- Affected by drought, pollution, high waters and floods, young people from different Brazilian states describe how climate change is impacting their routines and causing illness, malnutrition, displacement and school disruption.
- According to a UNICEF report, 2 billion children and adolescents in the world are exposed to risks arising from the climate emergency; in Brazil, there are 40 million affected children and adolescents — 60% of Brazilians under 18.
- According to experts, the climate crisis is a crisis of the rights of children and adolescents, as it affects everything from the right to decent housing and health care to education and food, leading to problems in child development and learning abilities.
The climate emergency has affected development and violated the rights of children and adolescents around the world, and in Brazil. In addition to fires, prolonged, extreme droughts make access to water difficult and disrupt eating patterns. Excessive rainfall and other disasters leave people homeless, force their displacement and cancel school activities. Pollution, heat waves and floods cause disease.
A 2021 report by UNICEF, a fund created by the U.N. to promote the rights and well-being of children and adolescents worldwide, showed that almost every boy and girl on the planet is exposed to at least one climate and environmental risk. According to the document, more than 2 billion children and adolescents under 18 are exposed to more than one climate/environmental-related risk, shock or stress.
Brazil is at the center of the problem. More than 40 million children and adolescents, 60% of all Brazilians in this age group, are exposed to more than one of the risks addressed by UNICEF’s study. Mongabay interviewed young people from different regions of the country to understand how they have been tackling the climate crisis that is already affecting their routines and violating their rights.
Darley Ferreira, 18, says he did not expect to see the Amazon rivers without water in 2023, when the region faced the worst drought ever recorded. He lives in the São Marcos community in the Lower Tapajós area, west Pará state, by the Arapiuns River, which dried up. Difficulties with river transport made it hard to travel to the community where he goes to school, which is far from his own.
“We students had to walk; we often had to get wet, to jump in the river [because the boat would run aground]. In some areas, students had to wake up at 4 a.m. to get to school on time, and many ended up giving it up,” Ferreira says.
Family farming, a source of income for local families, was also affected, and the production of maniva flour (made from cassava was lower in recent years. Even farming hours had to be changed. “The work that used to go from 7-11 a.m. on average now goes from 6-9 a.m. at most, because it’s too hot,” he explains.
This was reflected in the family’s income, which began to depend even more on government programs, as their extra earnings decreased. Community tourism prevented worse financial disruption, with some families turning their homes into inns. But the activity also needed to be adapted, as canoeing was impossible due to the drought that affected the rivers.
Ferreira says that in areas close to his, drought and heat waves have also led to the deaths of many fish and porpoises. “The communities suffered because they started to see it and couldn’t do anything,” he recalls.
The government responded to the risk of hunger by distributing packages of basic food items. It also provided buses to the communities. Ferreira says some communities were out of drinking water as wells ran dry and they had to resort to the river. “We know that the water in the river is already contaminated; it’s full of mercury [from illegal mining in the area]. It’s all the result of major environmental impacts,” he says.
The high school student says these problems are not just the result of the 2023 drought, but also of a series of human interventions with alarming environmental impacts. “The drought is caused by large companies, large industries, large agribusiness, which have been increasing more and more in our region and destabilizing it. For example, if there is deforestation, the streams that make up the rivers die out,” he explains.
Ferreira understands that climate change affects everyone, but he stresses: “Vulnerable people, the poorest, are the ones who suffer the most. And that’s us riverine dwellers, who can’t afford to buy air conditioners for very hot days.”
The São Marcos community where he lives as well as others in the Lower Tapajós area are still supplied by diesel engines, which normally offer electricity from 7-10:30 p.m. “Do you understand? We are the ones who suffer because we don’t have electricity 24 hours a day,” the teenager complains.
Putting sheets in the fridge to avoid the heat
The way Yan Daniel Brito Silveira faces heat waves in Ceará’s state capital, Fortaleza, is a reflection of the inequality surrounding the climate crisis: Come bedtime, he puts his sheet in the refrigerator to beat the heat.
The 12-year-old boy lives with his mother in a house in the Vila Velha district, on the outskirts of the city. One day, he was at home when he felt dizzy and fell to the floor. He regained consciousness after a short time and realized that he had fainted due to the increasingly frequent heat waves.
His family lives off his mother’s salary as a shop assistant in a mall, and they have only one fan at home, which must be used with caution to avoid high electricity bills. That is why, on hotter nights, Silveira — who gives up the fan to his mother — puts the sheets in the refrigerator. “I sprinkle some water on the sheet and then put it in the freezer to cool it before going to sleep. I don’t put too much water, so it doesn’t get too wet,” he explains.
He says he only recently heard about the climate emergency in a geography class at school. There, he understood that the excessive heat he tries to overcome daily could be part of the effects of people’s actions, which have driven the planet toward the climate crisis.
“I know little about this, but the teacher explained to me that that’s why it’s been hotter,” he says. Even though he does not know much about the subject, he feels the impacts of the crisis on a daily basis.
The climate crisis and the violation of children’s rights
The climate crisis is actually a crisis of the rights of children and adolescents, as it affects everything from the right to decent housing and health care to education and access to water. While extreme climate events are destroying schools and canceling classes, the difficulty in accessing health care and food affects child development and learning capacity. Added to this are forced displacements and loss of family income, as a result of which children need to help with household chores and work, increasing the package of violations of their rights.
