Children exposed to heat wave worldwide may lose up to 1.5 years of schooling: Report

Children exposed early to extreme heat may lose up to 1.5 years of schooling, with climate change having a direct impact on education and threatening to undo educational gains of recent decades, according to a new global report.

Climate related stressors such as heat, wildfires, storms, floods, droughts, diseases and rising sea levels, affect education outcomes. Most low and middle-income countries are experiencing climate-related school closures every year, increasing chances of learning loss and dropout, it noted.

The report compiled by UNESCO’s Global Education Monitoring (GEM) team, Monitoring and Evaluating Climate Communication and Education (MECCE) project and the University of Saskatchewan in Canada has pointed out that over the past 20 years, schools were closed in at least 75% of the extreme weather events, impacting five million people or more.

Exposure to heat has significant detrimental effects on children’s educational outcomes. An analysis linking census and climate data in 29 countries between 1969 and 2012 showed that exposure to higher than average temperatures during the prenatal and early life period is associated with fewer years of schooling, especially in Southeast Asia.

“A child experiencing temperatures that are two standard deviations above average is predicted to attain 1.5 fewer years of schooling than children experiencing average temperatures. High temperatures reduced high-stakes test performance in China and led to reductions in both high school graduation and college entrance rates,” the report said.

“In the United States, without air conditioning, a school year hotter by 1℃ reduced test scores by 1%. Very hot school days disproportionately impacted African American and Hispanic students, due to poor infrastructure conditions, accounting for roughly 5% of the racial achievement gap,” it added.

The report noted that about half of public school districts need to update or replace multiple heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems.

“In the most disadvantaged municipalities in Brazil, which were also amongst those most exposed to heat risk, students lost about 1% of learning per year due to rising temperatures,” it said.

The global report flagged that climate-induced education vulnerability is worse for marginalised populations. Of the 10 countries most affected by extreme weather events in 2019, eight were low- or lower-middle-income countries.

Of the 33 countries identified as bearing extremely high climate risks for children, where nearly 1 billion people live, 29 are also considered to be fragile states. In the United States, those with low income or without a secondary school certificate are 15% more likely to live in areas with the highest projected increases in childhood asthma diagnoses due to climate-driven increases in particulate air pollution.

“School districts in the United States that received federal disaster recovery funds had higher proportions of students from socially vulnerable groups,” the report said.

The team flagged that increasingly frequent natural disasters, including floods and cyclones, have led to the deaths of students and teachers and have damaged and destroyed schools.

“Following the 2013 floods in Jakarta, access to schools was disrupted, schools were used as emergency shelters and some schools closed because of damage. Among schools surveyed, 81% of those with disaster management plans and a standard operating procedure for dealing with flood emergencies agreed that these were effective in times of crisis,” it said.