By Anja Nielsen, Advocacy Co-Lead for the Global Alliance for Disaster Risk Reduction and Resilience in the Education Sector (GADRRRES), and Rhea Shah, Consultant, Urban Infrastructure Resilience Team, Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure (CDRI)
By 2050, nearly every child will face more frequent heatwaves — threatening their health, disrupting their education, and putting their future at risk.
Heat does not affect all children equally. Cruelly, and like so many climate impacts, it will be those with the fewest resources who will be worst affected. Heat could therefore further stratify classrooms and communities along economic, gender, and disability lines.
Children in cooler parts of the community, country, or world, or those able to move to these places, could have more school days. Children in schools with cooling systems and the right infrastructure could learn more in class. Children who are able to sit exams in cooler buildings could have better results. Children who have access to cooling at home could get more out of their homework. These children all have one thing in common: they are likely to be better off.
This reality is true both between countries and within communities. At the macro level, countries facing the worst heatwaves – very often those who are least responsible for climate change – may not have access to resources to keep schools open, keep children learning, and ensure children sit high stakes exams in heat-resilient infrastructure.
At the micro level, children who have access – either financially or geographically – to schools with climate control could have more schooling, be better able to focus, and ultimately secure better learning outcomes.
This is as true in Lusaka as it is in London. But it is also not an inevitability. If the global community is serious about realizing every child’s right to learn, it is time to move heat from a climate issue to an education issue.
A global promise to children
In less than five years’ time, all children should be on a path to complete free, equitable, and quality primary and secondary education leading to learning outcomes. All youth should be literate, and gender disparities in education should be eliminated. These were among the promises made through the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Progress has been made towards these goals. As the Sustainable Development Goals Report 2025 shows, since 2015 109 million more children are now in school. Yet still, 272 million children, adolescents and youth are out of school and 58% of students achieve minimum proficiency in reading by the end of primary school. A lot needs to be done to make progress towards the SDGs. But heat resilience is key to this conversation.
Every disruption to schooling can affect learning outcomes and set children back
Heat is the most significant climate hazard impacting learning. In 2024, 171 million students saw their education disrupted by extreme heat. Nationwide school closures caused by heat affected children in Bangladesh, Cambodia, and the Philippines. In South Sudan, schools were shut for two weeks in February 2025 as temperatures soared. Even in temperate countries like the United Kingdom, schools have closed early due to extreme heat.
Even if children stay in school, extreme heat can affect their learning. Research has shown a 2.28% drop in exam performance with just 10 additional hot days during a school year. Evidence from the United States ties heat directly to weakened productivity of learning inputs.
Heat also has significant health impacts for children, such as neurological impacts, respiratory problems, and gastrointestinal issues, all of which can further impact learning. This can also be coupled with hunger, as periods of heat are linked to higher levels of household food insecurity. When children face both heat and hunger, their right to learn and their overall wellbeing is put at risk.
Heat also has compounding impacts for girls. In Zambia and Zimbabwe, girls reported lower school attendance during their menstrual cycles due to extreme heat and inadequate access to water and sanitation facilities. The combination of high temperatures and limited resources made it difficult for girls to manage menstrual hygiene, leading to increased absenteeism.
In the worst cases, long periods of extreme heat will lead to children and their families being forced to leave their homes. This presents yet another possible disruption to learning – and more worryingly, could lead children to leave school forever.
“The extreme high temperatures totally disturbed our focus on studying because there is no fan in our classroom. I hadn’t realized before that hot weather could make us lose our concentration this much. If this extreme hot weather continues in the next few years, it could affect our overall academic performance and wellbeing.” Boy, 13, Laos
It’s only getting worse. The world is warming. 2024 was reported as the hottest year on record. A record number of children – one-third of the global population – experienced a heatwave between July 2023 and June 2024. In 2025, temperatures reached as high as 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit) in parts of Iran and Iraq, leading to disruptions to education. As the climate crisis deepens, more and more children will be affected, putting their education at risk.
CDRI’s Community of Practice on Extreme Heat Management in Urban Schools brought together 150+ experts across various sectors from 70+ organisations to create a practical guidance document for school administrators on managing extreme heat which will be launched at COP30. Grounded in evidence and field practice, the document ‘Heat Smart Schools’, distils the community’s findings into actionable steps to build heat resilience in schools. It also contains best practices, and recommendations for teachers, parents, students and officials from education departments, municipalities, disaster management agencies and finance authorities.
If we are serious about education equality, we must be serious about heat resilience.
The global community made a promise to all children, everywhere, that they would have the opportunity to learn by 2030. This opportunity is slipping away as quickly as the sand falls through the hourglass.
Extreme heat pushes educational equality further out of reach. But while we cannot change the already warmed world, we can mitigate its impact through heat resilience. Strategies suggested by CDRI and GADRRRES include:
- Investing in heat-resilient infrastructure, mobilising finance from education, health and climate and disaster management budgets to retrofit, design and green schools.
- Harnessing all available information, including forecasts, local data and indigenous knowledge, and school-level diagnostics, to guide action.
- Addressing underlying risks to ensure access to clean and safe water, sanitation, nutrition and health services.
- Developing standard operating procedures and learning continuity plans for extreme heat scenarios.
- Developing lessons on staying safe and cool during heat emergencies, and ensuring teachers have the proper training and support to implement these.
- Shifting the school calendar and adjusting daily schedules, and in particular exam times, to align with cooler temperatures.
- Using the Comprehensive School Safety Framework to develop an education strategy that encompasses all of the above as part of an all-hazards approach to resilience and disaster management.
It is time to take heat resilience seriously. Anything less will leave millions of children behind.
