fit-all. For some districts, climate issues are just as urgent as addressing unfinished learning and mental health concerns related to the pandemic as families face unprecedented flooding in the South and upper Atlantic.

As Los Angeles County’s superintendent of schools, Debra Duardo leads the that constitute the nation’s largest K-12 consolidated school system. She told ����Ӱ�� she hesitated when first approached by the commission, given all the urgent challenges facing students during the pandemic.

“I hadn’t really placed as much of an emphasis on my own time and knowledge on understanding the impact that the education sector has on the environment. For me it was like, we’re super busy right now, but one thing this pandemic has taught us is that schools have to be ready to step up — that people look to schools as the hub of support and resources and communities,” Duardo said.

In Los Angeles, where families increasingly face poor air quality from smog and fire smoke, she said, it’s historically been student and environmental activists leading the charge for climate solutions. However busy leaders might be, she said, they cannot ignore the dread young people feel when confronting climate change and the strains it may place on their learning.

“There’s so much evidence and research that tells us that children thrive when they’re in an environment where it’s safe, beautiful and accommodating to meet their needs …Children aren’t going to learn and thrive in an environment if they don’t feel like anybody is listening, or they’re concerned that their futures, their safety are in danger.”

Advocates and teachers say presents a way to confront some eco-anxiety with positive actions and possibilities for future careers in engineering, green infrastructure and clean energy. K12 Climate Action commissioners contend that infrastructure changes are reducing emissions while preparing the next generation of stewards.

Sustainable changes also open the door for deeper civic and family engagement at a time when the pandemic has strained relationships to schools. As a part of a larger research assignment on the Chesapeake Bay, Ashley Snyder’s fourth-grade students at Alice West Fleet started brainstorming ways to share with the community how best to enhance rain gardens and filtration systems to protect the watershed area.

“I definitely see the students bringing home a lot more of what they’re learning to their families,” she said.