The UN Children’s Fund warned on Thursday that weather disasters brought on by climate change—including floods, droughts, storms, and wildfires—caused 43.1 million child displacements between 2016 and 2021 and criticized the lack of attention given to victims.
Co-author Laura Healy told AFP that the statistics only indicated the “tip of the iceberg,” with many more potentially affected, in a comprehensive research on the subject that included the heartbreaking stories of some of the children affected.
“We moved our belongings to the highway, where we lived for weeks,” recounts Sudanese child Khalid Abdul Azim, whose flooded village was only accessible by boat.
In 2017, sisters Mia and Maia Bravo watched flames engulf their trailer in California from the back of the family minivan.
“I was afraid, in shock,” Maia says in the report. “I would stay up all night.”
The age of the victims is typically not taken into consideration in statistics on internal relocation brought on by climate disasters.
The Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, a non-governmental organization, and UNICEF collaborated to analyze the data and uncover the hidden costs for children.
According to the analysis, 43.1 million children were uprooted from their homes between 2016 and 2021 as a result of four different types of climatic disasters (floods, storms, droughts, and wildfires), which have become more frequent as a result of global warming.
Ninety-five percent of those relocating were brought on by storms and floods. “It’s the equivalent of about 20,000 child displacements every day,” Healy told AFP, underscoring how the children affected are then at risk of suffering other traumas, such as being separated from their parents or falling victim to child traffickers.
The data reflect the number of displacements and not the number of children affected, as the same child could be uprooted more than once.
The figures do not allow for a distinction between those evacuated before a weather event, and those forced to leave in the wake of a disaster.
And, according to Healy, the number of displacements due to drought is “radically underreported,” because they are less sudden and thus more difficult to quantify.
“This is just the tip of the iceberg based on the available data that we have,” she said.
“The reality is with the impacts of climate change, or better tracking of displacement when it comes to slow onset events, that the number of children who are uprooted from their homes is going to be much greater.”
