every year and calls it a weather event
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Schools in the capital registered smoke and particle readings above 2,000 micrograms per cubic metre, nearly 80 times the safe daily limit.
Children with asthma were kept indoors. Children without it soon developed symptoms.
For weeks, the smoke from the Black Summer bushfires pressed down across eastern Australia, and parents made decisions that no official protocol had prepared them for. Pack the kids in the car and drive somewhere cleaner. Or stay inside and hope.
The official response was telling in its gaps. Health alerts advised people to avoid outdoor exercise. They said little about developing lungs. They said almost nothing about what repeated, months-long smoke inhalation does to a seven-year-old.
That silence is not an accident. Across nearly every domain of Australian public health and climate policy, children exist as a statistical footnote rather than the primary subjects of concern.
The data documenting their exposure to climate harm is growing. The infrastructure to respond to it is not.
In 2024, Deloitte Access Economics published a report for UNICEF Australia that attempted, for the first time, to count what climate disaster actually costs Australian children. The findings were stark.
More than 1.4 million children and young people, roughly one in six, experience a climate disaster or extreme weather event in an average year in Australia. The average annual cost of climate disaster impacts on children had reached $6.3 billion by 2025. 1
Looking forward, that figure is projected to rise 65 per cent by 2060 if current emissions trajectories continue, reaching $10.4 billion annually. Over the next 35 years, the cumulative cost could reach $300 billion.
These numbers encompass mental health disruption, physical harm, educational loss, and displacement. They do not represent some speculative future. They represent what is already happening, measured and priced, yet largely absent from national policy conversation.
No federal minister has declared this a child welfare emergency. No national action plan exists specifically for climate-related harm to children. The children themselves, already breathing smoky air, sleeping through heat-disrupted nights, and watching their classrooms close because of floods, have no formal standing in the decisions that shape their exposure.
The damage begins, in the most literal sense, before a child draws its first breath. Evidence linking heat exposure during pregnancy to premature birth has accumulated for two decades.
A major multi-country analysis published in Environment International in 2026, drawing on 36.6 million births across 13 countries including Australia, found that preterm birth risk rises linearly as temperatures increase. On days of extreme heat, the risk of premature birth rises by 3.8 per cent. 4
A Curtin University study of more than 385,000 pregnancies in Western Australia between 2000 and 2015 found a significant association between extreme bioclimatic exposure and abnormal foetal birthweights, with non-Caucasian women, those in rural areas, and older mothers facing elevated risk. 5
Researchers from the University of Queensland, examining births in Queensland, have pointed to a similar pattern and noted that the state's heatwave management plan contains minimal guidance specifically targeting pregnant women.
A premature baby born before 37 weeks faces elevated risks of mortality, neurological damage, and chronic health conditions that can persist for a lifetime. The body that cannot cope with heat is the pregnant body. The consequence is a child who enters the world already shaped by a warming climate, before any parent or paediatrician has had a chance to intervene.
Public health messaging has not kept pace with this evidence. During the Black Summer fires, pregnant women were advised, broadly, to stay indoors. Whether they had a safe indoors to stay in, whether they could afford air conditioning, whether they lived in a timber house with no insulation in western New South Wales — these were not questions that official guidance had worked through. 15
Children thermoregulate differently from adults. Their ratio of body surface area to mass is higher, meaning they absorb more environmental heat. Their sweating response is less efficient. They depend entirely on adults to recognise and respond to early heat stress, a dependency that becomes dangerous when adults themselves are occupied, absent, or equally impaired by heat. 2
Australia's school infrastructure was not designed for the temperatures now arriving. In December 2023 alone, more than 14,000 students in 54 government schools across the country missed a day of class because of extreme heat or bushfires.
The disparity between states is pronounced. Queensland's Cooler Cleaner Schools program has delivered adequate cooling to all state school classrooms. NSW, despite a $500 million investment in its own program, still has approximately 350 schools without airconditioning and ventilation upgrades. In South Australia, 34 schools closed in a single day in December 2023 due to dangerous heat. 8
A handful of Perth schools sent students home early on the first day of the 2024 school year when air conditioners failed. Heat stress affects concentration and cognitive function before it produces visible symptoms.
Children in a 36-degree classroom are not simply uncomfortable; they are physiologically impaired. Cognitive load decreases with rising core temperature. Sleep debt accumulates across extended heatwaves. Learning loss from heat-disrupted schooling does not register on any national education assessment because no one is measuring it.
