Introduction and summary
Climate change, once a distant concern, is here. Burning fossil fuels, which release excess carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, has built up a heat-trapping blanket around the globe, upsetting nature’s balance and bringing about widespread ecological damage.1 From longer and more devastating wildfire seasons,2 to more intense and destructive hurricanes,3 to extreme and dangerous heat waves that tax the energy grid,4 individuals and families across the country are having to deal with more regular natural disasters and climate emergencies and their impacts on public health and safety.
Notably, however, not all individuals and industries are equally affected. Young children and the people who care for them face particular challenges due to the historically underfunded early education system,5 affecting child health and safety as well as community recovery. Policymakers at all levels of government, child and public health advocates, and other community members must act to ensure that children are protected, to strengthen the early learning workforce, and to rally public support for the early childhood system as critical infrastructure that can help protect children against the effects of climate change and aid broader community recovery from natural disasters.
This report examines the impact of climate change on young children’s health and learning, the unique role that early educators play in protecting children from harm and bolstering community recovery in the wake of natural disasters, and the specific challenges the early childhood field faces, given its historically limited resources to support resiliency efforts. Recommendations for state and local policymakers, in the absence of federal support to mitigate the climate crisis, are included below.
Amid worsening climate change, young children are particularly vulnerable
Young children are especially at risk from the effects of climate change.6 Poor air quality,7 compromised access to safe drinking water,8 extreme heat, and the increasing frequency of extreme weather events such as hurricanes and wildfires put children at the center of an advancing public health crisis9 that will affect their development, well-being, and learning in the long term.10 Young children also bear the largest health burden associated with climate change:11 Their developing immune systems, inability to thermoregulate as effectively as adults, and dependence on caregivers for their safety and well-being put them at unique risk of the impacts of climate catastrophes. With food costs expected to escalate,12 millions of children could face malnutrition in the coming years.13 Hurricanes and coastal flooding that destroy homes and businesses14 displace young children and their caregivers and are economically devastating and psychologically traumatizing for families who lose their belongings and livelihoods.15
Even amid lower-attention crises, such as periods of extreme heat,16 children in school and early education settings, including both center-based child care and family child care homes, remain vulnerable to negative impacts on their health and learning. This is because of inadequate infrastructure in early learning settings, insufficient funding to support heat action plans, and a lack of public knowledge17 about the near- and long-term effects of heat exposure during the earliest months and years of child development.18
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The challenge of protecting children in today’s political climate
Climate action, environmental protections, and energy affordability programs that help Americans be resilient, afford their energy bills, and live in safe and healthy environments have been under attack since the second Trump administration took office in January. The administration has frozen federal grants and loans19—including those providing heating and cooling assistance for low-income families20—threatened job growth in the clean energy sector,21 weakened protections for public lands in favor of fossil fuel development,22 and even removed data, reports,23 and mentions of the words “climate change” from federal websites.24 Within a day of taking office,25 the administration began working to withdraw, yet again, from the Paris Climate Agreement.26 In March 2025,27 the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it would roll back protections by loosening restrictions on power plants, reconsidering standards targeting coal-fired facilities, relaxing wastewater regulations, weakening standards for vehicle emissions, and more.28 These federal actions29 impede efforts to fight climate change and to prepare for more frequent and severe extreme weather disasters and emergencies.
States are responding to the climate crisis in different ways:30 Some are establishing comprehensive action plans, while others are adopting a patchwork of climate policies. Political will and the level of dedicated resources, particularly in the child care and early learning sector, continue to be highly variable across state and local leadership. Even where more comprehensive action plans exist, few identify infants, young children, and expectant parents as priority populations. The early childhood system faces particular and continuous challenges to protecting young children from the consequences of a changing climate—and to recovering from natural disasters—because the early childhood population has not been prioritized. There are also pervasive administrative and funding barriers to upgrading facilities and infrastructure, and it is difficult to retain qualified staff.
Child care professionals are on the front lines of the climate crisis
Whenever a hurricane hits, a river floods, wildfires rage, or temperatures climb to dangerous levels, early educators are on the front lines, trying to ensure that the response meets the needs of children and families—every day and particularly in times of crisis. Yet early educators’ role in these situations is frequently overlooked, and their day-to-day needs to prepare for and respond to these emergencies are too often invisible. In a 2024 RAPID survey, more than half (57 percent) of child care providers reported experiencing at least one extreme weather event in the past two years.31 In the survey and during informal focus groups conducted by the RAPID research team, providers reported that heat is affecting children’s outdoor play; electricity costs are rising due to a reliance on air conditioning; and water shortages, wildfires, and flooding are disrupting services and increasing stress on children, parents and providers.
