In an exclusive conversation with Climate Samurai, Anindit Roy Chowdhury, Country Director – India & Nepal at Terre Des Hommes, highlights how India’s youngest citizens bear the heaviest climate burden—from disrupted schooling and unsafe migration to rising health risks—and why child protection must become a core pillar of national climate policy.
Climate change is often discussed in terms of economic losses and infrastructure damage, but children remain nearly out of frame in the conversation. Do you think policymakers are overlooking the disproportionate impact on children?
Yes, and this oversight is serious. It is today’s children who will inherit the greatest burden of climate breakdown, yet most national and state climate plans do not explicitly mention them. Policy debates in India remain focused on GDP losses, infrastructure resilience, or emissions accounting, while the lived reality of a five-year-old in a flood-prone village is rarely considered.
UNICEF’s Children’s Climate Risk Index ranks India 26th of 163 countries, placing our children
among the world’s most vulnerable. Yet globally, less than 1% of adaptation finance is directed towards child and family sensitive measures, and even lesser to child-centred disaster risk reduction. This financing gap explains why schools remain shut for months after cyclones, why nutrition falters during lean seasons, and why WASH systems collapse during floods.
In our programmes, Sankalpa, Perinatal Health and WASHwise in the Sundarbans, IeDA in Jharkhand, we witness the fallout daily: missed schooling, unsafe migration, child marriages, malnutrition. Without deliberate child-focused indicators, budgets, and shock-responsive social protection, climate policies will continue to default to technical fixes, while the generation most affected, the children, remains invisible.
The Sundarbans is described as “ground zero” for climate change. From your field experience, what does climate breakdown look like through the eyes of a child growing up there?
In the Sundarbans, climate change is not a distant threat but a lived condition. For children, it shows up as saline drinking water, long stretches of school closure after cyclones, reduced meals when paddy harvests or fishing incomes fall, and older siblings migrating seasonally. These are daily disruptions that, over time, define childhood.
The government has strengthened early-warning systems and cyclone shelters in the region. Yet, our engagement with children reveals persistent gaps: extended breaks in learning, reduced access to safe play or peer groups, and heightened anxiety about losing homes or parents migrating. For adolescents, climate pressure often manifests as early marriage or dropping out of school to work.
Evidence supports these lived realities. Rising salinity has been linked to food insecurity and health risks, while multiple studies confirm that cyclones in West Bengal disproportionately disrupt schooling and nutrition. Our programmes in the Sundarbans work alongside these government initiatives to strengthen WASH systems, school preparedness, and child-protection mechanisms, ensuring that even in “ground zero” for climate change, children’s rights are not overlooked.
Unsafe migration, child labour, trafficking, and early marriage are emerging as direct outcomes of climate stress. How does climate change accelerate these risks, and what urgent interventions are needed to break this cycle?
Climate stress erodes household assets and coping capacity. When flood, salinity or repeated storm losses destroy livelihoods, families make distress decisions: sending children to work, marrying daughters early to reduce household burden, or trusting informal brokers to find “work” elsewhere are all pathways that create trafficking and labour risks. Empirical work increasingly shows these causal links: environmental shocks worsen drivers of child marriage
and unsafe migration. Urgent interventions must be integrated along with rights-based advocacy. Some of these can be:
- Short-term, unconditional cash-plus schemes tied to schooling and health services to prevent distress sale of children’s labour.
- Community child-protection mechanisms mapped to migration routes (hotlines, safe-return protocols, registered contractors).
- Adolescent-focused retention programs and conditional education incentives for girls.
- Legal and livelihood pathways at destination to reduce dependency on exploitative intermediaries. These are known, cost-effective building blocks. What’s missing is
political will and finance commensurate with the scale of the problem.
Your work emphasizes children not as passive victims but as leaders of resilience. Can you share specific examples where children have driven climate adaptation or protection efforts in their communities?
Children are often the first to adapt when environments change, and their leadership can strengthen community resilience. In our programmes, adolescents have helped map local hazards, advocated for safer school infrastructure, and supported awareness campaigns on nutrition and hygiene in climate-stressed areas.
Government initiatives like National Green Corps eco-clubs and the focus on youth within Mission LiFE recognise this potential. Our field experience shows that when children are given structured platforms and decision-making space, they contribute practical solutions. For instance, youth groups in the Sundarbans have worked with panchayats to prioritise safe evacuation routes, while in Jharkhand, adolescents have supported health outreach by assisting frontline workers in digital data collection.
International evidence mirrors these lessons: youth-led groups globally have pioneered water harvesting, disaster drills, and reforestation. The takeaway is clear. Children and adolescents are not passive recipients of aid, when engaged meaningfully, they become drivers of adaptation, and their innovations often resonate strongly with local realities. Scaling such
participation can bridge the gap between national policy intent and community practice.
In regions like West Bengal and Jharkhand, high maternal and infant mortality rates intersect with climate stressors such as salinity, flooding, and food insecurity. How is TDH addressing these overlapping vulnerabilities?
Maternal and infant health is one of the most climate-sensitive areas. In Jharkhand and West Bengal, high maternal and neonatal mortality intersects with rising heat, flooding, and food insecurity. Evidence shows that extreme heat increases risks of preterm births, and
waterborne disease surges after floods.
India has strong programmes such as Janani Suraksha Yojana and Poshan Abhiyaan, but climate disruptions threaten their continuity. Our role has been to strengthen and climate-proof existing systems.
