Analysis by Maryam Farouk
Imagine waking up not to the sound of your alarm clock, but to floodwaters rushing into your bedroom. Imagine your school turning into an emergency shelter. Your favorite meal disappearing because crops failed. The air too toxic to breathe.
This is real life for millions of kids across the globe and it’s not coming one day. Climate change is happening now and reshaping what it means to grow up.
In places like Bangladesh, Somalia, and even parts of the U.S., kids are already living in crisis mode. Rising heat, wildfires, violent storms, and severe droughts are no longer rare, they’re the new normal. According to UNICEF, nearly one billion children are now at extremely high risk due to climate-related disasters.
With temperatures skyrocketing, heatwaves can now trigger deadly heatstroke and dehydration, especially in young kids. Meanwhile, wildfires and emissions are making the air unbreathable. Asthma, allergies, and chronic coughs are becoming normal childhood experiences.
In other parts of the world, floods wipe out clean water supplies. Sanitation breaks down. Cholera and deadly diarrhea spread fast, especially in refugee camps and disaster zones where kids have nowhere to run.
Climate change is messing with how food is grown, caught, and raised. Crops are failing. Livestock are dying. Oceans are warming while 45 million children are now suffering from malnutrition.
No school, no safety, no stability
When floods or fires destroy schools, or turn them into shelters, kids are left without classrooms, teachers, or even friends. Some never return to school. In places like Nigeria, others are forced into child labor, marriage, or worse, trafficking and abuse.
For displaced children in some parts of the country, home becomes a memory. Every time there’s another disaster from, seeing your neighborhood underwater to living with the constant fear that the next storm could take everything.
Kids today are experiencing something new which is eco-anxiety, the fear that the world is falling apart and no one’s doing enough to stop it.
So…what now?
Here’s the truth: kids didn’t create this mess, but we’re the ones living in it and unless something changes, we will be the ones who pay the highest price.
That’s why action can’t wait, but not from politicians, not from corporations and not from adults who think this is tomorrow’s problem.
We need climate education in every school, resilient homes and cities. Clean energy. Fairer systems and we need people to start listening to the generation that is inheriting this planet.
Because we’re not just victims we are change makers and we’re already fighting.
The question is, will you join us, or will you watch us burn?