More than half of child care providers reported experiencing at least one extreme weather event in the past two years.
Child care programs are critical infrastructure, even when buildings are destroyed
In 2024, Hurricane Helene devastated much of western North Carolina, damaging at least 55 child care programs.32 Parents who lost jobs in the wake of the storm faced an unprecedented crisis because they could no longer pay for care, and the programs that had been available were either gone or providing limited services out of temporary locations. Parents faced significant struggles supporting their children while also trying to clean up damaged buildings, distribute supplies, or coordinate information with other community members. Yet despite the critical role that child care plays in community functioning, disaster recovery systems frequently overlook young children and the educators who care for them: The North Carolina General Assembly allocated only $10 million out of nearly $900 million33 in relief funding for early childhood education, despite estimates that damaged centers alone would require nearly $12 million to complete their repairs.
In early 2025, catastrophic wildfires swept through Los Angeles, California, leaving much of the city’s child care system displaced and in disarray.34 Alicia Albek, a family child care provider, experienced this firsthand when her home and business were threatened by the fire. As reported by The 74, she spent hours reuniting children in her program with their families before evacuating—and nine months later, she is still waiting for debris to be removed from and reconstruction to begin on her family’s home. She hasn’t been able to reopen her child care program, which previously served 20 families in her community.
The early childhood workforce connects young children with the environment
Despite the lack of adequate wages and recognition, more than 2.2 million early educators,35 overwhelmingly women and disproportionately women of color,36 are caring for an estimated 9.7 million young children, from birth to age 5, across the United States.37 Early educators play at least five critical roles in supporting climate resilience:
- They see firsthand the effect that the changing climate has on the health and development of young children and the well-being of families—including by recognizing early health warning signs—and are often among the first to document and raise awareness of this impact.
- Early childhood educators play a primary role in introducing young children to the natural world around them and helping them learn to care for the earth. They provide critical educational experiences—through nature-based learning methods38 and by encouraging outdoor play and incorporating climate themes into their curriculum—that promote health and social emotional and cognitive development, all important to developing resilience.
- Their daily interactions with families help parents better understand how to respond to the needs of their children—by improving, for example, their understanding of the risks of poor air quality. They also offer resources to help families respond to and speak out on environmental and public health issues.
- During emergencies, early childhood programs often become a place of refuge and support for children and families in the community. They not only secure emergency supplies but also provide mental health support to children and families as their community endures the trauma associated with climate disasters.39
- Early childhood programs and providers are a critical voice for young children and families, ensuring that their needs are included in community and state planning and response. Their advocacy can help secure specific investments for facilities upgrades and spur additional research on community-level risks associated with climate change.40
Despite the potential of early childhood educators and providers to play a critical role in addressing the environmental challenges facing themselves and the children in their care, funds are too often not available to prepare and train providers for a crisis. Moreover, providers, already strained due to a lack of resources, are facing an increasing need to renovate facilities—including by adding shaded structures, improving energy efficiency, upgrading ventilation, repairing roofs, and combating mold and mildew.41 Family child care providers—for whom the resources and zoning permits necessary to conduct upgrades may be harder to come by, as they conduct their businesses out of their homes—face particular struggles in the midst and aftermath of climate emergencies. Many home-based providers are renters,42 which means they face greater administrative, logistical, and financial barriers to making necessary home improvements, if their landlords or homeowners associations even allow them to do so. The millions of people caring for young children across the United States need recognition, support, professional development, and funding to meet the challenges posed by a range of environmental threats that are growing more serious year by year.43
Early childhood providers, already strained due to a lack of resources, are facing an increasing need to renovate facilities—including by adding shaded structures, improving energy efficiency, upgrading ventilation, repairing their roofs, and combating mold and mildew.
Recommendations
Rapid climate change, and the ensuing extreme weather emergencies and disasters, are already harming the health, lives, and livelihoods of people and families across the country and will continue to get worse unless the United States immediately transitions to a clean energy economy. Protecting children from climate change threats in the near term will require support from state, local, and federal governments to ensure that early childhood programs have the resources, training, and professional development required to keep kids safe during extreme weather events. In addition, state and local policymakers should adapt and improve health and safety standards with the early childhood system in mind to enable early educators and providers to respond effectively and promote children’s health and safety.44 Baseline support for family well-being and proactive planning will better prepare communities, educators, staff, and facilities for worsening climate threats. It should include the following five actions.
