[Photo source: How Decades of Racist Housing Policy Left Neighborhoods Sweltering, Brad Plumer and Nadja Popovich, 2020]
I have been interning with the Low Income Investment Fund and have had the opportunity to co-author several papers, one of which was published in September 2022. The report highlights the challenges children under the age of five face as our climate continues to change and the impact the built environment has on early childhood development. For the purpose of this blog post I have summarized the paper and provided a link to the full report, Planning for Resilient Early Care and Education: Addressing Climate Vulnerabilities.
Children will bear the brunt of the climate burden despite having the least responsibility for causing it, leading many to position climate change as a child’s rights crisis. Children experience rapid brain development before age five that is highly susceptible to environmental stressors. High temperatures, poor air quality, or stress associated with living through a natural disaster can harm working memory, reduce stamina, and slow cognitive performance during the most important developmental years in a person’s life. The ways children interact with a warming planet today also serve to worsen outcomes over time, all while weather-related disasters grow more common.
[Figure source: Vital Strategies. Early Childhood Matters. November 25, 2021]
Physical space plays an outsized role in every child’s development. But the homes and early care and education (ECE) facilities where children under the age of five spend most of their time are largely unequipped to withstand the impacts of a worsening climate. Fixing all deficiencies in American homes would cost more than $126 billion, and a national audit of child care programs using federal child care subsidies found that 96% had one or more hazardous conditions or health and safety violations.
Centering child health and well-being in climate policy – specifically through the lens of space, facilities, and the built environment – is a critical piece of building resilient communities and ensuring all children are able to live healthy and fulfilling lives.
Settings where young children spend their time need to protect them from the risk of developing lifelong health complications as a result of toxins or traumas in childhood. To achieve this, policymakers, financial institutions, funders, and communities need to prioritize the health and well-being of our youngest children and address the climate emergency through six core recommendations:
- Ensure all existing and planned ECE facilities are renovated or built with resilient, high-quality, and sustainable materials.
- Invest in small businesses and ECE providers who need assistance to adopt climate mitigation strategies.
- Include ECE facilities in local planning processes to reduce household carbon emissions and improve quality of life for parents and children.
- Make families a priority in community and economic development strategies through emphasis on reliable ECE and climate resilience.
- Design public programs so that communities with the largest child care gaps and greatest climate risks receive the most support.
- Analyze the ways racial, geographic, and socioeconomic disparities intersect with climate policy.
Communities can improve child health and climate resiliency simultaneously through building practices, small business supports, and efforts to co-locate and embed child care facilities within affordable housing and broader planning priorities. As climate change becomes more visceral in our daily lives, now is the time for action and the time to prioritize young children as we plan for the future of public infrastructure and the environment.
Sustainable Communities 
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