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Extreme weather events and escalating climate-related shocks disrupted the education of more than 171 million children worldwide during 2025, according to a detailed assessment published by the United Nations children’s agency. The findings reveal that approximately one in ten students, spanning from pre-primary education through upper secondary school, experienced significant interruptions to their studies as environmental catastrophes intensified across the globe.
The study, titled "Learning Interrupted: Global Snapshot of Climate-Related School Disruptions in 2025," examined data gathered from 106 countries and territories. It documents how an increasingly volatile climate continues to jeopardize academic access, showing that female students are bearing a disproportionately severe share of the resulting educational fallout.
Across the surveyed regions, a multitude of extreme environmental events—including destructive storms, torrential flooding, dangerous heatwaves, prolonged droughts, and widespread wildfires—severely undermined standard school operations. These hazards forced extensive classroom closures, destroyed educational facilities, curtailed instruction time, triggered sharp declines in student attendance, and substantially heightened the danger of permanent dropouts.
Catherine Russell, the executive director of UNICEF, underscored the profound human and societal consequences of these compounding disasters. She pointed out that for millions of vulnerable children, climate hazards do far more than temporarily halt daily lessons; they actively level schools, force families from their homes, and strip away critical stability from those already facing severe adversity.
The report emphasizes a stark geographic disparity in how these disruptions unfold. Approximately 75 percent of all students affected by climate emergencies in 2025 live in low- and lower-middle-income nations. In these regions, public education systems frequently lack the financial resources, resilient infrastructure, and contingency planning necessary to maintain instructional continuity when environmental crises hit.
The analysis drew particular attention to the severe toll exacted on girls, whose pathway through education is uniquely vulnerable to post-disaster shocks. When schools are damaged or rendered inaccessible, girls encounter heightened safety risks, precarious learning conditions, and sharp increases in forced early marriage, all of which substantially increase their likelihood of leaving the school system entirely.
The physical devastation of school campuses further compounds these gender-specific barriers. The destruction of safe water supplies and sanitation facilities, coupled with forced family displacement and severe household income losses, often transfers additional survival burdens onto young girls.
Under these strained domestic circumstances, girls are frequently pulled from their studies to manage household caregiving responsibilities and fetch water across long distances. These escalating pressures, alongside the compounding financial distress of affected families, dramatically heighten the prevalence of child marriage, creating formidable obstacles that prevent girls from returning to the classroom even after academic facilities manage to reopen.
Among the various natural hazards analyzed in the 2025 data, destructive storms emerged as the single largest contributor to classroom disruption on a global scale. Powerful storm systems interrupted the learning journeys of an estimated 109 million students worldwide.
Severe flooding ranked as the second most destructive factor, impacting at least 70 million children whose schools were either submerged, structurally compromised, or utilized as emergency shelters. Simultaneously, severe heatwaves disrupted the schooling of roughly 50 million young learners, as soaring temperatures made unventilated and unshaded classrooms dangerous for instruction.
The headline total of 171 million affected children in 2025 reflects a statistical decrease compared to the agency’s assessment for the preceding year. In its 2024 evaluation, UNICEF reported that nearly 250 million students—representing approximately one in seven children across 85 countries—experienced climate-related school interruptions.
UNICEF explained that this variation in total figures is linked to a major adjustment in its analytical methodology. While earlier reports relied heavily on official government statistics, the latest 2025 assessment derived its baseline data from on-the-ground reports compiled by humanitarian aid organizations and localized media coverage.
Beyond the immediate loss of instructional days, the United Nations agency cautioned that the long-term socioeconomic ramifications of these disruptions are catastrophic. UNICEF estimates that failing to address these educational setbacks could trigger at least $200 billion in lost lifetime earnings among the cohort of students whose schooling was derailed by climate emergencies in 2025 alone.
In response to these findings, UNICEF issued an urgent appeal to national governments and international funding partners to dramatically scale up investments in education infrastructure. The agency stressed that new schools must be constructed to withstand extreme environmental stress, ensuring that future generations can continue their education safely in an era of accelerating climate disruption.
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