UN Special Envoy: "The Climate Crisis Is an Education Crisis"

UN Special Envoy for Global Education Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown and Executive Director Yasmine Sherif have called on global donors to urgently mobilize more resources to scale up life-saving access to quality education for climate crisis-impacted Children.

In an op-ed, they explained that the climate crisis is an education crisis, saying: "Right here, right now, climate change is robbing millions of children and adolescents of their right to learn, their right to play and their right to feel safe and secure."

"In Pakistan deadly floods destroyed or damaged over 26,000 schools last year. This exposed over 600,000 adolescent girls to higher risks of school dropout, gender-based violence, and child marriage. In Ethiopia, girls like Mellion are going hungry and risk dropping out of school forever as a result of the ongoing drought," they recounted.

Brown and Sherif have underscored that the global climate crisis threatens the rights of every person on the planet, those who are enduring the brunt of its impact are the most vulnerable girls and boys already living in protracted crisis settings due to armed conflicts, forced displacement, and other crises.

"For them and their communities, climate change is already a daunting reality that can mean the difference between life and death, between war and peace, and between the chance to learn or not," they wrote.

They also noted that there are currently more than 224 million crisis-impacted children worldwide who urgently need education support.

With reference to a new analysis by Education Cannot Wait (ECW), they mentioned that the global fund for education in emergencies and protracted crises, hosted by UNICEF, has found that 62 million of these children have been impacted by climate hazards such as droughts, floods, cyclones and other extreme weather events since 2020.

"While these children have contributed least to the issue of climate change, they have the most to lose. Furthermore, over the last ten years, 31 million school-aged children have been displaced by the climate crisis, with 13 million in the last three years alone," they recalled.

In response, they called on global donors, the private sector, and other key partners to urgently mobilize US$150 million in additional resources to aid those impacted children. "This is an important contribution towards ECW’s overall resource mobilization target of US$1.5 billion toward the Fund’s 2023-2026 strategic plan."