Climate
After Kerala’s Deadliest Landslide, the Hardest Thing to Rebuild Was Childhood
In Wayanad, part of the ecologically fragile Western Ghats, a school at Vellarmala had no training in trauma recovery when the landslide hit — so its teachers built their own response, one now echoed by research and by disaster-recovery efforts in Nepal and the Philippines. What worked, what it took, and where it still falls short for the next school this happens to.
On the morning of July 30, 2024, one of Kerala’s deadliest landslides tore through Chooralmala and Mundakkai in Wayanad. As hillsides collapsed under relentless monsoon rain, entire neighbourhoods were swept away, killing 298 people. Among the dead were 33 students from the Vellarmala Government Vocational Higher Secondary School (VHSS). The school campus itself disappeared beneath mud and boulders, taking with it classrooms, a playground, a library and years of childhood memory.
When classes resumed months later, the children had a school again — but not the one they remembered. Friends were missing. Familiar surroundings were gone. The laughter that once filled the corridors was buried alongside students who never returned.
That was when the teachers realised they were not simply reopening a school. They were helping children rebuild a childhood that a disaster had shattered.
When Learning Had to Wait
The Meppadi school today has 331 students and 28 teachers. But in the weeks after the landslide, when the school community was still grappling with loss and displacement, the staff knew that returning to textbooks could not be the first priority.
Ninety-seven students from Classes 1 to 10 had been directly affected by the landslide — either injured, displaced, or bereaved — split almost evenly between girls and boys. Others had lost relatives or friends, including classmates who sat beside them every day. For the first month, the school itself was pressed into service as a relief camp. With the original campus destroyed, students were relocated to the kitchen and dining hall of another school compound.
For two months, academics were set aside entirely. Instead, the teachers focused on one thing: keeping the children together, and giving them a routine. Students arrived in the morning, ate breakfast and lunch, took part in activities, had evening snacks, and stayed through the day.
“We did not give the students a chance to overthink anything,” Unnikrishnan, a teacher who has worked at the school for 20 years, told EdPublica.
But even with the children physically back together, something was missing. “Both children and teachers have a sense of sadness regarding the disaster,” the headmistress Jesna Jose told EdPublica. “Even though they don’t show it often, we can feel it.” The children were together again. The school did not yet sound like itself.
Then Came the Smile
The change began with something that had nothing to do with textbooks.
Two teachers from a government school in Pathanamthitta, a district in south-central Kerala—Manoj Sini and K.S. Binu—arrived at Vellarmala dressed as clowns. They walked into a Class 1 classroom, played music, and began performing comic routines. The children laughed. Then the teachers laughed too.
“All of a sudden, the children started laughing. Seeing the children laugh, the teachers also started laughing,” Unnikrishnan recalls. It was a small moment. But after months of grief, it meant something far larger.
“That’s when we understood that art was the medicine,” he says.
The insight that followed was a quiet but important one: recovery did not have to begin with talking about the disaster. Sometimes, it could begin with giving children a reason to laugh.
“Once there was a smile, we could carry things forward. That was the turning point in rebuilding the school.”
Finding What Each Child Could Do
From there, the teachers began looking beyond what the children had lost and toward what they still had to rebuild the childhood.
They individually studied the 97 directly affected students to identify their interests and abilities. Some were drawn to craft, others to computers, art, sport, or science. Children were grouped by interest, and outside experts were brought in to train them — many arriving without any fee, through the teachers’ own personal networks and friendships.
The school became, for a period, a working studio of drama, oppana (a traditional Muslim wedding dance performed by women), nadan pattu (Kerala folk songs) and vanjippattu (traditional boat songs). A science expert ran demonstrations. A craft teacher introduced bookbinding and art. Students were entered into science exhibitions and arts festivals.
This was not simply keeping children occupied. It was giving them a structured way to discover themselves again — and it is the detail that separates what happened at Vellarmala from a generic “art therapy helped” narrative: the intervention was individually mapped, expert-led, and sustained, not a single feel-good workshop.
The results reached a public stage. Students from the school delivered the first dance programme at the State School Art Festival, and later performed Vellapokkathil (In the Flood) at the Kerala State School Youth Festival 2024 — all seven performers survivors of the Chooralmala landslide themselves.
Based on a story by the Malayalam writer Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai, the play depicts communities and animals caught in a catastrophic flood. For the students performing it, the story was inseparable from what they had lived through months earlier — making the performance both intensely personal and difficult to watch as fiction.
