Children’s Climate Risk Index for Least Developed Countries

The climate crisis is a child rights’ crisis. It is a direct threat to a child’s ability to survive, grow, and thrive. Children and young people are the least responsible for climate change, and yet will bear the greatest burden of its impacts, especially in Least Developed Countries (LDCs).

To avert the worst impacts of the climate crisis for children and young people living in LDCs, comprehensive and urgent action is required, including adaptation and resilience building. Together, such efforts offer the most effective way to protect child lives and family livelihoods from the immediate and expected impacts. Increasing the resilience of essential services including health and nutrition, water and sanitation, education, and social protection is imperative to reduce the impact of climate change and prevent millions of children and their families from slipping into extreme poverty by 2030.

Adaptation and resilience measures must be based on a careful assessment of the type, nature, and extent of population exposure to specific climate and environmental hazards, shocks, or stresses, as well as the degree to which children are vulnerable. Solutions must be appropriate to social and cultural contexts and must not take away the agency of local populations or overlook the crucial role of ecosystem restoration and local knowledge in adaptation. 

To develop effective adaptation measures, it is necessary to first understand the context-specific climate hazards that children in LDCs face. To that end, this report presents data from UNICEF’s Children’s Climate Risk Index (CCRI) as related explicitly to Least Developed Countries.