Climate change: students' woes

It is not just flooding or other disasters that are taking a toll on our schoolchildren. Increasing extreme weather events are making school a dangerous place to be for several weeks out of the year.

The searing classrooms of Lahore and many other parts of Punjab feel like brick kilns during May's heatwave, with news reports describing children fainting and getting nose bleeds due to excruciating heat, made even worse by power outages and overcrowding.

The opposite is often true in the winter, as students shiver due to subpar heating arrangements or lack of gas for heating, though in this case, at least the overcrowding helps keep the classrooms a little warm.

But whether it is floods after the rain, blistering heat around the summer, or toxic smog in the dry winter months, weather-induced school closures are occurring with increasing frequency, and little is being done to address them.

Experts agree that the situation is becoming untenable, with students losing too many days of school during the year, and the weather being too hot or too cold to schedule make-up days before winter or summer vacations.

And even if make-up days could be scheduled, attendances drop as much as 25% on extreme weather days, meaning many students are even further behind.

This will have a profound impact on long-term outcomes, with some experts suggesting that there will be far fewer kids making it to university in the future if things continue unchanged.

Some long-term strategies are being implemented, such as World Bank-funded 'resilient campuses' that are elevated and solar-powered, but financing, building and populating these new schools will take time, and with some 26 million students already out of school whom authorities desperately need to bring back into the system, we cannot afford to get distracted by the risk of more kids quitting school because of inhumane conditions.

Without urgent investment and adoption of resilient education systems, Pakistan's children will inherit not just a broken ecosystem but a broken future.