Where Research Meets the Ground
What the Vellarmala teachers arrived at through instinct and trial finds independent confirmation in a study published in 2025 in the journal Development in Practice. Researcher V. Akhila and colleagues, drawing on direct involvement in the relief camps set up after the landslide, documented the same emotional terrain the teachers describe: survivors carrying acute guilt at having lived when neighbours and family did not, a disruption to “sense of security, identity, and hope,” and heightened anxiety, sleep disturbance and fear that did not resolve quickly.
The study examines the toll on first responders, many of whom were themselves survivors or had lost people they knew, and who were frequently deployed into relief work without any prior debriefing — carrying the emotional weight of that period into their daily lives long afterward. It is a reminder that “recovery” in a disaster zone is not a category that applies only to the visibly affected; it extends to everyone who worked to hold the response together, including, arguably, teachers like Unnikrishnan.
The researchers also flag something the Vellarmala experience illustrates directly: that mental health impacts fall unevenly across a population — hitting children, older residents, people with disabilities, and those relocated from outside the immediate community hardest — and that longer-term psychological support after landslides remains patchy and poorly coordinated almost everywhere it has been studied.
When Grief Returned
But there is no single fix for what these students had endured. The return of laughter did not mean the children had forgotten what happened.
As the SSLC (Secondary School Leaving Certificate, Kerala’s Grade 10 board examination) approached, seven students — three girls and four boys — told their teachers they did not want to sit the exam. Many of the friends who should have been sitting beside them had died in the landslide, and the exam hall itself was a reminder of who was missing.
The teachers went to each of the seven students’ homes and persuaded them, one by one, to take the examination. They did. The school went on to record a 100 percent pass rate. At the farewell ceremony that followed, many students cried uncontrollably.
The episode is the clearest evidence that recovery here was never a straight line. There could be laughter one day and grief returning without warning the next. What the teachers had learned by then was not to expect children to simply “move on.” They stayed present through the difficult moments, and kept building spaces where students could learn, participate and be heard.
“Teachers gave them 24-hour support,” Unnikrishnan says. “It was survival. It was also a challenge for the teachers.”
Children and Disasters: A Global Problem
What happened at Chooralmala is a single, closely observed instance of a far larger pattern. UNICEF’s most recent global analysis found that at least 242 million students across 85 countries and territories had their schooling disrupted by extreme climate events in a single year — 2024 — through heatwaves, tropical cyclones, storms, floods and droughts. At least one in seven students worldwide experienced some form of climate-linked disruption to their education that year.
South Asia was the worst-affected region, with 128 million students facing climate-related school disruption in 2024 alone; heatwaves by themselves affected an estimated 171 million students globally. The disruption is rarely confined to missed classes. Extreme heat and other hazards damage school infrastructure, make the route to school unsafe, and measurably affect children’s concentration, memory and physical and mental health — the visible tip of a much larger iceberg of harm.
The scale behind these numbers is worth sitting with. A 2024 narrative review co-authored by researchers at the World Health Organization, synthesising over a decade of peer-reviewed evidence on climate change and child health, notes that 2022 alone saw 387 climate-related disasters worldwide — storms, floods, wildfires and droughts — that killed more than 30,000 people.
The review’s consistent finding across the literature it examined is that these events measurably affect children’s mental and physical health, nutrition, safety, learning, and the caregiving relationships that hold a childhood together — precisely the five domains Vellarmala’s teachers found themselves rebuilding one at a time.
Speaking to EdPublica, Dr Kavitha G. Bhaskaran, a guest faculty member in the Department of Psychology and Disaster Management at Sree Sankaracharya University of Sanskrit, said children exposed to recurrent landslides can experience withdrawal, fear, nightmares and a loss of interest in activities they once enjoyed, along with a lasting fear of loud sounds, rain or even the night itself.
Dr Upasona Ghosh, Technical Expert–Climate Change and Health at the Centre for Environmental Health and a member of the WHO South-East Asia Regional Expert Group on Environmental Determinants of Health and Climate Change, told EdPublica she has observed the same patterns working with children in the Indian Sundarbans, where communities face recurrent flooding. In that setting, children were simply given colours and notebooks and asked to draw their fear — no explanation required. They could draw the sea, the floodwater, or the destruction they had witnessed, without needing the vocabulary to describe it. “The entire page might be black,” Ghosh says. “That could reflect the state of their mind.”
Ghosh also points out that the damage does not stop with the child. When a disaster disrupts a parent’s livelihood, access to healthcare and the ability to seek care for a child both suffer. Children can simultaneously lose access to school-based nutrition, health and hygiene programmes when education itself is disrupted — and they lose something harder to name. “Their school, friends, teachers and other people in their village form an important part of their social world,” she says. When that world is disrupted, recovery requires far more than reopening a classroom door.
