Experts urge global climate goals to prioritize children's health

A Weill Cornell Medicine investigator and other members of a technical advisory group to the World Health Organization and United Nations Children's Fund have outlined measures that nations can take to ensure that children's health is accounted for within climate change goals. The authors discuss concrete and achievable indicators in a commentary published Oct. 1 in The Lancet Planetary Health.

Children have specific needs that often get overlooked. We're making sure that doesn't happen."

Dr. Ilan Cerna-Turoff, lead author, assistant professor of epidemiology in emergency medicine, Weill Cornell Medicine

The topic is particularly relevant as world leaders gather for the 30th Conference of the Parties (COP30) in Belém, Brazil to discuss how to measure their countries' progress toward adapting to climate change.

"When they met at COP28 in November of 2023, world leaders made very broad commitments, but they didn't have concrete indicators for measuring progress," Dr. Cerna-Turoff said, "and how are you going to keep to your commitments without metrics?"

To rectify the situation, the United Nations, government representatives, regional governance bodies and civil society groups proposed a list of candidate indicators to assess progress, totaling 5,339 distinct indicators related to the impacts of climate change. "It was an enormous list," Dr. Cerna-Turoff said, "that covered multiple domains of health and wellbeing but did not have an explicit focus on child health."

Dr. Cerna-Turoff and the co-authors identified six indicators from the original list pertinent to child health, which could be measured in at least 50% of countries globally. To those six, they suggested 11 additional standardized indicators, making a total of 17. The final list spans childhood mortality rates to metrics related to nutrition and vaccination coverage. Dr. Cerna-Turoff and the co-authors are advocating for signatories to the Paris Agreement to adopt these 17 indicators at COP30.

Whether signatories to the Paris Agreement adopt all 17 indicators or chart a separate course, Dr. Cerna-Turoff thinks that increasing standardized measurement makes global child health data more readily available, which supports other targets, like the Sustainable Development Goals, and opens valuable opportunities to analyze how the climate change agenda is influencing child health. Combining communicable disease data with information about flooding or heat, for instance, "could pinpoint the specific effects of these weather systems on health outcomes," he said. He further hopes the specificity of the data will increase, disaggregating children by age and economic status, for instance, so global leaders can make sure they are protecting the most vulnerable.

Ultimately, Dr. Cerna-Turoff hopes to see signatories to the Paris Agreement include children in assessing progress and impact of climate adaptation on health. "Children ultimately will inherit the world that we create today, and we can't afford to leave the youngest members of our society behind," he said.