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Climate hazards interrupted schooling for 171 million students in UNICEF's 2025 count
UNICEF's snapshot covers one year in 106 countries and counts students reached by a hazard, a smaller measurement than school days lost. The one-in-ten framing implies a base near 1.7 billion students.
The Scientist · Science desk
What happened
- UNICEF's new analysis counts more than 171 million students, one in ten from preprimary to upper secondary age, whose schooling was disrupted by climate hazards during 2025.
- Storms were the most common cause, reaching 109 million students, ahead of floods at 70 million or more and heat waves at roughly 50 million.
- Three-quarters of the affected students live in low- and lower-middle-income countries, where UNICEF says education systems often lack the resources to safeguard learning during an emergency.
- High-income systems appear too: more than 500,000 students in Spain's Valencian Community were hit by March storms, then Cyclone Gabrielle in September, with heat closures in May and June and Storm Alice in October.
- The report projects that inaction would cost the students disrupted in 2025 at least US$200 billion in lifetime earnings.
Compiled by The ScientistSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- constraint A ministry using this table to allocate money learns where hazards land, not how much instructional time each one destroyed, because the same tally absorbs a one-day closure order and a delayed school term.
- decision Forty countries were disrupted more than once inside a single year. School continuity is an annual budget line for those systems. UNICEF is asking governments and donors to raise financing for education resilience.
- exposure Girls carry the losses a 2025 snapshot is least able to see, since the mechanisms UNICEF names for them, caregiving and water-collection duties and child marriage, act after schools reopen.
- cost The bill lands on students as lower lifetime pay and on their countries as weaker workforce productivity, slower growth and harder poverty reduction.
Add the three biggest hazard categories together and they overflow the total. Storms, floods and heat waves come to at least 229 million students between them, against a headline count of 171 million, so at least 58 million students are counted under two hazards or more [7]. Some of that is one event wearing two labels, a cyclone that also floods a school. Some of it is two events months apart. Madagascar had drought, tropical cyclones and floods in the same year, affecting 280,000 students [12].
The unit of account is students. Egypt suspended classes nationwide for a single day in April after a Khamsin wind and dust storm, and the count there is more than 28 million students [10]. Pakistan's August monsoon floods delayed the return to school for more than 28 million students; UNICEF calls it one of the largest climate-related education disruptions recorded in 2025 [9].
One student quoted in the report is 16-year-old Taudibura Garo of Papua New Guinea. "Usually, the water comes up to our knees and floods the pit toilets, then it becomes unhealthy for us to stay at school, and we miss the lessons we are supposed to learn," Garo said [17]. UNICEF notes that El Nino conditions are expected to increase the risk of extreme weather there in the coming months [21].
Divide the report's minimum earnings projection by the students it covers and the average is about $1,170 each across a working life [15]. A one-day national closure and a lost school year both add one student to the headcount, and only the lost year moves a lifetime of earnings much.
"For millions of children, climate hazards do more than disrupt lessons: They destroy schools, uproot families and push the most vulnerable children, especially girls, out of the classroom for good," said UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell [16]. Permanent exit is the part of that sentence a single-year snapshot cannot follow.
The analysis draws on data from 106 countries or territories and covers 2025 [2]. It therefore carries no comparison with an earlier year, and countries outside the sample contribute nothing. The total is a floor. The categories are hazard types, not causes: the report counts students affected by storms, floods, heat waves, droughts and wildfires [3], and the published summary does not separate a baseline share of those hazards from a warming share.
UNICEF lists approaches already in use, including integrating climate resilience into national education planning, strengthening school infrastructure, keeping learning going during and after a disruption, and embedding climate education in curricula [19]. The list comes without effect sizes. How many school days a hardened building or a continuity plan saves per dollar spent is the number a finance ministry would need, and this report does not carry it.
What to watch
- A 2026 edition of the count would give the series a second data point; one year of data cannot establish a trend.
- Whether UNICEF publishes the underlying data in school days lost, so severity can be ranked by learning time and not by headcount.
- Follow-up on Pakistan's 28 million students: how many had not returned by the end of the school year.