Climate action to help build a climate-smart world
UNICEF and partners are monitoring, innovating and collaborating to tackle the climate crisis.
Climate change threatens the lives, health and well-being of children. They are the most vulnerable to its effects, and those who live in low-income communities are at particularly high risk of harm.
To save and protect lives and prevent climate change’s worst impacts on children, we need to act now. There are clear, practical solutions that work and irrefutable evidence of the returns on investment.
UNICEF and partners are taking climate action around the world to build stronger and more resilient communities. Read more in these four case studies on solutions for a climate-ready planet.
Paving the way for a climate resilient education system in India
India’s Maharashtra State, the country’s economic ‘capital’ with the city of Mumbai, has witnessed a seven-fold increase in drought and six-fold increase in floods and cyclones over the past decade. Groundwater is the main source of drinking water in nearly 85 per cent of rural areas and around two thirds of its area is prone to drought. The population depends heavily on boreholes or wells to meet their domestic water needs. Repeated droughts have resulted in losses of life and crop loss, relocation, and disruption to essential basic services like nutrition, health, education, and water and sanitation services. Youth from Maharashtra have been raising their voices on the climate crisis and demonstrating successful innovations at the grassroots level.
Maha Youth for Climate Action (MYCA) is a programme in partnership between the State Department of Environment and Climate Change and UNICEF Maharashtra with other partners. The platform has more than 500 youth advocates working on climate action to influence state-level climate change-related policies and programmes and raise awareness in their communities. The programme provides three levels of training covering climate action planning, climate action reporting, and climate advocacy and policy, followed by self-paced training modules on climate advocacy. UNICEF supported MYCA Fellowships to accelerate local climate actions and enable outstanding advocates to undertake green initiatives in their field. Selected MYCA Fellows receive a stipend and a mentor to help strengthen green skilling and encourage long-term youth engagement.
The MYCA initiative has trained 2.8 million youth, 465,000 children, over 10,000 teachers and 1,000 professors.
The MYCA initiative has trained 2.8 million youth, 465,000 children, over 10,000 teachers and 1,000 professors. The youth-led actions and advocacy in the State have successfully led to the government implementing climate curriculum in first and second grades covering 65,000 primary schools at the State level and plans to build up to a capacity of 100 master trainers and 10,000 schoolteachers through related trainings.
In 2022, UNICEF supported 10 MYCA youth members’ participation in the Local Conference of Youth (LCOY) along with 110 national youth delegates. The conference participants drafted a national youth statement to be submitted to the COY17 (Conference of Youth) and later to the COP presidency at COP27 in the form of a Global Youth statement. In the next three years, 700,000 young people will be engaged in low-touch action and in reporting on water conservation.
Early detection of groundwater depletion in Madagascar
The semi-arid southern region of Madagascar has been hit hard by years of severe droughts, which has left more than 4.8 million people in need of humanitarian assistance. The region has the country’s lowest water supply coverage, which is further exacerbated by climate change. The lack of rainfall and other environmental factors have also affected the region’s vegetation and agricultural production, leaving many in the region facing severe hunger. The high levels of food insecurity has pushed hundreds to leave their homes and migrate in search of more secure livelihoods. 479,000 children under 5 are expected to suffer from acute malnutrition in the region.
To better understand and predict the risks of droughts, UNICEF in collaboration with the European Union and the Ministry of Water, Energy and Hydrocarbons developed a Groundwater Early Warning System (GEWS) in the region to monitor groundwater and predict droughts. The system tracks the quality of groundwater and forecasts the likelihood of droughts using a combination of underground water pressure measurements and satellite data. Historical drought trends are determined from long-term averages (20 years for rainfalls and 17 years for the vegetation index) that serve as a baseline against which current conditions are compared throughout the year, making it possible to differentiate levels of drought severity.
The system has proven to be a critical tool for understanding the south of Madagascar’s vulnerability to recurrent droughts and its ability to track precipitation and vegetation growth. It is now possible to monitor drought and provide early warnings for better and more proactive responses. The system also improves planning for drought adaptation practices such as water trucking and helps trigger rapid responses.
It is now possible to monitor drought and provide early warnings for better and more proactive responses.
