One in five children in the world today experiences twice as many hot days as 60 years ago, according to a report published by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) in New York.
The organization's experts stated that 2023 was the hottest year ever, and this year this record could be broken.
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According to their calculations, heat-related difficulties affect about half a billion children worldwide, most of them in Africa, but also 36 million in the United States, for example.
This problem affects 123 million minors in the western and central parts of the black continent, where their percentage is close to 40 percent. The situation is particularly difficult for the inhabitants of Mali, Niger, Senegal and Sudan, where the number of days when the temperature reaches 35 degrees Celsius approaches or exceeds 200 days a year.
UNICEF officials warn that children’s bodies are less adapted to heat than adults’. Extreme heat is also affecting education: in the first months of this year alone, at least 80 million children missed school for these reasons.
The global organization called for giving priority to protecting the layers containing the most vulnerable organisms from extreme weather events that “may be deadly.”
