The heatwaves now affecting large parts of the world are making climate risk visible in the daily lives of billions of people: schools, hospitals, homes, transport, food supply and work.
For children, the consequences are particularly dangerous. Overheated classrooms disrupt learning, heat stress raises health risks, poor air quality worsens respiratory illness, and pressure on food and water systems hits households in the poorest communities, who are already living with little margin.
Climate change is now threatening one of the major development gains of the past generation. In 1990, roughly one in 11 children did not survive to see their fifth birthday. Today that figure has fallen to fewer than one in 27, driven by rising incomes, stronger public institutions, vaccines, health systems, water and sanitation infrastructure, and delivery mechanisms capable of reaching remote and under-resourced communities. But these gains are now being eroded.
UNICEF’s Children’s Climate Risk Report 2026 finds that nearly half of the world’s children are exposed to multiple overlapping climate hazards. Heat is among the most pervasive: 1.5 billion children face heatwaves that are becoming more frequent, longer-lasting or more severe, and 1.2 billion are exposed to extreme heat conditions.
The risks extend beyond heat into water stress, food insecurity and climate-sensitive disease, placing the systems that support children’s health and development under growing pressure.
Yet even while the health and mortality consequences are accelerating rapidly, the political conversation about climate has reorganised around energy security and economic competitiveness. These are powerful drivers of energy transition.
But with locked-in climate change, and no clear trajectory to reduce emissions globally, the energy transition will not be enough to protect children from escalating climate impacts. There are live political battles across the UK, EU and the U.S. about whether responding to climate change should even be a political priority. This is despite of the fact that commitment to health – and particularly children’s health – is one of the few positions that unites many politicians.
Major health-sector players, including the healthcare companies we work with at the Institute for Sustainability Leadership in Cambridge, are rightly recognising that climate change is reshaping future disease burden, operational resilience and supply-chain risk. Their reach will be needed to sustain and expand access to treatment. The immediate gap is wide-scale deployment of affordable adaptation and resilience tools in the communities facing the greatest exposure.
Many of these already exist or are being rapidly built by innovators across emerging economies. Shaped by their direct experience of climate change, future-focused startups are designing context-relevant early warning systems that anticipate floods and droughts; forecasting models that track climate-sensitive disease patterns; digital infrastructure that improves how emergency relief and health support is delivered, and low-cost monitoring systems that bring real-time environmental data into public decision-making.
Many have been tested in the communities they were built to serve. Yet very few reach scale because the surrounding market conditions have not been built around them. This is the necessary work of systems innovation and market-making: shaping finance, procurement, policy, institutions and demand so effective solutions become investable and scalable.
For example, a founder building a flood early-warning system in Dhaka or a disease surveillance tool in Kampala cannot rely on their home government as a first customer when public budgets are constrained by debt. International capital could fill part of the gap, but risk assessments applied to these markets consistently overstate actual investment risk. Fixing this could unlock investment flows.
A second challenge is that even where capital is flowing, it isn’t connecting to on-the- ground solutions. Climate finance has doubled in recent years, to almost $1.5 trillion globally, yet the least-developed countries receive just 2% of those flows. Despite years spent discussing blended finance and catalytic capital, the practical plumbing has not been built.
Many climate-health ventures in these geographies are too small to meet the minimum investment thresholds. The instruments best-suited to bridging that gap account for just 4% of multilateral development bank climate finance, despite evidence that they unlock up to 25 times more private investment per dollar deployed than direct loans.
A third, critical constraint lies in the absence of pathways into real markets. Ventures operating in Indonesia, Kenya or Libya, even with proven solutions, often encounter the same set of barriers: limited access to procurement systems, weak connections to public institutions, and few opportunities to engage with the networks required to move from pilot to adoption.
Initiatives such as UNICEF’s Climate Ventures platform show how this gap can be closed, through building in-country support networks and procurement opportunities, and providing professional advice and access to investor connections.
This is necessary but not sufficient if solutions are to reach the necessary scale. Saving lives and protecting children has long motivated national and international action. Investing in innovations that meet real societal needs can also build resilience and growth.
Political, institutional and community leaders now need to to push through climate fatigue and organised denial, roll up their sleeves and get to work on the practical action required to connect capital to effective solutions to protect human health and lives.