Two Other Disasters, Two Other Answers
Wayanad is not the first place to confront this problem, and the responses elsewhere are instructive — both for what worked and for what the Vellarmala teachers had to invent on their own because it did not yet exist as institutional practice.
After Typhoon Haiyan (known locally as Yolanda) devastated the central Philippines in November 2013 — one of the strongest tropical storms ever recorded, affecting some 16 million people — the country’s Department of Education partnered with UNESCO and the Psychological Association of the Philippines to produce a formal teachers’ manual on psychosocial intervention for disaster-affected students.
The underlying premise mirrors exactly what Unnikrishnan and his colleagues discovered through trial and error: that teachers, positioned closest to children day after day, are often better placed than outside specialists to help a child begin processing trauma. In the immediate aftermath, volunteers in Cebu were running storytelling and “bibliotherapy” sessions with children in evacuation centres even before the typhoon made landfall — art and story as a first response, not an afterthought, much as the clown routine became at Vellarmala.
Nepal’s 2015 earthquake response took a more structural approach to a problem the Wayanad school solved through personal goodwill. Finn Church Aid and its Nepali partner CMC-Nepal built a peer-support network for teachers across 61 schools, training “psychosocial focal teachers” who could escalate serious cases to specialists in Kathmandu.
A needs assessment following the earthquake found more than 60 percent of affected children suffering sleep problems, alongside bullying, anxiousness and bedwetting — a set of symptoms that closely tracks what Bhaskaran describes seeing in Wayanad. What Nepal built was, in effect, an institutionalised version of what Vellarmala improvised: a formal mechanism for identifying which children need more than a routine and a smile, and where to send them.
The comparison is worth sitting with honestly rather than folding into the uplift: the expert network the Vellarmala teachers built by calling in personal favours was remarkable, but it was also contingent — a product of one community’s specific relationships and one headmaster’s persistence. Nepal’s model suggests what it might look like scaled and made durable rather than dependent on individual goodwill.
The Losses That Cannot Be Counted
There is a reason the language around this issue keeps reaching for something beyond the vocabulary of disaster economics. A damage assessment can price a destroyed school building, a washed-out road, a flattened home. It is far harder to price a child’s lost friendship, a familiar playground, or the emotional security that came from an intact community.
The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change has a formal category for this: non-economic loss and damage (NELD) — harm that resists financial quantification, spanning loss of life and health to the erosion of territory, cultural heritage, and social and cultural identity.
For children, these losses are acutely personal. Harjeet Singh, climate activist and founding director of the Satat Sampada Climate Foundation, told EdPublica that the destruction of a school should never be filed simply under lost infrastructure. “For children, a school is a sanctuary, a site of identity, and an ecosystem of emotional safety,” he says. What a disaster like Wayanad’s takes, in his framing, includes shattered social bonds and the sudden disappearance of the developmental environment a child grew up inside — which is why, he argues, recovery cannot stop at concrete and steel. “Recovery cannot just be about pouring concrete,” Singh says. “It must be about restoring the social fabric.”
This is no longer only a conceptual argument. The Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage, operational under the UNFCCC since 2022 and hosted in the Philippines with the World Bank as its interim trustee, holds close to $488 million, with a first round of disbursements — roughly $250 million — scheduled to begin rolling out in 2025 and 2026. Mental health and psychosocial support is explicitly listed among the categories countries can submit project proposals for, alongside cultural heritage preservation and dignified relocation.
In principle, this means the kind of psychosocial infrastructure Nepal built with international NGO funding after 2015 — and the kind Vellarmala’s teachers had to invent themselves in 2024 — now has a formal funding channel it could be built through, if Kerala or the Government of India chose to apply.
What India’s Own Guidelines Say
India is not without a policy framework for exactly this problem — which makes the Vellarmala story more pointed, not less. The National Disaster Management Authority, working with the Tata Institute of Social Sciences’ Rahbar programme, updated its National Disaster Management Guidelines on Mental Health and Psychosocial Support Services in Disasters in 2023, setting out a trauma-informed, whole-of-society approach meant to be built into every stage of the disaster management cycle, not bolted on afterward.
Alongside it sits the older National School Safety Policy Guidelines of 2016, which task School Management Committees and a designated “Safety Focal Point Teacher” in each school with disaster preparedness — including, on paper, psychosocial elements, though the bulk of that programme’s implementation history runs toward physical safety: building codes, mock drills, evacuation plans.
