Six months into 2026, three times more children were exposed to extreme temperatures compared to the whole of 2025, according to a child rights organisation.
Two-thirds of children across Western Europe were exposed to extreme temperatures in six-and-a-half-month in 2026, which is three times the figure from the whole of 2025 – and more than any entire year since 2003, according to a child rights organisation, Save the Children.
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
"With climate change and also specifically heatwaves and wildfires, everything that affects everyone affects children even more,” said Matilde Angeltveit, senior advisor and global climate advocacy lead at Save the Children, told Euronews. “As climate change is worsening every year that passes, the impacts on children are also worsening,” she said.
In Germany, the number of children exposed to extreme heat in the first six months of this year was larger than the past five years combined. In the UK, 10 million children – more than the total for any single year in the past 30 years – have been exposed to extreme heat in the first six months of this year, according to the organisation.
Particularly vulnerable
Children are particularly vulnerable to the heat as they are undergoing physical development and have lower capacity for body temperature regulation, which puts them at high risk of electrolyte imbalance, fever, respiratory disease, and kidney disease.
“It impacts specifically the children who are already kind of suffering from worse health or from poverty or from other circumstances,” said Angeltveit, calling the climate change “inequality exacerbator.”
It also has a toll on education, as schools were closed in June in both France and the UK to protect children from dangerous heat as temperatures surged.
The data for the full year is expected to be “even more severe,” the organisation warned, as the current findings include winter and spring months.
Speeding the climate action
To reverse the trend, Angeltveit urged the governments to switch from fossil fuels to renewable energy.
“That should be a kind of no-brainer to implement climate action in a quicker and more urgent and more decisive way,” she said, adding that this could dramatically curb children's exposure to climate change dangers.
Almost a third of the world's children born in 2020 – about 38 million – would be spared a lifetime's "unprecedented" exposure to extreme heat if the world can meet the 1.5°C warming target by 2100, a key climate goal from the Paris Agreement to limit global temperature rise, according to a report by Save the Children and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel last year.
“Without drastic mitigation action to reduce emissions and limit warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, … the children of these low- and middle-income countries will be burdened with the most dangerous impacts of the climate crisis,” the report said.
