More than 171 million children around the world were forced out of their classrooms by climate-related disasters in 2025 — that is one in every ten students on earth, according to a landmark UNICEF report that lays bare the deepening collision between the climate crisis and the right to education.
Girls were disproportionately among those displaced, and the consequences for them extended far beyond a missed term. In communities across sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and the Pacific islands, when a flood or prolonged heatwave shuts a school, girls are the last to return — and in far too many cases, they never do. Families fall back on tradition, early marriage becomes an economic solution, and a climate event that lasted weeks steals a future that was meant to last decades.
Nigeria, where an estimated 20 million children are already out of school — the highest figure of any country in the world — sits at the centre of this gathering storm. Annual flooding across Anambra, Kogi, Benue, and Delta states routinely submerges school buildings and displaces communities for months at a stretch. In the North-East, where Borno, Adamawa, and Yobe states are still absorbing over two million internally displaced persons from the Boko Haram insurgency, climate shocks pile onto fragile school systems that were already running on borrowed time.
The UNICEF data reflects a trend that climate scientists have been tracking for years: extreme weather events are not only becoming more frequent, they are becoming more intense and more geographically widespread. Cyclones that once struck every few years now arrive annually. Heatwaves that once lasted days now last weeks, making it physically dangerous for children to sit in metal-roofed classrooms with no electricity and no water. The 2025 figure of 171 million disrupted students represents a sharp escalation on previous years, signalling that the window for passive concern has closed.
UNICEF's report calls on governments to treat education infrastructure as climate infrastructure — demanding that schools be built and retrofitted to withstand floods, extreme heat, and storms, and that emergency learning systems be in place so that a disaster does not automatically mean a lost academic year. The agency is pushing for climate adaptation to be embedded in national education budgets, not treated as an afterthought funded only when a donor steps in after a catastrophe.
For Nigeria, the report's timing is significant. The federal government is currently finalising its Nationally Determined Contributions update under the Paris Agreement, and education advocates are pressing Abuja to include school climate-proofing as an explicit commitment. The Universal Basic Education Commission has received increased allocations in recent budgets, but observers argue that without a climate lens applied to school siting, construction standards, and emergency protocols, those investments remain vulnerable to the next flood season — which the Nigerian Meteorological Agency has already projected will be severe across the South-South and South-West in the coming year.