Two things are worth sitting with here. First, the guidelines exist — India is not starting from zero the way some of its neighbours were in 2015. Second, none of what the guidelines describe appears to have reached Vellarmala in July 2024. What the teachers built — the interest-mapping, the expert network, the sustained follow-through into exam season — was invented on the ground, by people with no formal psychosocial training, drawing on personal contacts rather than a state or district implementation plan.
That gap between the guideline and the ground is, in its own way, the story: India has written down roughly what Nepal built through international NGO funding, but writing it down and delivering it to a village school in Meppadi panchayat during the actual emergency turned out to be two very different things.
What This Adds Up To
Set side by side, Wayanad, Tacloban and the villages of rural Nepal point toward the same conclusion from three different directions: formal mental health infrastructure for children after a climate disaster is, almost everywhere, arriving late, underfunded, or not at all — and the gap is being filled, when it is filled, by whoever is standing closest to the child. Sometimes that is a trained peer-support teacher network built with international funding. Sometimes it is two teachers in clown costumes who happened to believe art might help.
Both approaches worked, to a point. But only one of them is replicable on demand, in a district that doesn’t happen to have a headmaster with the right personal contacts. That is the uncomfortable finding underneath the uplifting parts of this story: what saved Vellarmala’s children was extraordinary improvisation under pressure, not policy — and extraordinary improvisation is, by definition, not something the next disaster-hit school can count on.
Rebuilding a Childhood
Chooralmala’s teachers never had the power to restore everything the landslide took. They could not bring back the children who died. They could not recreate the old school, or return the community to what it was before July 30, 2024.
What they did was give children back a routine when their lives had been upended. They found each child’s individual talent when grief had become the only story anyone was telling about them. They brought artists, scientists and experts into children’s lives who would otherwise never have crossed paths with a village school in Wayanad. They encouraged children to dance, sing, perform, experiment and compete — and when children struggled, as the SSLC refusals showed they still would, the teachers stayed rather than declaring the recovery finished.
What Chooralmala’s teachers proved is not that children are resilient. That word is used too easily after disasters, as though recovery is something that simply happens with time. It isn’t. Resilience had to be built—patiently, deliberately, by teachers who chose to replace silence with music, grief with art, isolation with friendship, and fear with purpose.
The tragedy is that none of this should have depended on extraordinary people doing extraordinary things. By the time the next flood, landslide or cyclone tears through another school, children should not have to wait for a headmaster with the right contacts or two teachers willing to arrive dressed as clowns. They should find a system that already knows how to help them heal.
Climate change is making disasters more frequent, putting schools in the path of floods, landslides and storms. When classrooms disappear, books are lost and playgrounds are buried, rebuilding the school is only the beginning. The harder task is helping children rebuild the sense of safety, routine and childhood that the disaster took from them.
Climate
The Himalayas Are Under Pressure From Above, Below and Within
The Himalayas are changing in ways that are becoming harder to ignore. As glaciers retreat and permafrost warms, avalanches, landslides and other hazards are becoming more difficult to predict, while growing settlements are putting more people in harm’s way. The recent disaster in Nepal is a reminder that the region needs better warning systems, safer planning and stronger cooperation before the next disaster strikes.
The Himalayas are often described as a region increasingly vulnerable to climate change. But the risks facing the world’s youngest major mountain range are more complicated than warming alone. Glaciers are retreating, permafrost is degrading, avalanches remain a persistent threat and settlements are expanding into unstable mountain terrain. At the same time, the geological forces that created the Himalayas have never stopped.
The recent disaster in Nepal has brought these overlapping risks into sharp focus. Speaking during a discussion on the Nepal floods, Hridayesh Joshi, visiting writer at Carbon Copy, described the event as comparable in scale to the 2013 Kedarnath disaster. He pointed to a succession of disasters across the Himalayas, including Kedarnath, Chamoli, Joshimath and Dharali, as evidence of a growing pattern of extreme events.
But the danger is not coming from a single source.
A Mountain Range That is Still Moving
The Himalayas are not a static landscape. They exist along one of the world’s most active continental collision zones, where the Indian Plate continues to converge with the Eurasian Plate at roughly 40–50 mm a year. The Indian Plate is being pushed beneath the Eurasian Plate, generating enormous stresses in the Earth’s crust and making the region highly earthquake-prone.
The same collision that continues to shape and raise the Himalayas is also responsible for much of their seismic instability. The crust is compressed, folded and fractured as the two plates continue to push against each other.
