Climate Change Affects Children’s Academics

Manasi Saraf Joshi

Pune, 10th December 2024: The 2024 southwest monsoon season in India was 108% of its Long Period Average (LPA) — way above its normal LPA. The monsoon this year also had a few days of heavy to very heavy rainfall, disrupting lives. Among all this mayhem, children and their schools were affected the most.

In Pune city, school-going children had four days of holidays owing to the India Meteorological Department (IMD) forecast of heavy rainfall.

As winter falls, schools in Delhi get undeclared holidays owing to bad air. Over the years, the problem of bad, unbreathable air in Delhi and NCR has become grave.

In Odisha or Chennai, the academic calendar is hit due to warnings of low-pressure areas turning into storms.

After Cyclone Amphan, the Sundarbans delta in West Bengal reported a significant spike in child marriages. On the western side such as Rann of Kutch or Thar desert, the rising temperature during summer makes it impossible to attend school.

Apart from mental and physical health, climate change is also affecting academics, resulting in students not receiving enough time to grasp the subjects.

According to the latest Global Climate Risk Index 2021, India was the 7th most affected country in the world due to climate change in 2019.

According to a UNICEF study, approximately 36 per cent of children under 18 years of age in India were exposed to high heatwave frequency in 2020, and this is expected to increase to 100 per cent by 2050 (UNICEF, 2022). The study also concludes that 83 per cent of children under 18 years of age in India will be exposed to extremely high temperatures.

Co-ordinator at a Pune Municipal Corporation-run school, Vaishali Shewale said, “This monsoon, children had four days of holiday. When schools have to declare a holiday, the academic planning is disturbed. If the collector declares a holiday for one day, the number of absentees on the subsequent days increases, paralysing the teachers to begin new chapters or complete the incomplete ones Similarly, even if the students get a holiday, the teachers have to come to school and re-plan the schedule. The missing days of the students have to be compensated by having schools on weekends or other planned holiday days.”

Gayatri Bapat, a school teacher at a city school said, “Private schools are either conducted either or we have to make worksheets for the students so that they do not miss out on the academics during emergency or precautionary holidays.

Students are not interested in submitting this extra work and many leave it incomplete. Parents, too, are averse to the idea of conducting school on a Saturday as they have weekend plans.”

Both the teachers agreed that transport to the school also becomes a major hurdle as working parents do not get such holidays and it is difficult to send children to school on a Saturday.

Senior educationist Vasant Kalpande, however, finds this problem as a perceived one.

“When I was a school teacher, I was posted in rural areas or semi-urban areas. The school campuses there were huge and schools would function in two shifts. The majority of the students would go home for lunch. There were no fans in the classrooms. All schools and Maharashtra State Board for Secondary and Higher Secondary (SSC) examinations used to be conducted in March or April. Nobody complained about it,” he said.

The former SSC board chairman said, “Parents are changing. Children go to school situated far away from their place of residence. Even I faced heavy to heavy rainfall or scorching sun during my childhood but neither the parents, nor the school or the government found it necessary to declare a holiday.”

Doctor Bhushoon Shukla, a practising child and family psychiatrist, felt the same way. According to him, these are all man-made problems. The problem arises when children are sent to faraway schools but the blame falls on climate change.

What UNESCO and UNICEF reports say?

The “Seeds of Change: UNESCO 2023 State of the Education Report for India on Education to Address Climate Change.” This fifth edition of its annual flagship report is a testament to the growing global acknowledgement of the climate crisis, particularly in regions like India, which continually grapple with its severe ramifications.

According to its report, in Maharashtra, India, drought led to a 4.1% reduction in mathematics scores and a 2.7% reduction in reading scores a study by UNICEF mentioned.

Climate change has several tangible and intangible impacts on the overall education ecosystem, particularly in India, caused by increasing heat stress and heatwaves, erratic weather events, climate-induced displacement and migration.

In India, the education sector is being reformed through the National Education Policy 2020, as well as through the revision of the National Curriculum Framework for School Education 2023 (NCERT, 2023).

India was the 7th most affected country in the world due to climate change in 2019, as per the latest Global Climate Risk Index 2021 (Eckstein et al., 2021). In 2019, India recorded the highest number of fatalities (2,267) and highest absolute loss (US$68.8 million) caused by an intense monsoon season that brought 110 per cent of normal rainfall and eight tropical cyclones, including Cyclone Fani (Eckstein et al., 2021).

The adverse impacts of climate change and lack of sufficient infrastructure compound the disruption to education caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and hinder an affected region’s recovery from it. A 2020 study conducted by the Ministry of Education revealed that the COVID-19 pandemic had a severe impact on the education of approximately 240 million schoolchildren in India (Department of School Education & Literacy, while a study by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) revealed that around 27 per cent of all enrolled students lacked access to the laptops, computers or smartphones necessary to attend virtual classrooms during the COVID-19 pandemic (Arif et al., 2022).

According to the Global Risks Report 2023, natural disasters and extreme weather events are among the top five risks for India (WEF, 2023). During the Kerala floods in 2018, over 1,700 schools were used as relief camps due to a lack of other appropriate facilities. Even when schools reopened, attendance was as low as 20 per cent due to trauma, stress and heightened family needs (UNDRR, 2020)

According to the World Health Organization’s World Malaria Report 2022, India reported 441,610 confirmed cases of malaria in 2021, most among children (WHO, 2022). Malaria causes severe illness and long-term complications and also impacts regular school attendance among children. Floods, contaminated water sources and inadequate sanitation facilities in schools can also expose children to water-borne illnesses like diarrhoea, cholera and typhoid fever, affecting their health and educational outcomes.

School drop-out rate

The effect of climate change on school drop-out rates, especially in rural and disaster-prone areas, is evident. It has been observed that while school enrolment rates have been improving (at 98.4  per cent in 2022), drop-out rates are high for the middle school stage (Grades 6 to 8) at  3 per cent, and significantly higher at the secondary school stage (Grades 9 to 10) at  12.6 per cent (Education for all in India, 2023). Drop-out rates at the secondary school stage in disaster-prone states like Odisha (27.3 per cent), Bihar (20.5 per cent), Assam (20.3 per cent), West Bengal (18 per cent) and Gujarat (17.9 per cent) are particularly alarming (MoE, 2023).