The gap in policy is not technical. It is a question of priority. No national heatwave policy applies uniformly to Australian schools. No mandatory temperature threshold triggers school closure. State-by-state guidance is inconsistent, and schools in the poorest communities, those least able to fund their own infrastructure upgrades, are routinely the least equipped. 9
Bushfire smoke contains fine particulate matter — PM2.5 — that penetrates deeply into lung tissue, triggers oxidative stress, and in children, can alter the developmental trajectory of respiratory systems still in formation.
The Black Summer fires of 2019-2020 generated a smoke plume that persisted for more than 13 weeks across eastern Australia, affecting millions of children during a critical period of lung development. 6
The direct toll included approximately 2,000 respiratory hospitalisations and 1,300 asthma emergencies attributable to bushfire smoke during that single season. Research published in 2025 examining asthma emergency department presentations in NSW and the ACT confirmed the statistically significant spike in paediatric cases during peak smoke periods. 7
What is less well understood because the data does not yet exist is the cumulative effect of repeated smoke seasons on children growing up in fire-affected regions. Australian air quality standards were developed with adult reference exposures in mind. They do not account for the differential vulnerability of children, nor for the compounding effects of year-on-year smoke inhalation across a childhood in south-eastern Australia.
The Black Summer was extreme. But it was not singular. Since 2020, every fire season has produced days of hazardous air quality across parts of New South Wales, Victoria, and Queensland.
A generation of children is growing up in conditions that no respiratory study has yet followed for long enough to fully characterise. The unknowns are not reassuring.
In 2024, research on Australian adolescents aged 15 to 19 found that those with higher climate change concerns also reported higher levels of psychological distress. Separately, studies estimated that between one-third and 89 per cent of pre-teens aged 10 to 13 worry about climate change or the environment.
By 2025, survey data suggested that 75 per cent of Australian young people reported concern about climate change, with one in four feeling very or extremely worried about the planet's future. 10
These numbers are not abstract. In headspace clinics in regional and rural Australia, clinicians are treating young people whose anxiety is directly tied to floods that destroyed their town, fires that killed stock and took neighbours' houses, droughts that broke their family's farming operation over several successive years.
A 2024 study of eco-anxiety among regional Australian youth with existing mental health conditions found that their experience of climate distress was qualitatively distinct from that of urban adolescents. 11
They were not anxious about an abstract future. They were processing a concrete, ongoing present.
Eco-anxiety is not pathology in the clinical sense. Researchers have described it as a rational response to real threat. But when that response persists across years, when it interrupts sleep, erodes academic motivation, and undermines a young person's capacity to imagine a worthwhile future, the distinction between rational fear and clinical harm becomes difficult to sustain.
Mental health services in rural and regional Australia were under-resourced before climate disasters compounded demand. They are acutely stretched now. Telehealth reaches some. It does not reach all. The children of Cobargo, of Lismore, of Fitzroy Crossing have not received the long-term psychological recovery support that evidence-based post-disaster practice requires. In most cases, there has been no systematic assessment of how many still carry active trauma years after the event.
Climate harm does not distribute evenly across Australian childhood. The Deloitte analysis found that children in remote areas, from lower socio-economic backgrounds, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children are more likely to experience climate disaster. 13
Indigenous children in remote communities face a compounding logic: inadequate housing stock, limited cooling infrastructure, distance from health services, and cultural connection to Country that is itself being altered by fire and flood.
Research from the University of Sydney found that Indigenous regional and remote communities will experience the negative impacts of climate change earlier and more severely than most urban Australian settings.
The modelling of Indigenous housing in hot and mild climate zones showed that future energy consumption to maintain safe indoor temperatures would increase dramatically in communities that already struggle with energy poverty. 14
A study examining Aboriginal populations in New South Wales found that they were disproportionately exposed to heat, drought, and extreme rainfall compared to non-Aboriginal populations in the same state, and that this disparity was projected to widen. Aboriginal children in those communities are not experiencing climate change as a future risk. They are experiencing it as the present condition of their daily life.
For children in low-income households across urban Australia, the arithmetic is different but the logic similar. Rising energy costs mean that families already stretched by housing stress may not run air conditioners during extreme heat events. The child sleeping in a 38-degree bedroom is not a hypothetical. In western Sydney, in outer Melbourne, in northern Adelaide, these conditions are already a feature of summer.
Australia has ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. It requires governments to protect children from harm, to act in the best interests of children in all decisions affecting them, and to ensure children's right to health and education. No current Australian government has formally assessed whether its climate policies satisfy these obligations.