This geological pressure does not mean that every Himalayan landslide or flood is caused by tectonic movement. But it creates a fundamentally unstable mountain environment in which earthquakes, rock failures and other processes can interact.
The Himalayas are also geologically young. In the Nepal disaster discussed by cryosphere specialist Dr Farooq Azam of ICIMOD, the underlying geology was an important part of the story. Much of the affected area contains sedimentary rock formations that are vulnerable to weathering. That creates a landscape where climate-driven changes can amplify existing geological weaknesses.
The Ice Changing The Terrain
Glacier retreat is altering that terrain further. As glaciers recede, they expose rock surfaces that absorb more heat. They can also leave behind loose debris. At elevations of around 5,000–6,000 metres, permafrost—the frozen ground beneath the surface—can also begin to warm and degrade as temperatures rise.
Azam said the Nepal disaster appeared to involve a combination of climatic and geological processes rather than a single trigger. This matters because a warming mountain does not simply lose ice. It can change the stability of the material holding the mountain together.
ICIMOD reported in March 2026 that ice-loss rates across the Hindu Kush Himalaya have doubled since 2000. The region’s glaciers have lost up to 27 metres of ice thickness since 1975. The consequences can extend well beyond the glacier itself. In the Everest region, for example, a 2024 glacial lake outburst flood was triggered after a rock avalanche struck a glacial lake, generating a displacement wave and releasing about 156,000 cubic metres of water. Nepal has experienced more than 90 GLOFs since the early 1920s.
Avalanches are an older warning
Avalanches add another layer to the Himalayan risk. A regional assessment of snow and ice avalanches identified 681 avalanche events between 1972 and 2022, resulting in more than 3,100 deaths across eight countries in High Mountain Asia. India accounted for 952 recorded deaths and Nepal for 508.
The numbers also reveal why simply counting floods does not capture the region’s vulnerability. Avalanches can affect communities, roads, infrastructure and people living far below the high-altitude slopes.
The research found that most recorded avalanches occurred between January and March. It also noted that only 21% of recorded events had a reported impact, meaning the available database does not represent every avalanche that occurs in the region. Avalanches therefore need to be considered alongside landslides, GLOFs and flash floods rather than treated as an isolated winter hazard.
People are moving into the hazard zone
Natural hazards become disasters when people and infrastructure are exposed to them. Joshi pointed to a dramatic increase in population in parts of the Himalayan region. According to the figures he cited, the population in the area has increased by nearly 600% over the past five decades, while the area under habitation is projected to expand substantially by 2030.
Azam similarly highlighted the absence of a comprehensive land-use policy across the Himalayas. In countries such as Nepal and Bhutan, settlements are often concentrated in gorges, where communities can be particularly exposed to sudden floods, landslides and rockfalls.
This creates a dangerous overlap: climate change is altering the physical environment while development is increasing the number of people and assets exposed to it. Hydropower is a particularly important example. The 2021 Chamoli disaster damaged hydropower infrastructure, while more recent Himalayan disasters have again exposed the vulnerability of power projects and other infrastructure to cascading hazards.
The warning system has a blind spot
One of the biggest problems is that there is no single early-warning system capable of detecting every Himalayan hazard. Azam noted that existing systems are largely designed to detect glacial lake outburst floods. But the Nepal event did not originate from a conventional glacial lake. The critical movement occurred beneath the rocky surface, making it much harder to identify in advance.
The solution, he argues, requires a different level of monitoring: high-resolution imagery, systems capable of detecting ground movement, machine-learning models and more weather stations across the mountains.
That is a formidable challenge. Monitoring the Himalayas continuously is difficult because of their enormous size, extreme elevations and limited accessibility. But the alternative is increasingly expensive.
Climate risk is becoming an economic risk
The consequences are no longer limited to vulnerable mountain communities. Ulka Kelkar of WRI India pointed out that businesses and critical infrastructure are also increasingly exposed to climate-related losses. Hydropower projects in India, for example, have already been affected by Himalayan disasters.
Kelkar also argues that insurance cannot be treated as the only financial response. As climate-related disasters become more frequent and geographically widespread, insurers themselves face growing exposure. She proposes regional catastrophe funds that could combine government compensation, international finance, insurance and reinsurance mechanisms.
The same logic applies to adaptation. Private capital is unlikely to finance enough adaptation on its own because many adaptation measures benefit entire communities rather than generating easily recoverable financial returns. Kelkar argues that climate resilience therefore needs to be integrated into government budgets across sectors.
