Climate change and child health: a scoping review and an expanded conceptual framework

Climate change will have a detrimental direct and indirect impact on children’s health and wellbeingClimate change is expected to have a broad impact on children’s rights and deepen the vulnerabilities of children and sub-populations at risk. Few studies have examined the direct and indirect pathways of climate change’s impact on children’s health and wellbeing. This scoping review and conceptual framework explores how climate change can have a detrimental impact on children and wellbeing.

The conceptual framework explains how greenhouse gas emissions changed the Earth’s ecosystem, climate change’s direct and indirect effects on children’s health, and how these effects interact with human activity and resilience including mitigation and adaptation. Authors reviewed 371 studies, reviews, and documents (e.g., commentaries, and grey literature) that explicitly linked a change in an exposure to a risk factor for child health to climate change or climate variability. They found evidence of climate change’s direct effects (e.g., temperature changes, precipitation pattern changes) and indirect effects (e.g., ecosystem disruption, air pollution) on children’s health. While the studies included children under 18, most of the studies focused on children aged 5 and younger.

Direct effects such as temperature changes can increase overall mortality rates, emergency department visits, other morbidities, as well as effects on respiratory and infectious diseases. Precipitation and floods impact children long-term via lack of nutrition and spread of communicable diseases. Droughts and wildfires have been associated with worse respiratory and mental health as well as undernutrition and infectious diseases. The indirect effects impact children in the short- and long-term via the intensified spread of infectious diseases e.g., malaria, dengue, and Lyme disease, as well as via air pollution, food insecurity, mental illness susceptibility, detrimental birth effects, and toxicant exposure.

The authors highlight inequities in how climate change can disproportionately impact disadvantaged children especially those that live in lower elevation coastal zones, those that lack social security nets, and the toll of infectious disease on socioeconomically vulnerable children. There are also differences in urban and rural areas with higher precipitation in urban areas, undernutrition in rural areas, and overnutrition in urban areas. However, the authors note the research has not indicated a consistent rural/urban divide.

This scoping review provides a better understanding of the effects of climate change on child health and the ways in which it is influenced by geography and socioeconomic contexts. The authors highlight the need for policy makers to strengthen these efforts that could be the solution to better resilience against climate change driven diseases. Unfortunately, children will continue to bear a high disease burden from climate change, especially those that are already vulnerable.