A new study has found that with current global climate policies, children born in 2021 will face a future of climate disasters disproportionate to that of their grandparents.
Published in the journal Science, the study found that children born this year are going to live on Earth with seven times more heatwaves, twice as many wildfires, and almost three times as many droughts, river floods, and crop failures, compared to those born 60 years ago.
"This basically means that people younger than 40 today will live an unprecedented life even under the most stringent climate change mitigation scenarios," Wim Thiery, the studies lead author, said in a statement. "Our results highlight a severe threat to the safety of young generations and call for drastic emission reductions to safeguard their future."
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One of the study's co-authors, Joeri Rogelj, shared that children will suffer through "climate extremes" from the inactions of adults today.
However, Rogelj went on to say that a difference can be made through reducing emissions.
"With this study, we lay bare the fundamental injustice of climate change across generations, as well as the responsibilities of today's adults and elders in power," he said.
The study included an international team of more than 30 researchers from several universities working out of Vrije Universiteit Brussel, a Belgian public university. The researchers computed lifetime exposures to climate events from every generation born between 1960 and 2020 in every country across the globe.
The study went on to mention that children in developing countries will also see disproportionately more extreme climate events. For example, it found that the 172 million children in sub-Saharan Africa will face a sixfold increase of the extreme events over their lifetime. This includes 50 times more heatwaves.
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In comparison, the 53 million children of the same age born in Europe and Central Asia will only face four times more extreme events than their grandparents, USA Today reported.
Simon Gosling, another co-author, shared that setting more ambitious plans could help reduce emissions further.
"Our research shows very clearly the responsibility that the current generation holds for future generations in terms of climate change," Gosling said in the statement, which praised efforts by the world's youth to increase climate change awareness through school strikes and protests.
Currently, the world is on course to warm 3 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures, the researchers said in a statement.
If the Paris Agreement goal of a 1.5-degree increase was met, it could drastically reduce the burden of extreme climate events on the next generation.