The Himalayas need a regional response
The Himalayas do not follow national borders, but disaster management largely does. Rivers, glaciers, weather systems and mountain ranges connect India, Nepal, Bhutan, China and Pakistan. Yet data-sharing between countries remains inconsistent. Kelkar noted that some existing arrangements operate only during the flood season, even as changing climate patterns create risks throughout the year. Geopolitical tensions can further disrupt these channels.
That makes regional cooperation as important as local preparedness.
The challenge facing the Himalayas is therefore not simply that climate change is producing more extreme weather. It is that warming is interacting with a young, tectonically active and geologically fragile mountain system, while people and infrastructure are moving deeper into that system.
The Himalayas are moving from below. Ice is changing from above. Rock and frozen ground are becoming less stable. Avalanches and landslides can turn those changes into sudden disasters. The question is no longer whether the Himalayas are hazardous. It is whether the systems built around them can adapt quickly enough.
Climate
560 Million Children, One Overheating Planet
New research finds that up to 560 million children under ten are already living through at least one extra month of dangerous heat every year because of human-induced climate change — nearly triple the exposure faced by people in their sixties. South Asia, Southeast Asia and West Africa carry the heaviest load. EdPublica breaks down the numbers.
Children and heat stress are becoming an increasingly serious climate risk, with 560 million children under 10 already exposed to at least one additional month of dangerous heat each year because of human-induced climate change.
In Chennai, Divya watches the clock more than the calendar. Her son is two. Most evenings she decides against the playground — the heat, the risk of dehydration, sunburn on skin that has barely had two summers to toughen up — and he stays indoors instead, missing the other children who might have become his friends. “I’m really worried that he won’t be able to experience the childhood that I did,” she says. It is not a single bad week she is describing. It is most of the year, most years, and she is far from alone in making that calculation.
Children and heat stress: The numbers behind a warming childhood
New research now puts a number on what parents like Divya have been working out for themselves. A study published in Science Advances by an international team led by the VUB’s Department of Water and Climate — with collaborators from ETH Zurich, Oxford, the University of Waikato and the Potsdam Institute — is the first to quantify, age group by age group, how much of the world’s heat exposure can be pinned specifically on human-induced climate change rather than natural variability. The answer, for children aged 0–9, is stark: 560 million of them (43 per cent of all children in that age bracket worldwide) are already exposed to at least one additional month of dangerous heat stress a year that would not exist in a world without fossil-fuel emissions. That is nearly three times the 190 million people aged 60–69 (30 per cent) facing the same additional burden.
What “heat stress” actually means here
The study doesn’t count ordinary hot days. It uses wet-bulb globe temperature (WBGT) — a measure that folds in humidity, sunlight and wind, not just the thermometer reading — and defines a “heat stress day” as one where shaded WBGT crosses 28°C, the threshold at which health guidance recommends reduced activity or structured rest. An “additional” heat stress day is one that attribution science shows would not have occurred in a pre-industrial climate.
This distinction matters because humid heat is far more dangerous than dry heat: once humidity climbs high enough, sweat stops evaporating, and the body’s main cooling mechanism simply fails. A companion explainer accompanying the study notes that the same 30°C can feel pleasant at 30 per cent humidity and be suffocating — even lethal over time — at 85 per cent. Extreme heat already kills roughly half a million people a year, making it the deadliest form of extreme weather, and researchers estimate that nine in ten of those deaths go uncounted in official records.
How the numbers were built: researchers combined 2023 population data with climate models and attribution science — the branch of climate research that isolates how much of an observed trend is due to human-caused warming rather than natural variability — comparing today’s climate against a modelled pre-industrial one with today’s population overlaid. The 1.5°C and 2°C projections assume a “middle-of-the-road” path for both future emissions and demographic change.
The scale, by the numbers
- 560 million children aged 0–9 (43%) face at least one additional month of climate-driven heat stress today.
- 350 million (27%) face at least five months of total heat stress a year — nearly triple the 120 million adults aged 60–69 (18%) who do.
- Climate change has nearly tripled the number of children enduring five-plus months of dangerous heat, from 120 million in a hypothetical world without warming to 350 million today.
- Under 1.5°C of global warming — a threshold current policy trajectories are likely to overshoot — exposure rises to 620 million children (49%).
- Under 2°C, it rises further to 650 million children (59%), with 420 million (37%) facing five-plus months a year.
Children are hit hardest not because of where they happen to live, but because of demographics colliding with geography: the tropical and lower-income regions where climate-driven humid heat is intensifying fastest also happen to have the youngest populations. As global warming continues, the proportion of children exposed keeps climbing even in countries where ageing populations mean the absolute number of children eventually falls.