“The problem is obviously the climate crisis that we are experiencing, but inequality is a bigger problem. And because of that inequality, people also suffer the climate effects unequally,” says JP Amaral, who is the environment, climate and biodiversity manager at Alana Institute. “Due to their peculiar development process, especially in early childhood, children — particularly black and Indigenous ones — are the most vulnerable to the climate crisis and therefore need special protection as well,” he stresses.
The phenomenon also affects health. Higher temperatures increase the incidence of waterborne and vector-borne diseases such as malaria, dengue fever and diarrhea. To get a sense of the magnitude of the problem, a U.N. study that quantitatively assessed the risks of climate change affecting selected causes of death estimated that 95,000 additional deaths of children up to 5 years of age in 2030 would be due to malnutrition.
Therefore, Amaral warns about the need for a child-oriented climate adaptation plan with general and specific protocols to protect children and adolescents in the face of extreme weather events.
“Virtually everything is missing from public policy on that matter. We hope that the national climate adaptation plan that is being developed by the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change includes and gives responses to the most affected populations, especially children, who are the most vulnerable in this whole logic,” he stresses.
Also regarding the plan, the government is expected to consider actions focused on the lasting impacts of these climate phenomena. “There is the impact of these extreme events, which greatly affect people emotionally and mentally. Children are affected twice, in their own lives and through their caretakers. For example, they might become orphans as a result of the death of a relative or a caretaker, with a very strong impact on their lives. And this is something in which the state plays a major strong role and that must be very well planned,” Amaral concludes.
From activism to climate anxiety
Indigenous student Thaís Pitaguary, 17, barely remembers the first time she heard about the climate emergency. As the daughter of an activist mother raised in the Pitaguary Indigenous Land, in the greater Fortaleza area, she grew up hearing about the environmental impacts of the surrounding quarries and how humanity’s actions were destroying the planet.
A deeper understanding of the problem, however, came when her people carried out an action known as retomada to reclaim land (when Indigenous people occupy territories claimed as traditional) and stopped the operations of a quarry. “That was when I really understood how humanity’s actions impact our planet. I was 9 years old,” says Thaís, who started giving talks to raise young people’s awareness about the subject when she was 10. Today she calls herself an activist.
“Many people say that youth and children are the future of Brazil, but we are the now, and what we do now will influence the future. Knowing what a climate emergency is and how to preserve the environment helps preserve our lives and our health,” she argues.
But this is no easy task. The teenager says that sometimes she needs to stay away from social media and the news about the crisis because of the anxiety she feels. “When I stop to think about all the impacts and all the lives affected, I feel huge despair and anxiety,” she says.
“Every day, I see some relative of mine being persecuted for defending the environment. I get desperate thinking that children are dying today from excessive heat, excessive rain — impacts caused by us humans,” she adds.
At the Indigenous school in the village of the Pitaguary people, she learned about the traditions of her ethnic group and the environment through culture-specific education. As a teenager, she decided to pursue environmental studies at a vocational school. In recent years, Thaís says that she has increasingly felt the effects of the climate crisis. She lives in a village with brick houses, where most people work in jobs in town or practice family farming in the Mata do Sabiá area, which supplies the community.
In 2023, she saw a heavy downpour flood her house and cause her sister, who lives next door, to lose some of her furniture. “We used to have floods before, because we live near a mountain range, but not as frequently as in recent years,” she points out.
Last year, at least 2,951 people were made homeless or displaced in Ceará state due to excessive rain, according to Civil Defense data collected until April 11. In the last three years, 31 million people were affected in the country as a whole, with 329,400 left homeless and 1.9 million displaced, according to the National Confederation of Municipalities.
Excessive rainfall caused other disruptions to education in Thaís’ community, such as power and internet outages and flooding of the community’s passageways, making access to school difficult. “I often went to class at the Indigenous school with mud up to my knees. Sometimes, they’d just send us back home and cancel classes because it was hard to get there,” she recalls.
In early 2024, the young woman says that the impacts are due to the delay in the start of the wet season, when northeast Brazil sees the highest rainfall. Plantations have burned, the community is suffering from heat waves and the waterfall, which should already be gushing with water, remains dry. “I feel the impacts within my territory. We should be swimming in the waterfall since January, but it’s still dry because it only started raining in February,” she explains.
This story was reported by Mongabay’s Brazil team and first published here on our Brazil site on March 4, 2024.
Banner image: A girl washes dishes in front of a flooded house as the water levels of the Juruá River in Eirunepé, Amazonas, increased in April 2011. Image courtesy of Alberto César Araújo/Amazônia Real.
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Citations:
The climate crisis is a child rights crisis. (2021). Retrieved from UNICEF website: https://www.unicef.org/reports/climate-crisis-child-rights-crisis
Quantitative risk assessment of the effects of climate change on selected causes of death, 2030s and 2050s. (2014). Retrieved from World Health Organization website: https://iris.who.int/bitstream/handle/10665/134014/9789241507691_eng.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y