Highlighted Session: Climate-induced disadvantage: The effect of extreme weather events and natural disasters on children’s educational outcomes in climate vulnerable countries

Group Submission Type: Highlighted Paper Session

Proposal

As our planet experiences a relentless increase climate-induced disasters and extreme weather events, children’s learning experiences and educational outcomes are increasingly shaped by community, family, and school capacities to manage the impact of climate change. Historic large-scale disasters affect children’s ability to go to or stay in school, but children’s schooling is also disrupted by more frequent small and medium-scale disasters. Moreover, repeated climate-induced disruptions may result in both short and long-term effects on education that differ from the impact of single, large-scale events and call for distinct educational policies and programs to promote resilient schools. Even when children remain in school, rising temperatures, droughts and floods affect their communities, schools, and families, often hindering children’s well-being and ability to learn. Despite accelerated momentum for exploring the educational effects of the climate crisis, with few exceptions, most prior research on the effect of climate-induced disasters or extreme weather events on education in limited by 1)a primary focus on educational access and completion rather than educational quality and learning, 2)an emphasis on the impact of single, large-scale, global headline-generating disasters, and 3)data and methodological constraints that prevent the identification of short and long-term causal effects and protective mechanisms. Together, the papers presented in this panel overcome previous limitations by utilizing high quality, rich, representative data sets and causal inference methods to highlight the impact of climate-induced natural disasters and extreme weather of children’s education in diverse communities in climate vulnerable areas of our planet. In this way, the research findings explored in this panel raise important questions about planetary justice, climate disadvantage as a source of global educational inequality, and the powerful role of communities and schools in climate action.

Drawing on both ecological models of development (Bronfenbrenner, 1979) and childhood resilience (Masten et al, 2007) as well as frameworks for climate-smart education systems (Global Partnership for Education; 2023; UNICEF, 2022), the papers included in the proposed panel spotlight the adverse effects of climate change on children’s education, but importantly, identify specific pathways and mechanisms linking climate events to educational outcomes in the short and long term. The conceptual framing emphasizes children’s dynamic role experiencing the effects of climate events in multiple and often overlapping communities as well as the possible avenues to develop community- and school- level resilience to protect children from the negative impacts on learning and living. The panel also employs comparison to emphasize the similarities and differences in the impact of climate events on children’s education in a diversity of regions, including South Asia, East Asia, Central Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa. Moreover, each paper is methodologically rigorous utilizing causal inference methods such as difference-in-difference, but also innovative in the use and matching of often country-specific child, family, and household surveys with global hours estimates of climate data (ERAS) and the International Disaster Database (EMDAT). in this panel attend to what happens in and around schools, as well as people’s lived experiences in the contexts of rapid urbanization.

Paper 1 uses the 6th round of the Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS6) school outcomes data for children aged 5-7 years-old as well as global climate and disaster data to identify natural disasters, especially droughts and floods, and create time-varying intensity variations in disaster exposures for available countries in South, Central, and East Asia. It investigates the heterogeneous impacts of natural disasters on grade progression, school enrollment, and cognitive achievements for children along gender, age, and SES gradients as well as the role of school shutdowns and instructor truancies in mediating heterogeneous natural disaster effects across children and localities.

Paper 2 explores the short-term and long-term effects of natural disasters on children’s education in rural Indonesia as well as how the effects vary by child gender, age, socioeconomic status, and region To estimate the effect of exposure to natural disasters on school participation and learning outcomes, the authors use disaster information from the representative, Indonesian Family Living Survey-6 and a difference-in-differences framework comparing communities that experience disasters with those that do not. By distinguishing disruptions to schooling from impacts on learning, short-term from long-term effects, the study contributes to a better understanding of educational system resilience.

Paper 3 uses a nationally representative longitudinal household survey data to examine whether resilient communities, conceptualized in terms of their economic, social, political, and educational resources, buffer the impact of flood disasters on children’s learning in India. Innovatively, the authors also identify whether protection extends to the most marginalized households within communities and whether protective effects are mediated by reducing the household economic impact of floods.

Paper 4 investigates the impact of climate anomalies on primary education in ten Sub-Saharan African countries using the latest phase of the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) and temperature and precipitation data from the Climatic Research Unit-time series (CRU-TS). The analysis demonstrates the way in which cumulative exposure to climate anomalies, especially in early childhood, has a significant negative effect on primary school completion and that the effect varies depending on socioeconomic status.

Together, the four papers focus on the critical dimensions of climate-induced educational disadvantage, moving beyond issues related to disruption alone. The research findings highlight the dramatic and long-term impact of climate change on children’s educational outcomes. They also identify specific mechanisms for the impact such as teacher absence and the differential impacts for more vulnerable children, such as low-come children. Together, the papers expand the conception of equity and planetary justice by repositioning the role of the school as climate vulnerable, but also provides an alternative narrative of future climate protection. The panel also includes a representative from the Global Monitoring Report, UNESCO as a discussant to situate the panel within the wider global discourse on the links between the climate crisis, education, and sustainable futures.

Sub Unit

• Environmental and Sustainability Education SIG

Chair

• Jennifer H Adams, Johns Hopkins University, School of Education

Individual Presentations

• Natural disasters, school system resilience, and educational outcomes in Asia - Emily Hannum, University of Pennsylvania; JERE RICHARD BEHRMAN, University of Pennsylvania

• The short and long-term effects of climate-induced disasters on school participation and learning in rural Indonesia - Jennifer H Adams, Johns Hopkins University, School of Education; Shuang Chen, Princeton University

• Floods and children’s learning outcomes in rural India: Do resilient communities offer protection? - Nazar Khalid, University of Pennsylvania; Emily Hannum, University of Pennsylvania; JERE RICHARD BEHRMAN, University of Pennsylvania; Amrit Thapa, University of Pennsylvania

• Mapping the cumulative effects of climate anomalies on children’s education in ten African countries - Sukie Xiuqi Yang, University of Pennsylvania; Kai Feng

Discussant

• Priyadarshani Joshi, UNESCO