South Asia carries the heaviest load
Three regions post the highest absolute numbers of exposed children: South Asia, Southeast Asia and West Africa. South Asia alone accounts for the largest single share.
- South Asia (SAS): 167.4 million children (62%) are exposed to at least one additional month of heat stress today. Climate change has doubled the number enduring five-plus months — from 80 million to 156.6 million children, or 58 per cent of the region’s under-tens. At 2°C, that climbs to 93 per cent facing at least a month, and 73 per cent facing five months or more.
- India: 145 million children (61%) are exposed today, with the five-month-plus group doubling from 59 million to 118 million (50%). At 2°C, 96 per cent of Indian children aged 0–9 — 169 million — would face at least a month of added heat stress annually, and 120 million (68%) would face five months or more.
- Bangladesh: 79 per cent of children already exposed; the five-month-plus group has nearly tripled to 26 million (91% of the country’s under-tens).
- Southeast Asia (SEA): 90 per cent of children exposed today; the five-month-plus figure has nearly quadrupled to 72.6 million (72%).
- West Africa (WAF): 96 per cent of children exposed today across the region; nineteen countries — including Benin, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Mali, Niger, Senegal and Sierra Leone — already have effectively 100 per cent of their under-ten population facing at least one additional month of heat stress a year.
The India figures carry particular weight: three in five Indian children under ten are already losing at least a month a year to dangerous heat that would not exist without fossil-fuel emissions, and that share could approach universal — 96 per cent — within a couple of decades of continued warming.
Voices behind the data
Bhavreen Kandhari, founder of the Delhi-based parents’ collective Warrior Moms, described watching “childhood shrink” in the capital’s summers, telling researchers that mothers now check temperature readings the way they once checked air-quality indices before letting children outside. She noted that India has recently classified heatwaves as a notified natural calamity — an overdue acknowledgement, she said, of what families have lived through for years.
In Chennai, dermatologist and mother Vaaruni Ravishankar said the heat has pushed her toddler’s outdoor time later and later into the evening, edging out the unstructured outdoor play that paediatric development research consistently favours.
And from Bangladesh, 17-year-old child campaigner Imtiaz described nights that stay warm long after sunset, meaning children “wake up still tired” before another exhausting day of heat begins — a pattern he said drains energy, concentration and, ultimately, education.
Rosa Pietroiusti, the study’s lead author and a PhD researcher at VUB, said children in developing countries face disproportionate climate exposure “despite contributing the least to historical greenhouse gas emissions,” while poverty, poor housing and stretched health systems leave many with few ways to protect themselves. Senior author Professor Wim Thiery called for both drastic emissions cuts in line with the Paris Agreement and a sharp increase in climate finance and adaptation support — heat action plans, resilient housing, stronger public health systems — for the countries carrying the heaviest exposure.
An echo of Wayanad
This is a different hazard from the one EdPublica‘s Vaishnavi VS covered last month in After Kerala’s Deadliest Landslide, the Hardest Thing to Rebuild Was Childhood — a landslide rather than a heatwave, a single catastrophic event rather than a slow accumulation of hot months. That reporting followed GVHSS Vellarmala, the Wayanad school where 33 students died and 97 more were directly affected when the Chooralmala–Mundakkai landslide killed 298 people in July 2024, and traced how teachers with no trauma training improvised their way to a full recovery — mapping each surviving child’s interests, bringing in outside experts, and eventually getting seven grief-stricken students back into their SSLC exam hall for a 100 per cent pass rate.
The story also cited a UNICEF finding that puts heat squarely back in this frame: at least 242 million students across 85 countries had their schooling disrupted by climate extremes in 2024 alone, with heatwaves alone affecting an estimated 171 million students worldwide and South Asia the worst-hit region at 128 million. Landslide or heatwave, sudden or slow-accumulating, the two stories describe the same underlying vulnerability — children’s education and wellbeing absorbing the cost of a warming climate, and recovery systems that are, more often than not, being built on the fly rather than in advance.
Back in Chennai, none of this is abstract to Divya. She isn’t tracking wet-bulb globe temperatures or reading climate-attribution papers; she is deciding, most evenings, whether it is safe enough to let her son go outside. Multiply her calculation by 560 million children, in cities and villages from Dhaka to Dakar, and the shape of the number stops being statistical. It is a generation quietly being kept indoors, evening by evening, by a hazard their parents did not create and cannot switch off.