GEWS data are compared with food security and nutrition assessments to better target vulnerable populations in the drought-affected southern districts. A monthly drought-focused bulletin, based on the collected data, is produced and shared amongst WASH partners, the communities and farmers to provide them with information to better guide the planning and implementation of water programmes and the cost of water.
UNICEF is currently expanding the groundwater mapping so all new water points have online reporting capability. The mapping will monitor water usage and ensure that there is no over-extraction from the groundwater resources, which are made even more fragile by climate change.
Innovations in climate risk reduction in Venezuela
Disaster risk reduction is an essential element of responding to climate change as children increasingly need holistic solutions that address both the impacts of sudden-onset disasters such as hurricanes and floods and resilient solutions that promote climate-smart development for the long term.
In partnership and coordination with the Minister of Water and implementing partners, UNICEF Venezuela supported the implementation of integrated WASH and Climate, Environment, Energy, and Disaster Risk Reduction (CEED) innovations, contributing to community resilience and adaptation to climate change. In 2023, UNICEF and partners enabled access to safe water for 256,500 people in five states through the rehabilitation of water pumping, treatment, disinfection and distribution systems and installation of solar-powered technologies.
In 2023, UNICEF and partners enabled access to safe water for 256,500 people in five states.
In the remote indigenous community of San Francisco del Guayo, six hours away by boat from Tucupita, the capital of Delta Amacuro State, local communities used to consume untreated water directly from the Orinoco River for drinking, food preparation and hygiene. This increased the prevalence of waterborne diseases such as skin and gastrological illnesses. The community’s greatest need was to have a reliable water service that could operate even during extreme weather events.
UNICEF and its partners built a solar-powered water treatment plant benefitting approximately 15,000 people in San Francisco del Guayo and in the neighboring fluvial communities. Because it does not depend on unreliable grid power, the water treatment plant ensures greater resilience to extreme weather events while contributing to helping reduce greenhouse gases. This intervention not only provides water to households but also contributes to improved WASH services in San Francisco’s schools and to a hospital. In addition, the new plant facilities serve as a meeting point for the community, facilitate hygiene, and promote protection, health, and education activities – all part of UNICEF’s behavior change work in the communities.
Reducing the impact of greenhouse gas emissions from sanitation in Kampala, Uganda
Climate change and sanitation are intrinsically connected. Poorly managed sanitation emits significant greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, contributing to the global climate crisis. Climate change is also damaging sanitation services and infrastructure, displacing people into areas with limited access to safely managed sanitation. A growing population results in increased production of human faeces with 57 per cent not treatable in a centralized manner through sewers. In 2022, there were still 36 countries with open defecation rates between 5 per cent and 25 per cent and in 13 countries; more than one in four people still practice open defecation.
Data on GHG emissions due to sanitation are sparse. A 2022 report estimates that global methane emissions from non-sewered sanitation systems are equivalent to approximately 377 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year, or 4.7 per cent of global anthropogenic methane emissions. Methane and nitrous oxide are the most significant GHG emitted by sanitation systems and have a heating potential 25 and 300 times greater – respectively – than carbon dioxide. It is crucial to gather more timely data and knowledge on the correlation between climate change and sanitation and how sanitation contributes to GHG emissions.
It is crucial to gather timely data on how sanitation contributes to greenhouse gas emissions.
An analysis citing Kampala, the capital of Uganda, estimated emissions from all stages of the sanitation service chain. The city was selected for its good data availability and as it is served by both on-site (78 per cent) and sewer-based (22 per cent) sanitation. The analysis showed that emissions associated with long periods of storage of faecal waste in sealed anaerobic tanks (49 per cent), discharge from tanks and pits direct to open drains (4 per cent), illegal dumping of faecal waste (2 per cent), leakage from sewers (6 per cent), wastewater bypassing treatment (7 per cent) and uncollected methane emissions at treatment plants (31 per cent), are contributing to high levels of GHG emissions. The city’s sanitation produces 189 kilotons CO2 per year and it may represent a significant proportion of total city-level emissions.
The results suggested that emissions from sanitation and their management could play a vital role in reducing greenhouse gases, particularly methane. Making improvements in sanitation management along the entire service chain and controlling emissions will have an important impact on reducing the long-term impact on the climate.
These case studies have been sourced and reproduced from The climate-changed child (2023), a UNICEF report that examines water scarcity and water vulnerability.
