Kathrin Zangerl is a pediatrician at the Heidelberg Institute of Global Health in Germany, where she is a specialist on how climate change affects children at different stages in their lives. For instance, an infant’s developing lungs make her more susceptible to lasting harm from air pollution. A teenager, on the other hand, might be more likely to become part of the mental health pandemic among adolescents, where climate anxiety is a factor.

In other words, children have differing needs, more vulnerability, and interventions that work for adults might not work for kids.

“Children are not tiny adults,” she said.

So when Zangerl and other researchers combed through the official national climate adaptation plans of 160 countries, they were looking for consideration of the needs and roles of children, especially when it comes to health. How many countries are taking kids into account when they think about climate change?

In an article published earlier this month in The Lancet, Zangerl and her team revealed their findings: Not many.

It’s not that national climate adaptation plans have the force of law, but they can guide policymakers and attract focused funding from richer countries to low and middle-income countries. International bodies, like the United Nations, its Framework Convention on Climate Change, UNFCCC, the World Health Organization, and UNICEF, are increasingly urging countries to consider the specific needs of children in their climate policies.

The numbers were dismaying.

Nearly a third of the plans  — 28 percent —did not mention children at all. Another third — 31 percent — mentioned children in only one area, such as education. And none mentioned children’s mental health.

As Zangerl wrote in the article: “Children’s mental health is a crucial public health concern that requires immediate action.”

Sudan, one of the poorest countries in the world, scored the highest in the report for its number of mentions of children in its plan. But Zangerl said that’s grading on a curve.

“No country comprehensively addressed child health needs,” she said. “A few countries were better than others, but they weren’t really good.”

“I’m not surprised,” said Tooba Akhtar, a PhD researcher at Trinity College Dublin, who was not involved in this study. She focuses on the development and well-being of children affected by climate change.

Akhtar and two of her colleagues, Kristin Hadfield and Alina Paula Cosma, wrote a recent open letter to the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat. They looked for evidence supporting programs that would help young children cope with the emotional toll of climate disasters, and found none.

“Our hunch is that these programs do not actually exist,” Akhtar said.

This is personal for Akhtar, who grew up in Pakistan. She was recently speaking to a friend working for a nonprofit there, documenting the aftermath of the devastating 2022 floods. Camps for displaced survivors have set up makeshift schools.

“Who’s attending? Children who are already school-aged. Those under 6 are forgotten.” Akhtar said that simple programs for very young children, like shared book reading, could promote social-emotional skills and parent-child bonding, helping entire families cope with post-traumatic stress. But that’s rarely happening. “The father’s off managing the land that’s been destroyed, the mother is taking care of six other kids.”

Children’s needs, especially young children’s, are left out of climate planning, experts said, because of a lack of advocacy, a lack of funding, a lack of collaboration across government ministries, and a lack of data — conditions which all reinforce each other.

Read the full article about including children in climate planning by Anya Kamenetz at Grist.