Climate change puts 1b children at ‘extreme risk’

Some one billion children are at "extremely high risk" due to climate change harms, a rights group warned yesterday, adding that youths' living standards failed to improve in the last decade. The KidsRights index, based on figures supplied by UN agencies, also said more than one-third of the world's children, some 820 million, were currently exposed to heatwaves. Water scarcity affected 920 million children worldwide, while diseases such as malaria and dengue affected some 600 million children, or one in every four, Dutch NGO KidsRights said. The KidsRights Index is the first and only ranking that measures how children's rights are respected annually, ranking Iceland, Sweden, and Finland as the best for children's rights and Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and Chad as the worst, out of 185 countries. KidsRights highlighted Angola and Bangladesh, saying the two countries significantly improved their scores in regards to children's rights.