Nearly 1.1 billion children worldwide now face at least three climate hazards at once. Imagine a school in a region hit by a drought one season, extreme heat the next and storms that arrive when the building is already damaged. For these children, climate threats are not distant or theoretical. They keep kids out of school. They strain clinics. They dry up drinking water. They wash away homes. The question is not whether children are affected by climate change. It is how best to embed the complexities of climate change into the institutions that work to protect children, and how to reduce risk for the next generation.
What started as a conversation on the sidelines of COP29 has evolved into an effort across the United Nations Fund for Children (UNICEF) to build climate knowledge among the staff who design programs for children. In less than a year, the Climate Leadership Capacity Strengthening Programme has brought together more than 240 UNICEF staff—from health specialists and education officers to water engineers and social protection experts—to learn how climate change affects children, and how UNICEF can design programs that are climate-resilient. The Columbia Climate School team—Lisa Dale, Jeff Schlegelmilch and Miren Gil-Vernet, with support from the National Center for Disaster Preparedness—has partnered with UNICEF leadership to deliver a series of trainings around the world and online. In every session, the same pattern emerges: staff walk in without deep climate knowledge and walk out understanding how to start building climate into the projects they lead.
“In each city, we heard from program leaders trying to develop climate strategies in their work with children,” said Dale. They were asking: “What’s the best way to ensure education can continue after a school is flooded? How do young bodies respond to extreme heat?”
Building capacity across modalities
Since October 2025, the partnership has implemented a dual approach: in-person workshops at UNICEF’s global offices for deep technical learning in person and webinars for thematic global teams. The first in-person training in Bangkok in 2025 brought together UNICEF country representatives from East Asia and the Pacific to build a shared foundation. In May 2026, a training in Panama City showed specialists how to build climate into the projects UNICEF runs across Latin America. In June 2026, a new group of 20 senior UNICEF staff met in Bangkok.
Alongside these in-person training sessions, the joint Columbia-UNICEF team began an ambitious series of synchronous webinars. Our first one, a three-part series on climate and health, reached 200 UNICEF staff experts in children’s health and well-being. “Working with leaders in the field calls for different approaches than traditional classroom teaching,” explained Schlegelmilch, adding that “case-based learning, along with formats like our online trainings, lets us reach busy professionals with limited time who still want to learn—and who bring their own experience into discussion.”
Global reach, regional relevance
Participants joining these climate training sessions come from UNICEF offices across Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Pacific. Some represent large regional centers of excellence; others come from country offices where climate hazards are already reshaping childhood. What connects them is their goal of turning climate knowledge into real changes in their programs: education; water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH); social protection; gender; youth engagement and finance.
One attendee works with disabled children in a big city and described how a newly built early warning system for floods would need to be modified to reach those residents. Another asked whether climate finance offers new sources of funding for drinking water installation projects. Another discussed the climate curriculum he is building for primary students and mused about how he would integrate his new knowledge from the workshop.
“Leading these sessions led to mutual learning. The discussions helped us link what we know about climate science and policy to reducing risk for the next generation,” Dale said.
From training to implementation
The real measure of success is what practitioners do once the training ends. A health specialist from the Panama training is now helping run the technical assessments for solar power at about 100 health facilities in Guyana and Suriname that are planned for the second half of 2026. An education specialist is working with a regional youth advisory board to bring a climate focus into its global programs.
Each participant is a node in a larger system. They supervise teams. They design programs. They influence policy. They unlock financing. Three people at a climate training workshop stand behind roughly 100 health facilities, which serve thousands of young people. Multiply that across all 240 staff, and the reach grows quickly. “This partnership has helped bring research to the people working on these issues today, while also showing us what operational and policy questions we need more research to answer,” said Schlegelmilch.
What’s next?
The work continues. At the end of August, our program heads to Nairobi for a training with UNICEF’s Center of Excellence in child survival, health, WASH and nutrition. Additional online sessions are expanding to other sectors, including education, WASH and social protection.
Participants don’t become experts in two days, but they leave the workshop better equipped to bring an eye toward climate risk into every program design and every funding request, until the lens is no longer a special addition but simply the way the work gets done.
The children exposed to climate hazards cannot wait for perfect knowledge or endless training. They need the people closest to them—the health workers, educators, engineers and policymakers—to act now with the understanding and tools to do it.
Views and opinions expressed here are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the Columbia Climate School, Earth Institute or Columbia University.