Featured image: Indian girl covering her face with her clothing during the harsh Indian summers. Image credit: Anurag Jamwal/UnSplash
Climate
India Is Facing More Climate Disasters. Who Pays When They Happen?
India insures only about 5% of its disaster-related losses, leaving most of the financial burden with households, businesses and governments. Globally, natural catastrophes caused around 100 billion dollars in economic losses in the first half of 2026, of which 42% was insured, according to Swiss Re.
A flood can destroy a house in a few hours. Paying for that loss can take years. For an insured homeowner, part of the cost may come from an insurer. A farmer with crop insurance may recover some agricultural losses. But much of India’s disaster damage has no equivalent financial protection. Estimates cited by Reuters put the share of disaster-related losses covered by insurance in India at only around 5%.
The contrast with the global picture is significant. The Swiss Re Institute estimated that natural catastrophes caused about $100 billion in economic losses worldwide in the first half of 2026. Around 42 billion dollars, or 42%, was insured. For India, the much smaller share means that most of the financial burden remains with households, businesses and governments.
Where Does the Money Come From?
India already has a system for financing disaster response. The State Disaster Response Fund (SDRF) is the main source of immediate relief for states. The National Disaster Response Fund (NDRF) can provide additional assistance after severe disasters. But relief and insurance do different jobs.
Government assistance can help a family whose house has been damaged, but it does not necessarily cover the full cost of rebuilding. A state can spend public money repairing a damaged road or bridge, but that does not recover the economic activity lost while it was unusable.
For families, the difference may have to be met through savings or borrowing. For farmers, losing a crop can affect the next season as well. Small businesses may lose income while they repair or replace damaged assets. Some losses may never be recovered. That is the significance of the insurance gap. It shows how little of the financial risk has been transferred away from those directly exposed to disasters.
India Does Insure Some Disaster Risks
The country already has a substantial agricultural insurance system. The Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY) covers crops against several risks, including drought, floods, cyclones, inundation and hailstorms. But crop insurance covers the crop, not necessarily everything else a farmer owns.
A flood can destroy a crop, house, livestock, machinery and shop at the same time. Only some of these losses may have insurance protection. The wider gap is therefore not simply about whether people have insurance. It is about how much of the assets and economic activity exposed to disasters are financially protected.
A Faster Way to Pay
One approach being explored is parametric insurance. Traditional insurance generally requires the actual damage to be assessed before a claim is settled. Parametric insurance uses a predefined trigger — such as a particular level of rainfall, wind speed or temperature. Once the trigger is reached, a predetermined payment is made. The advantage is speed. A payout does not have to wait for every individual loss to be assessed.
India has already experimented with such models. Nagaland has used parametric disaster insurance, while other pilots have examined risks such as floods and extreme heat. A nationwide climate-linked insurance programme has also been discussed, although India does not yet have a comprehensive national disaster-insurance scheme.
Parametric insurance also has a weakness: the trigger may not perfectly match an individual’s actual loss. A household could suffer serious damage without crossing the policy threshold, or receive a payout that does not correspond exactly to its losses. The design of the trigger therefore matters.
Kerala is Trying Another Approach
Kerala is among the states looking more closely at disaster-risk financing. The Kerala State Disaster Management Authority has been developing a Disaster Risk Financing and Insurance (DRFI) framework, including work on parametric and indemnity insurance.
In February 2026, the state gave in-principle approval for a comprehensive group insurance scheme for Below Poverty Line families, combining the two approaches. The idea is to arrange part of the financial protection before a disaster occurs rather than relying entirely on relief after it. That distinction becomes important for a state that has experienced repeated floods and landslides.
Insurance Cannot Undo a Disaster
Insurance is only one part of the equation. Reducing exposure through safer construction, better drainage, land-use planning, early-warning systems and stronger infrastructure remains essential. But prevention and insurance address different parts of the problem.
Prevention can reduce the size of the loss. Insurance can determine who carries the remaining financial risk. This matters because the uninsured portion does not disappear. It moves elsewhere — into government relief and reconstruction budgets, household savings, loans, business losses and delayed recovery.
For India, the challenge is therefore not simply to sell more insurance policies. It is to decide which disaster risks should be borne by households and businesses, which should be pooled through insurance, and which require government backing. As disaster losses become more financially significant, that decision will increasingly affect how quickly families recover, how much governments have to spend after each event, and how much of the cost is ultimately borne by people who had the least capacity to absorb it.
The most revealing number after a disaster may therefore not be the amount of damage alone. It may be how much of that damage was actually insured.
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