Child Survival at the centre of the Climate Crisis

The panel will take a deeper dive into the changing landscape and approach of health programming to respond to the catastrophic effects of climate crisis on child survival. It will bring focus on changing disease epidemiology due to climate change and its impact child survival, and response needed from different health constituencies like governments, CSOs, academia, UN organizations, and global financing mechanisms. The panel will discuss and deliberate on the needs for universal as well as targeted approaches to primary health care, water and sanitation, newborn and maternal health, essential child health interventions, and nutrition programming to make them future ready and proactively mitigate impact of climate change on child survival, rather than a reactive approach to an escalating crisis.

The overall focus of the panel will include: 

• Within the backdrop of climate change, understand current research on distribution of major childhood diseases and future epidemiologic trends which will impact child survival at global, regional, and country level.  

• Bring a vulnerability lens to climate change and child survival interface to unpack how vulnerabilities at political, social, economic, and health system level act as key determinants of child survival from climate crisis.  

• Discuss public health programming under childhood illnesses, nutrition, WASH, newborn and maternal health to sustain the gains made during SDG era in reducing child mortalities and need for calibration of different child survival approaches to mitigate effect of climate change in child survival. 

• Deliberate how to strongly integrate child survival in UHC and climate change discussion to address needs of millions of children who are at forefront of climate change and are extremely vulnerable to its impact.  

We are keen to have your perspective and expertise to underscore the criticality of achieving universal health coverage through adaptive health systems to mitigate the impact of climate change on the most vulnerable population groups including children and their survival to achieve SDG 3.2.