This student story was published as part of the 2025 NASW Perlman Virtual Mentoring Program organized by the NASW Education Committee, providing science journalism experience for undergraduate and graduate students.
Story by Claudia Steiner
Mentored and edited by Saima Sidik
More than half of children born in 2020 will experience a number of heatwaves endured by only one in 10,000 people living in pre-industrial climates, according to a study published in May in the journal Nature.
The study finds that if global temperatures rise 2.7 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures by 2100 — the global warming pathway Earth is currently on — the portion of people born in 2020 experiencing historic numbers of extreme climate events will be at least double that of people born in 1960. These events aren’t limited to heatwaves. The authors include crop failures, river floods, droughts, wildfires, and tropical cyclones in their modeling.
For today’s children, the findings are “very bad news,” says the study’s principal investigator, climate scientist Wim Thiery of the Free University of Brussels. How bad the news is, exactly, depends on the planet’s warming path, which, right now, is a 2.7-degree increase above pre-industrial temperatures by the end of the century.
The authors modeled scenarios that are both less and more extreme than our current warming path. They predict that if the world sees a 1.5-degree increase by century’s end, 52% of 2020-born children, or 62 million babies, will face approximately 11 heatwaves, a historic amount. In the 3.5-degree increase scenario, 92% of babies born in 2020 — or 111 million — will experience about 26 heatwaves, which is again more than virtually any individual in history has experienced.
The findings “highlighted this growing issue that we have been talking about as scientists,” says Shelby Yamamoto, an environmental epidemiologist at the University at Buffalo who was not involved in the work. Namely, that certain demographic groups, such as children, are more heavily impacted by climate change than others. In addition to having been born into a hotter world, she notes that children spend more time outside and breathe in more air per body weight than other age groups.
The new study from Thiery and his team illuminates the long-term and future implications of the changing climate for children born in recent years, on top of their day-to-day predisposition to environmental risk.
Modeling lifetimes of disaster
The Nature article is a sequel to earlier research Thiery and his team published in Science in 2021. They originally modeled the number of extreme climate events people in a given country born in a given year would experience in their lifetime and compared the experiences of different generations and national origins. In the more recent study, they sought to quantify the “unprecedented” nature of young people’s lifetime experiences with climate-driven disasters. Using Belgium, Brussels, as an example, the researchers show that unless humanity curtails its carbon emissions very quickly, people born in 2020 will have experienced unprecedented numbers of heatwaves by the time they’re 40.
The results are based on global climate models, which predict how the climate will change based on rainfall patterns, the reflectiveness of cities, ocean currents, and more. These models encapsulate "everything that matters for understanding how climate systems work,” Thiery explains, noting that the models “run on the fastest computers in the world." The team then used impact models to forecast how these climatic changes will affect people, in terms of emissions increases and natural disaster occurrences.
Uneven impacts
Within current and future generations, the impact of climate extremes will not be felt equally. The authors found that 95% of individuals born in 2020 who were considered socially and economically disadvantaged — measured by factors such as infant mortality rate, standards of living, and GDP — will live through historic numbers of climate extremes. For those not considered disadvantaged, the figure was only 78%.
“[I]f you are struggling, or if you're lower socioeconomic status, for example, these effects are going to be multiplied,” Yamamoto says.
For Thiery, the harrowing projections of young and vulnerable people’s futures frame the call for ambitious greenhouse gas emissions reductions to the international community in a new, more urgent perspective. The study’s findings are a desperate warning but also serve as “a message of hope and call to action” to create a livable, equitable future.
Top image: Describe the main header image that will be at the top of the page as in this example. An uptick in heatwaves will hit hardest on the newest generation. Credit: Unsplash / Creator: Rapha Wilde.
Claudia Steiner
Saima Sidik
The NASW Perlman Virtual Mentoring program is named for longtime science writer and past NASW President David Perlman. Dave, who died in 2020 at the age of 101 only three years after his retirement from the San Francisco Chronicle, was a mentor to countless members of the science writing community and always made time for kind and supportive words, especially for early career writers.
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