No national reporting framework tracks climate-related harm to children as a distinct category. No government budget identifies a line item for child-focused climate adaptation. No federal policy requires that major fossil fuel project approvals assess intergenerational health impacts on children. 3
The children who will live longest with the consequences of decisions made this decade have the least formal influence over them. They do not vote. They are rarely consulted when towns face managed retreat from flood zones, when rural communities weigh the closure of schools made unviable by repeated disasters, when health systems plan for the paediatric burden of a warming climate.
What Australia does have is a growing body of evidence. The science on heat and premature birth is now unambiguous. The evidence on bushfire smoke and developing lungs is substantial. The research on climate-related psychological harm in adolescents is accumulating rapidly. 12
The gap is not knowledge. The gap is institutional will.
The groundwork exists. UNICEF Australia has called for the establishment of child-specific climate indicators — tracking heat-related school closures, climate-related paediatric hospitalisations, rates of eco-anxiety in adolescents, and climate displacement of families with children.
Researchers at the Australian National University and elsewhere have called for air quality standards recalibrated to children's exposure rather than adult reference levels. Paediatricians have been urging heat-safe school infrastructure standards since at least 2017.
None of this is technically complex. Each measure has a precedent elsewhere. Sweden tracks climate health indicators by age group. The United Kingdom has published child-specific adaptation assessments as part of its statutory climate risk reporting. Germany mandates heat protection standards in school buildings.
Australia has not moved in this direction because children, despite being legally protected by rights frameworks, have no mechanism to hold governments to account for climate inaction.
The children growing up through this decade will inherit whatever decisions are made now. They will breathe air shaped by today's emissions. Their lungs, formed in smoky summers, will carry the record. Their futures, formed in anxiety-laden classrooms, will reflect what adults chose to notice and what they chose to ignore.
Layla, the UNICEF Australia Young Ambassador who shared her experience of climate disaster in 2024, put it plainly: climate change is already disrupting the lives of many young Australians by negatively impacting wellbeing and participation in school and the workforce.
The disruption she described is not an abstraction. It is a pattern, documented, measurable, and growing — and it has so far failed to produce the one thing it demands: a decision to treat the harm to children as the emergency it is.
References
- Deloitte Access Economics / UNICEF Australia (2025). The Cost of Climate Disasters on Children and Young People in Australia. Updated 2025 report. UNICEF Australia.
- van der Heijden, K. (2024). Climate change is putting children's health at risk. World Economic Forum / UNICEF.
- Tong, M., Okokon, E., & Vardoulakis, S. (2024). Health risks of climate change in Australia: An umbrella review. The Journal of Climate Change and Health, 100347.
- Scortichini, M. et al. (2026). Climate change-related heat increases the risk of premature birth in 13 countries. Environment International. Via The Conversation.
- Nyadanu, S.D. et al. (2024). Climate change could be impacting babies' birthweight for gestational age. Curtin University / ScienceDaily.
- University of Queensland (2023). Families needed for study of bushfire smoke and health. UQ News. Includes Black Summer statistics on hospitalisations and asthma emergencies.
- Connor, S. et al. (2025). Health impacts of the 2019–2020 Australian "Black Summer" bushfires: smoke-related asthma emergency department presentations in NSW and ACT. International Journal of Environmental Health Research.
- Kids News / Parents for Climate (2024). Extreme heat warning for school return. Analysis of school closures and cooling gaps across Australian states.
- Teachers for Climate Australia (2026). Extreme Heat in Australian Schools. Commentary and policy analysis.
- Potentialz Psychology (2025). Climate Anxiety and Eco-Grief: A Psychologist's Guide for Australian Families. Drawing on 2024–25 survey data on young Australian climate concern.
- Boyd, C.P. et al. (2024). Eco-anxiety among regional Australian youth with mental health problems: A qualitative study. Early Intervention in Psychiatry.
- Emerging Minds (2024). Climate change-related worry in children and young people: What does the research evidence say? National Workforce Centre for Child Mental Health.
- UNICEF Australia (2024). Three ways climate change is changing childhood in Australia. Includes findings on Indigenous and remote children's disproportionate exposure.
- University of Sydney (2021). Climate change a greater risk for Indigenous families. Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute research on remote Indigenous housing under future climate regimes.
- Grist / ABC (2025). After Los Angeles wildfires, parents fear toxic smoke began harming their children before birth. Joint investigation comparing US and Australian pregnancy smoke exposure guidance.
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