In Jharkhand, through IeDA-eIMNCI, we equip ANMs and ASHAs with digital diagnostic tools to detect danger signs early in child consultations, ensuring timely referrals even in resource-poor settings. In the Sundarbans, our Matri Sakhi app supports frontline workers in perinatal counselling, while WASHwise improves water and sanitation in health centres, including training frontline workers and improving infrastructure.
By integrating health and WASH interventions within community and Government structures, we ensure that mothers and infants continue to access essential services despite climate stress. These layered measures complement national schemes and protect families where climate and health risks converge most sharply.
Much of India’s climate action still focuses on mitigation rather than adaptation. What structural shifts are needed in national climate policy to prioritize child protection and community resilience?
While India has made significant strides in climate action, much of the focus remains on mitigation be it renewable energy, emissions reduction, and infrastructure resilience. Adaptation, particularly child-centred adaptation, has not received the policy attention or funding it urgently requires. To truly safeguard India’s youngest citizens and build community resilience, three structural changes are non-negotiable:
- Child-focussed adaptation finance: make a portion of national and state adaptation budgets ring-fenced for child outcomes (nutrition continuity, learning recovery, protection services), and require indicators for those outcomes in NAPs and NDC
adaptation plans. - Shock-responsive social protection at scale: integrate climate triggers into existing cash-transfer systems so households with pregnant women, infants or school-age children receive immediate, automatic top-ups after a shock, with conditional services
attached. - Integrated governance at local level: institutionalise child-protection actors within local disaster management (DDM) committees and panchayats so that DRR planning explicitly includes child-safe evacuation, school retrofits, and livelihood pathways for
returning migrants. These shifts require parliamentary commitment and donor alignment: adaptation finance is growing globally but remains far below needs and is often skewed to mitigation. India must demand (and program) adaptation funding that targets human
outcomes, not just infrastructure.
Disaster risk reduction and WASH systems often fail in the face of extreme climate events. How is TDH working with local governance structures to make these systems child-centric and more resilient?
Water, sanitation and hygiene systems are often the first to collapse in disasters, and children feel the consequences most, through diarrhoeal disease, interrupted immunisation, or unsafe health environments.
Through our WASHwise programme in the Sundarbans, we focus on health centres, ensuring that essential services for women and children continue even during cyclones
and floods. This means working with local panchayats and health authorities to install better drinking water stations, improve and maintain resilient toilets, and train cleaners in infection prevention and control (IPC). By combining infrastructure fixes with system strengthening and governance engagement, we make sure these facilities remain functional, safe, and trusted.
Done right, climate-resilient WASH in health facilities is one of the most cost-effective, preventive investments: it saves lives, reduces health costs, and provides dignity in the most vulnerable moments for children and families.
You’ve warned that safeguarding children today is an investment in India’s long-term resilience. What risks does India face if it continues to treat child protection as a side issue rather than a core pillar of climate action?
Safeguarding children today is about building safer futures for entire communities. When climate shocks push children out of school, into early marriage, or unsafe migration, the effects are not temporary, they shape the next generation’s wellbeing, productivity, and resilience. A country cannot truly recover from disasters if its children are left behind.
In the Sundarbans, through our efforts in the Sankalpa programme, we see how floods or salinity disrupt household stability and place children at direct risk. By strengthening local governance, schools, and community protection systems, the programme helps families weather shocks without resorting to harmful coping strategies. Likewise, through Kabaddi, adolescent girls in vulnerable districts use sport as a pathway to stay in school, build confidence, and resist pressures of early marriage. Both efforts demonstrate that climate adaptation is strongest when child protection is integrated at its core.
India has already built strong foundations through social protection schemes, youth initiatives, and disaster preparedness systems. The next step is to make these climate responsive — ensuring that every flood, heatwave, or cyclone triggers not just infrastructure repair, but a safety net that keeps children learning, nourished, and protected. That is how we secure safer futures, not just for children, but for India’s resilience as a whole.
There’s a growing recognition that climate justice is intergenerational justice. How can India ensure that its development and climate strategies don’t sacrifice children’s futures for short-term economic growth?
Intergenerational justice means today’s growth choices must not narrow tomorrow’s life chances. A practical step is to add Child Rights Impact Assessments (CRIA) alongside EIAs
for large infrastructure, coastal protection and urban projects, so plans include relocation of at-risk schools, resilient WASH, and funds for learning continuity. Development finance (including PPPs) can build in social protection and reskilling for affected households to reduce distress decisions that harm children. Voice matters too: adolescents engaged in our programmes in the Sundarbans and Jharkhand contribute to disaster planning and service feedback; scaling such participation into state climate committees would make trade-offs
transparent and keep children’s interests central. This is entirely complementary to India’s current direction, adding a child lens ensures sustainable growth is also shared and future-proof.
Finally, what role can the global community—governments, donors, civil society—play in amplifying the voices of climate-affected children from the Sundarbans and other vulnerable regions?
Global actors have three clear roles: finance, technical partnership and
platforming.
● Finance: donors and climate funds must close the adaptation gap and prioritise
child-tagged allocations (grants, not loans) that strengthen public systems
(health, education, social protection) in vulnerable regions.
● Technical partnership: share rapid, low-cost innovation (heat-resilient maternal care
protocols, child-sensitive early warning tech, shock-responsive transfer
designs) and fund rigorous evaluations so governments can scale what works.
● Platforming: Create and fund safe, mediated platforms for children from places like the
Sundarbans to speak at UN fora, COP sessions and global media; it matters
politically when affected children tell their story directly, supported by NGOs
and research partners so their testimony shapes agendas rather than being a
photo-op. Donors and civil society should also insist that national climate
plans transparently report child-centred indicators; accountability is the
mechanism that turns compassion into policy.