Climate change also endangers children

The Hungarian committee of the UN Children's Fund wrote in a statement delivered to MTI on Saturday: the lives and well-being of millions of children are at risk worldwide as a result of severe droughts, floods, hurricanes, forest fires and other natural disasters linked to climate change.

Even the most basic conditions of a balanced childhood were not provided to them. They don't have anything to eat, they don't have safe drinking water, they don't have access to health care and they can't study, because of these consequences, the results of several decades of humanitarian work may come to nothing - they wrote.

According to the UNICEF report, the Children's Climate Risk Index, approximately one billion children in 33 countries are exposed to an extremely high risk due to the effects of climate change. Almost half of the world's population suffers from a lack of drinking water, and this number is predicted to increase in proportion to the rise in temperature. In the meantime, the lives of 600 million children in South Asia are threatened by floods on a scale not seen since man-killing, they are quoted in the announcement.

Although the climate crisis is not yet so tangible in Europe, according to a representative research carried out by UNICEF Hungary this summer, ninety percent of young Hungarians are worried about it: for many of them, this concern is so decisive that it has a greater impact on their daily lives than even the war situation in the neighboring country, the announcement reads.

On Sunday, on World Children's Rights Day, UNICEF Hungary is organizing a free conference entitled Klímahős at Magyar Telekom's headquarters in Budapest. Subject matter experts, opinion leaders and UNICEF Hungary's young ambassadors will present at the event.

(Source: biokalauz.co.hu; marmalade.co.hu; MTI | Image: pixabay.com)