Prof. Craig Hutton, a Trustee with The Glacier Trust, was asked to lead a multi-university team including Universities of Edinburgh and Stirling in developing a global Child Climate Risk Index (CCRI) with UNICEF for delivery to the COP26 in Glasgow in November 2021.
In this article Craig outlines how the CCRI was formulated and what it reveals about child climate risk in Nepal.
The CCRI uses global data sources, such as the World Resource Institute and World Bank, to identify the risk of climate impacts specifically from a child and teenager perspective, providing a risk value for each country including Nepal.
This work recognises that children and adolescents have little or no agency in decision making processes and are impacted by climate change in unique ways compared to broader society. Children have particularly sensitivities to diseases, malnutrition, and disasters and are subject to the indirect effects of climate change such as migration. As well as producing global maps for 2020, the project will produce more detailed maps for Tanzania and Uganda demonstrating the need to understand child risk to climate in high spatial detail so that differences between environments such as cities and rural areas can be studied.
The 2020 CCRI was published on August 19 2021, and the projection of risk to 2050 will be released for COP26. UK partners are Edinburgh University, who lead on the climate and hazard modelling including heatwaves, floods, droughts and disease; University of Sterling, who lead the examination of the global literature on the specific challenges to children of climate change; and the University of Southampton who, as well as leading and conceptualising the overall project, are leading the development of the child vulnerability component of the work such as poverty, local livelihood types, child education level, and child health, as well as coordination of the statistical processes leading to the production of the Child Climate Risk Index (CCRI).
Nepal features in this index. Whilst Nepal ranks equal 51st on the CCRI index, with Burundi and Zimbabwe, Nepal ranks 69/200 for child vulnerability and 19/200 for climate and environmental hazards which make up the index. Within the vulnerability pillar Nepal scores particularly poorly in child nutrition, but fairs better in the education component. However, it is also noted that there is data missing on poverty and inequality for Nepal which may be significant in determining overall vulnerability. The environmental hazards pillar shows Nepal scores poorly on water scarcity and air pollution. The hope is that the team will go on to focus on a few case study countries to develop the index at a higher resolution and that Nepal could be nominated as one of these countries.