Save The Children in its recent report has said that 70 percent of Afghan children are facing with negative impacts of extreme weather events in Afghanistan.
This comes after the 27th session of the Conference of Parties (COP27) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change hasbeen recently held in Sharm ElSheikh in Egypt.
Afghanistan is the sixth vulnerable country suffering from the negative impacts of the climate change as it is predicted that the country will face with drought till 2023.According to the Save The Children, the climate crisis poses a serious risk to all Afghan children whose families or communities survive on farming – nearly 13.2 million children — with the current drought and unseasonal summer floods wiping out crops,
killing livestock, drastically reducing vital food supplies and diminishing water sources.
The organization said that the rainfall rate during the spring of the current year has been in its lowest level in past five years. It also predicts that the rain and snowfall rate will be low in the coming seasons, so the drought will be continue for coming few years.
This comes amid of continued drought that has affected most of the country’s provinces for the past several years.
A number of residents of the provinces affected by continued drought have been displaced to other provinces. The organization has said that the summer floods in other areas of the country have destroyed 85,000 acres of crops and killed 7,500 livestock, further worsening the situation.
A number of those displaced people due to floods in the past six months are facing with various challenges.
According to the Save The Children, nearly 28 million of Afghanistan’s population is living in countryside and suburbs where most of them depend on products they collect from their agricultural fields; therefore, extreme weather events will pose serious risk to this number of the country’s population.
Save The children, which has been working in Afghanistan for decades, has said that the catastrophic combination of climate change, floods and economic crisis means that most families depending on
agricultural products are in a situation in which they have to resort to manual labor to feed their children.
Based on the information of the respective organization, cases of malnutrition among children under the age of five in its mobile medical clinics have jumped to 50 percent compared to Jan 2022. The organization has warned that the coming months will be so difficult for children who are mostly suffering from poverty.
The organization has also pointed to the lack of water resources in the country, saying that access to clean water is also becoming more difficult by the day, with children walking for hours to collect water for their families or in some cases, drinking dirty water, exposing them to deadly water-borne diseases such as acute watery diarrhea.
A recent countrywide assessment found 80% of households in rural areas and 75% of households in urban areas don’t have enough water for drinking, cooking and bathing. According to the organization’s report, child labor is also on the rise, with desperate parents taking their children out of school and sending them to
work on the streets, in other people’s homes, factories and mines to make up for the income they have lost due to the drought or floods. It is worth mentioning that the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA) is making effort to round up children, women and men begging on streets. A committee is working on identifying such
children to provide them with monthly allowance.
Shukria Kohistani
Afghan children at risk of extreme weather events, Save The Children
