Children are already bearing the brunt of the health impacts of global climate change . the planet Health Organization estimates that over 80% of the illnesses, injuries, and deaths occurring thanks to global climate change are in children, particularly those living in poor and under-served areas. Global climate change is altering weather patterns in ways in which can affect the geographic range and incidence of health outcomes that are among the main killers of children: malnutrition, diarrheal diseases, and vector-borne diseases like malaria. By the year 2000, global climate change may have increased the numbers of cases of those diseases by roughly3to10%.
These percentages translate into large numbers of children: diarrheal diseases claim the lives of nearly 2.5 million children annually, malaria causes an estimated 655,000 deaths, and malnutrition is an underlying explanation for death of half the slightly below 7 million deaths globally in children under age five. Based only on the climate influence on health risks, future impacts on children are projected to extend, assuming no additional interventions to avoid, steel oneself against, answer, or get over the impacts of climate variability and alter.
Many other risks for children's health and well-being are expected or likely to occur with ongoing and future global climate change, with additional data and understanding needed to quantify current and possible future adverse consequences. a couple of examples include:
- Contaminated water and inadequate sanitation and hygiene are the leading reasons for the high rates of diarrheal diseases. Rising temperatures that facilitate the replication of some pathogens, and more flooding events that damage water treatment and/or spread pathogens could increase significantly the burden of disease, counting on the effectiveness of control programs.
- global climate change is contributing to increases in pollen in some regions which will be exacerbating allergies and asthma. However, there's an incomplete understanding of the degree to which aeroallergens are contributing to the worldwide increase in pediatric allergic disease, among other issues, to estimate the contribution of global climate change.
- Increasing atmospheric concentrations of CO2 are acidifying the ocean, with possible consequences for food security in some regions.
Providing more comprehensive estimates of current and projected impacts is complex due to the character of global climate change itself and since of the various factors which will increase or decrease the rates of climate-sensitive health outcomes. The science is obvious on many aspects of global climate change and its associated risks.
Climate change is caused by natural and man-made activities, particularly the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation that are adding significant quantities of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on global climate change concluded the evidence is unequivocal that humans are changing the climate, supported observed increases in average air temperatures and other geophysical factors. Further, emitted greenhouse gases take decades to centuries to be absorbed within the soil and sequestered within the ocean, leading to a "climate change commitment". Essentially, the greenhouse gases currently within the atmosphere will still drive global climate change for a minimum of 30-40 years. About the maximum amount global climate change |temperature change"> global climate change will occur over that point period as has already occurred since the economic Revolution; the speed of climate change is bigger than it's been in a minimum of 10,000 years.
We also know that shifts within the mean values of weather variables also are resulting in very large observed percentage changes within the occurrence of utmost weather and climate events. The frequency and intensity of daily temperature extremes and heavy precipitation events in some regions are now different than they were before 1950, partially thanks to global climate change . Estimating the extent to which these and other changes are often attributed to global climate change is complex due to the problem in determining whether one event would have occurred naturally. an easy analogy is athletic performance under the influence of performance enhancing drugs. An athlete may need achieved a specific outcome supported aptitude , but the utilization of medicine made it more likely. Further, it's easier to work out statistically by analyzing a series of past events to understand if drugs influenced a series of outstanding performances than by watching one particular achievement.
Similarly, the energy that greenhouse gases are adding to the atmosphere is being expressed through more and more severe extreme events, although it's impossible to attribute anybody event to global climate change alone.

Thus projections of future global climate change and its impacts are, of course, inherently uncertain because it's impossible to completely predict how the climate system will answer additional greenhouse emission emissions; what climate policies are going to be implemented (and how rapidly); how societies will develop in terms of demographics, economics, technology, etc.; and therefore the effectiveness and timeliness of public health actions to deal with the health risks of global climate change . However, we all know that children are being suffering from climate today, and these same risks are very likely to extend .
Children are being suffering from recent increases within the frequency, intensity, spatial extent, and duration of utmost weather events. for instance , within the Horn of Africa failed rains within the boreal winter of 2010/2011 and therefore the boreal spring of 2011 played a critical role within the 2011 food crisis that cause famine in parts of Ethiopia and Somalia; other important factors that were exacerbated by the shortage of rainfall included high global food prices, political instability, and chronic poverty. This followed poor rainfall in 2008 and 2009. Additionally, to the immediate impacts of acute food shortage, chronic malnutrition affects a child's life course. Concern about achieving the MDG targets increases when combining the limited progress in reducing chronic childhood malnutrition in Africa with projections that global climate change will increase the challenges to food security through changing crop yields under new temperature and precipitation patterns.
Climate change, then, can exacerbate current challenges for improving children's health and well-being and may create new risks. So how can we all know by what proportion will risks to children increase? Although quantifying the danger to understand exactly when, where, and by what proportion the danger will increase might not always be possible, other approaches to understanding how climate and other factors could interact to affect children's health during a particular region are available. When sufficient local data are lacking (which is common within the most vulnerable places), narrative scenarios supported expert judgment and native expertise are often helpful. Narratives of possible futures are often constructed to raised understand how various risk factors can interact, including whether tipping points might be reached, to tell development of strong local policies and measures to avoid, steel oneself against , and answer changing health burdens under a variety of climate and socio-economic changes. Limited data and projections of the health impacts of global climate change shouldn't be a barrier to action, but a call to more research and to flexible and iterative approaches to decision-making, just like the use of scenarios and adaptive management.
What are often done? Current policies and measures to stop climate-sensitive health outcomes can and will be modified to deal with not only current impacts, but also consider the risks of future global climate change , to make sure they're robust to warmer temperatures and changing precipitation patterns. the planning , implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of latest policies and measures should also explicitly incorporate consideration of the risks of global climate change . Adaptive management approaches are often wont to manage uncertainties about the magnitude and extent of global climate change and its possible consequences, and about future development pathways. The absence of effective and timely actions to deal with global climate change is predicted to steer to preventable consequences for child growth and development, needlessly affecting current and future generations.

About the Authors: Mubeena Iram, Mehak Shenaz and Komel Jehangir are focused on climate change science, integrated assessment of ecological and economic impacts of human-induced climate change and identifying viable climate policies and technological solutions.