The impacts of climate change on education outcomes: assessment and response

This brief presents findings from a global systematic review examining how climate change affects primary and secondary education across low-, middle- and high-income countries. It draws on worldwide literature to explore the educational consequences of major climate hazards — including floods, rainfall variability, droughts, cyclones, temperature fluctuations, and wildfires — and considers how these hazards interact with characteristics such as gender, age, race/ethnicity, and socioeconomic status to shape three key educational dimensions:

1. Access: Who participates in education and how they progress through the system.
2. Attainment: The level of formal qualifications achieved, typically measured by years of schooling completed.
3. Learning: Cognitive outcomes such as literacy, numeracy, and standardised test scores.

Key messages include:

• Evidence indicates that climate hazards are severely impacting children’s education. The current research base is most extensive regarding learning outcomes, where most studies document a significant decline. There is also a robust body of research on school access; however, the findings are mixed. Research on grade attainment – though based on a smaller set of studies – consistently points to a decline driven by climate hazards. 
• Climate hazards reduce educational outcomes in three main ways: school closures and damage to infrastructure; impacts on maternal and child health; and pressures on household resources, leading to an increase in children’s paid or unpaid labour.
• Within the studies examining if impacts vary across different groups, age, gender and socio-economic status are the categories most studied. While differences by gender vary greatly by context, there is more consistent evidence that young and economically disadvantaged students are more severely impacted by climate hazards.
• Further research is needed to understand the long-term compounding effects of climate shocks on understudied pathways like mental health, understudied groups such as children with disabilities and the effectiveness of programmes and policies that can mitigate these effects.