UNITED NATIONS, Nov 16 (APP):The United Nations’ Children’s Fund, UNICEF, on Wednesday launched a new child-focused initiative designed to increase countries’ disaster preparedness and better cope with future climate calamities.
“We know more climate disasters are in the making. We just do not know where or when they will hit”, Karin Hulshof, UNICEF Deputy Executive Director for Partnerships, said.
The ‘Today and Tomorrow’ initiative, for the first time, combines funding for immediate resilience and risk prevention programmes for children today, with risk transfer finance provided by the insurance market to help cope with future cyclones.
“The risks of climate change are no longer hypothetical. They are here. And even while we work to build communities’ resilience against climate disasters, we have to become much better in pre-empting risks for our children”, she added.
Youth are a critically vulnerable population who are among the most affected by extreme weather events, UNICEF said.
Last year, UNICEF’s Children’s Climate Risk Index estimated that 400 million children are currently at high exposure to cyclones.
During the initial three-year pilot, the initiative will focus on Bangladesh, Comoros, Haiti, Fiji, Madagascar, Mozambique, Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu.
To move forward, UNICEF is raising $30 million for the project and calling for additional private and public partners to join the agency in closing the intensifying humanitarian financing gap for disaster protection for children and youth.
Although extreme weather damage perpetuates and deepens inequality and poverty across generations, existing risk transfer mechanisms do not meet the specific needs of hundreds of millions of children and youth.
‘Today and Tomorrow ‘is the first pre-arranged and event-based climate disaster risk financing mechanism that specifically targets the “child protection gap”, with full support for the future, as secured by the governments of Germany and the United Kingdom under the newly launched G7-V20 Global Shield against Climate Risks.
