Students use umbrellas to protect themselves from the sun as they line up to wait for their classes outside their school in Manila, the Philippines, on Apr 2, 2024. More than a hundred schools in the Philippine capital shut their classrooms on Apr 2, as the tropical heat hit "danger" levels, education officials said.
"The climate crisis is already a reality for children in East Asia and Pacific," the United Nations children's agency UNICEF warned last year. "Not only are the temperatures higher, the duration of the high temperatures is much longer," he told AFP. Bangladesh's urban schools can be sturdy, but are often overcrowded, with little ventilation, said Sengupta.
But closing schools comes with serious consequences,"particularly for children from poorer, vulnerable communities who do not have access to resources such as computers, internet and books", said Salwa Aleryani, UNICEF's health specialist for East Asia and the Pacific. UNICEF research in Myanmar found that crop shortages caused by rising temperatures and unpredictable rain caused families to pull children from school to help with work or because they could no longer afford fees.