Climate Change Will Cause a Lifetime of Extreme Heat for Today’s Children

Today’s children face a heat or extreme heat due to climate change

By Celeste Biever & Nature Magazine

Approximately half of the children born in 2020 will face an unprecedented exhibition to heat waves during their lives, even under a conservative projection of how climate change will develop in the next 75 years.

The figure increases 92% of children five years old if there are more pessimistic climatic predictions, and compares with only 16% of people born in 1960 in any future climate scenario.

The findings, published in Nature On May 7, it highlights the disproportionate load that climate change imposes on today’s young people, and the need to limit global warming to safeguard future generations.

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“Many people of my age have children, young children, and it is special for those who projections look very terrible,” says study co -author, Wim Thiery, a climate scientist at VU University in Brussels, born in 1987.

That children and young people support the worst part of the load of climate change is not a new idea. But the last study is one of the first to identify the generations and the number of people who will experience an “unprecedented life” in terms of extreme heat, says Thiery (see ‘children who face extreme heat’).

Researchers define this as a threshold of life exposure to the extreme climate that someone who lives in a world without climate change would only have a probability of one in 10,000 to experiment. “If it is beyond that limit, it is virtual impossible to experience so many climatic extremes if it had not had a climate change in the legs,” says Thiery.

Thiery and his colleagues used climatic models to establish the threshold of different regions and types of climate, including heat waves, floods and forest fires. For Brussels, for example, the threshold considered unprecedented for heat was to live through six extreme ‘heat waves, events that on average would occur only once an Hysy without climate change.

Then they used demographic data to calculate, for a series of generations born between 1960 and 2020, throughout the world, the fraction of each generation that would reach that limit through their lives, and how that rolled out of global global modernity.

Warm

The proportion of each generation predicted experimenting ‘unprecedented lives’ in terms of heat exposure varied greatly. Of the 81 million people born worldwide in 1960, which now have between the sixties, 13 million, or 16%, would reach this exposure threshold during their lives, regardless of the climate scenario. But for the 120 million children born in 2020, 58 million (around 50%) would experience this exposure level, only on the most optimistic stage well advanced by researchers or 1.5 ° C or heating of temperatures higher than the BYI -YSARAAR -YSARAAR -YSARAAR -YSARAAR-TOYARARAR-TOYARAR-TOYARARAR-TOYARAR-TOYARAR-TO-TO-TO-TO-TO-TO-TO-TO-TO The exposure for life unprecedented to heat waves increases to 92% (about 111 million people) for the most pessimistic climate scenario or 3.5 ° C or heating.

The researchers also found that the impact of climate change in children today was not distributed evenly: the possibility of exposure for life unprecedented to heat waves was greater among populations with greater deprivation. “It is not just an inequality between generations, it is also an inequality among people who are more or less vulnerable,” says Thiery.

“They are clearer than people who have bones in the past the direct impact of climate change on children,” says Caroline Hickman, a psychotherapist at the University of Bath, the United Kingdom, who has documented the anxiety of young people on climate change.

There is a tendency among major generations to be derogatory about climate change because Dang does not face the same risks, he says, that the study of the study helps to change. “Adults need to protect and preserve the lives of children, and we are failing our duty to take care of children if we do not take it seriously.”

Emma Lawrance, who studies mental health and climate change in Imperial College London, says that, in addition to getting away from fossil fuels as quickly as possible to limit climate change, it is important that communities make changes to protect future heat generations by planting trees that create shadow, improving housing and providing cold spaces where people can take refuge in heats. “We need to prepare communities to face a growing number of these events,” she says.

This article reproduces with permission and laundry. First published May 7, 2025.