While the world debates policy, our children are already paying the price. What the data — and the streets — show.
There is a child in Chennai right now who did not sleep well last night.
Not because of a nightmare. Because the temperature inside their tin-roofed home did not drop below 34 degrees after midnight. Because the fan kept cutting out. Because the air tasted like something their lungs were not built to process.
This child will go to school tomorrow. They will sit in a classroom. And if the school is in an informal settlement in North Chennai or near the industrial belt that rings the south of the city, they will likely spend that day quietly suffering from heat stress — slower to think, quicker to tire, more likely to fall ill in the weeks ahead.
This is not a future scenario. This is happening now.
The numbers, from field research
In 2024 and 2025, a researcher from Harvard Medical School surveyed 391 mothers across all 38 districts of Tamil Nadu on the health impacts of climate change. The findings are precise and sobering.
Tamil Nadu has been among India’s fastest-warming states. The India Meteorological Department has recorded annual maximum temperatures rising by 0.02 to 0.04 degrees Celsius per year over the last three decades. Multiple districts now regularly cross 42 degrees Celsius in summer. In Chennai, urban heat islands raise city temperatures by 3 to 4 degrees above greener surrounding areas.
The state government’s own action plan on climate change and human health is direct about what this means for children: they are more susceptible to heat stress and dehydration, more sensitive to air pollution, and their immune systems are not fully developed — putting them at greater risk from the infections that flood seasons bring reliably to Chennai’s lower-lying neighbourhoods.
24.1 million children
The National Institute of Disaster Management, in collaboration with Child Rights and You, estimates that 24.1 million children in India are affected by climate events every year.
A CRY study covering Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands documented how climate events affect children across five categories: injuries, disease outbreaks, respiratory illnesses, mental stress, and nutritional deficiencies. All five are worsened by disrupted healthcare services and limited emergency preparedness — both of which describe the conditions in Chennai’s most climate-exposed communities.
The UNICEF executive director, speaking in early 2025, noted something that should not need to be said but apparently does:
“Education is one of the services most frequently disrupted due to climate hazards. Yet it is often overlooked in policy discussions, despite its role in preparing children for climate adaptation.”
In 2024 alone, climate impacts disrupted the schooling of 250 million children across 85 countries.
What heat does to a child’s body and mind
It is worth being specific, because the general conversation about climate change is too often conducted in abstractions.
When a child is exposed to sustained high heat, their ability to concentrate drops measurably. Their reaction time slows. Dehydration — which sets in faster in children than in adults — affects cognitive function before it triggers the sensation of thirst. By the time a child feels thirsty, their ability to learn has already been compromised.
Air pollution compounds this. Chennai’s air quality, particularly in its industrial zones and high-traffic corridors, regularly carries particulate matter at levels harmful to developing lungs. Children who breathe polluted air over extended periods develop respiratory vulnerabilities that affect not just their health but their stamina, their attendance, and their ability to sustain attention in class.
And then there is the psychological dimension. Research from across India links temperature spikes to rising depression and anxiety even in adults. For children, the stress of watching a familiar environment become hostile — the street that floods, the water that doesn’t come, the summer that keeps arriving earlier — carries a weight that we do not yet fully understand.
Tamil Nadu is paying attention. Not enough, but more than most.
Tamil Nadu is, to its credit, the first state in India to allocate dedicated funding — ₹24 crores — for climate literacy in schools. The Climate Educators Network, which held its first national summit in January 2025, has identified Tamil Nadu as a priority region for building regional education hubs that teach climate change with local specificity.
The Tamil Nadu Heat Mitigation Strategy of 2024 recognises the particular vulnerability of low-income households and supports cooling interventions. It exists. That matters.
But a policy document is not a sleeping child who is too hot to rest. ₹24 crores across a state of 80 million people is a start, not a solution.
Why ERA Foundation exists
I started ERA Foundation because I live in Chennai. I have lived here my whole life. I know what the monsoon feels like when it is right. I know what it has started to feel like when it is wrong.
The communities most affected by climate change in this city — the settlements near the Buckingham Canal, the fishing communities at Ennore, the families in Vyasarpadi who flood every October — are not the communities with access to policy conversations, climate consultants, or international research summaries.
ERA Foundation’s work is about closing that distance. Not with grand programmes or imported frameworks. With presence. With listening. With translating what the research says into what the community can use — practical tools, early warning connections, the knowledge that the heat their children are feeling is not inevitable, is not natural, and is not something they have to absorb alone.
Climate change is not an environmental issue. It is a children’s issue. The children living it are already paying a price they did not generate. The least we can do is show up in their streets.
— Elango Raghupathy
Founder, ERA Foundation · erafoundation.in · elangoraghupathy.com