Children born today face more climate-driven heat than those who caused it

Children under 10 are experiencing more extreme heat than previous generations — heat driven by climate change those generations helped create.

When researchers isolated only the additional hot days attributable to rising greenhouse gas emissions, children aged 0 to 9 faced 28 such days per year, compared with 19 days for those aged 60 to 69. The findings show that a generation with no role in causing greenhouse gas emissions is bearing a disproportionate share of the resulting heat.

The research was published in volume 12, issue 35 of the international journal Science Advances by Rosa Pietroiusti and Wim Thiery of Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium. The team brought together climate scientists and legal scholars.

Children are concentrated where heat has grown fastest

The research team developed an index combining temperature and humidity to measure the heat burden on the human body, counting any day exceeding 28 degrees Celsius as a heat-stress day — the threshold at which the ISO recommends reducing activity or adding rest breaks.

To isolate the human-caused portion of that heat, the team modeled a counterfactual climate in which greenhouse gas concentrations had not increased, calculated how many days would have exceeded 28 degrees under that scenario, and subtracted that figure from observed data.

Under this method, if a location currently records 100 days per year above 28 degrees but would have recorded only 60 in the absence of rising emissions, 40 of those days are attributed to greenhouse gases.

In Côte d'Ivoire in West Africa, people experience 112 days per year above 28 degrees, of which 53 were calculated as days that would not have occurred without rising emissions. Applying the same method to Germany, the analysis found that almost no days would have exceeded 28 degrees had emissions not increased.

Children in Côte d'Ivoire. [Getty Images Bank]

Children under 10 make up 27 percent of Côte d'Ivoire's population, compared with 9 percent in Germany. Many of the low-latitude regions where warming has added the most heat days are also home to the world's largest concentrations of young children.

Globally, about 583 million children aged 0 to 9 experience more than 20 greenhouse-gas-attributable heat days per year, versus about 190 million people aged 60 to 69 under the same threshold — a roughly threefold difference.

Looking at all days above 28 degrees and the share attributable to emissions, children aged 0 to 9 experience 46 percent more greenhouse-gas-driven heat days than those aged 60 to 69. Children are not simply living in places that are hot — they are living in places where warming has increased heat particularly sharply.

The gap widens with each older cohort used as a comparison: children aged 0 to 9 face five more such days per year than people in their 40s, 12 more than those in their 70s, and 14 more than those in their 80s.

Even 2 degrees of warming means heat stress for more than a third of the year

How will heat change for children born today as they grow up? The research team projected global average temperatures rising 1.5 degrees Celsius in the 2030s and 2 degrees in the 2060s, factoring in projected population age structures at each point.

Currently, roughly one in 10 children experiences more than 100 greenhouse-gas-attributable heat days per year. At 2 degrees of warming, that share rises to nearly one in four — meaning those children would spend more than a third of the year in such conditions.

However, the generational gap in exposure narrows at higher warming levels. Today, children experience nearly twice as many such days as people in their 60s, but that gap closes at the 2-degree mark.

The research team attributed this to aging in low-latitude regions. As the share of older people grows even in the hottest parts of the world, the age distribution of heat exposure becomes more even.

The research team cautioned against reading a narrowing gap as a reduction in danger. Heat exposure rises across all age groups simultaneously, and the team expressed particular concern that the share of people aged 65 and older — who are most vulnerable to heat — grows within that total.

The regions bearing the heaviest concentration of this heat are South Asia and West Africa — areas already marked by low incomes and limited access to housing and healthcare. The team concluded that the regions and generations that have contributed least to greenhouse gas emissions are absorbing the greatest consequences in the form of heat.

However, the team said the analysis measured exposure — how many heat days people experienced — not health outcomes. It also noted that the same level of heat affects the body differently depending on age, and that the risk of dying from heat remains higher among the elderly.

Reference

DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aeb3232

Rosa Pietroiusti et al., "Age-specific exposure to human-induced increases in humid heat." Science Advances 12, eaeb3232 (2026).

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