1. Increasing federal, state, and local investments to support, train, and promote the overall resiliency of the early childhood workforce
- Increase early educator wages and improve workplace conditions: Increasing wages for educators and other early childhood staff is crucial. Low wages, few or no benefits, and demanding work environments drive early educators from the field,45 leaving the remainder to face the increasing challenge of protecting children’s health and promoting their learning. Moreover, federal, state, and local program performance standards—including national health and safety and accreditation standards, state child care licensing standards, and quality rating and improvement standards (QRIS)—can and should be used to make improvements in the workplace, with input from members of the early learning workforce. This can include establishing wage floors and expanding labor organizing opportunities among early education professionals. Standards can also be used as a foundation for upgrading facilities, developing action plans, and providing other tools necessary to respond to climate emergencies. Professional development opportunities should include regularly updated preparedness training to ensure early educators are adequately supported and have the necessary skills and knowledge to care for children in a climate emergency, connect with their families, and respond to broader community needs.
- Develop and expand on community needs assessments and mapping tools: Community needs assessments should be used in coordination with climate projection mapping tools to ask questions about what climate threats lie ahead for a particular community, what needs will result for families and staff, and how professional development for educators and other staff should be tailored to these emergent challenges. For example, in 2023 the Pennsylvania Department of Public Health created a training module specifically for child care providers and teachers about air quality.46 Urban Institute similarly generated a tool for documenting exposure threats to children in Head Start settings.47 Moreover, climate planning and response professional development training for early care and education staff must be approved for adult learning clock hours48 to ensure it is recognized for child care licensing requirements. The Eco-Healthy Child Care program, for example, educates and trains early learning professionals on low-to-no-cost actions they can take to provide environmental health and climate protections in their facilities.49 The federal government can use these needs assessments to inform decisions about competitive grants disbursed to states based on climate risks and needs.50
The child care sector already struggles to recruit and retain early educators
Child care workers earn less than workers in 97 percent of all other paid jobs in the United States.51 With a median hourly wage of just more than $15 per hour,52 nearly half of child care workers depend on some form of public assistance.53 Most early educators also lack workplace benefits and retirement.54 Child care workers in center-based programs are twice as likely as the general workforce to have no form of workplace health insurance, and only 1 in 10 have any form of retirement benefits. More than one-quarter of early educators therefore rely on Medicaid,55 which recently faced drastic federal cuts.56
Early educators also face a pervasive lack of professional recognition and respect, borne out of a long history of devaluing care work that is frequently provided as invisible, low, or unpaid labor by women57—disproportionately Black and Hispanic women.58 Among early educators who leave the field, more than half report that they would stay if they earned higher wages, and 20 percent report that they would stay if they felt more respected in the profession.59 Despite challenging workplace conditions, low wages, and little to no benefits, early educators play a critical role in supporting the broader economy and promoting children’s early learning and development. As the climate crisis continues to worsen, those workplace challenges will only grow, and the field is likely to face even greater difficulty recruiting and retaining qualified early educators.
2. Promoting early childhood providers’ ability to enhance the resiliency of their facilities by creating flexibility in current infrastructure funding and securing new investments
- Make facilities upgrades easier and more affordable: Providers often lack the resources necessary to make facility upgrades to their homes or businesses to help improve conditions in spaces where children spend their time.60 These upgrades include HVAC improvements and maintenance, shade structures, clean water access, rebuilding after a climate disaster, indoor and outdoor air quality purifiers, and mold and mildew remediation. The high cost burden on providers means that many programs go without these upgrades, which poses a risk to both children and educators. Providing robust funding through new and sustained investments specifically geared toward making child care facilities more climate resilient61—and to support indoor air quality monitoring—is crucial to advancing children’s health and learning and protecting the educators who care for them.
- Consider the unique facilities needs of home-based early educators: Where possible, state and local leaders should address housing and zoning laws to ease red tape for child care businesses operating out of family child care homes so that they can make necessary facilities upgrades. Many home-based child care providers rent their homes,62 meaning they cannot independently make changes to the building or property without the approval and support of the landlord or homeowners association and may not qualify for certain home upgrade programs.63 Administrative burdens and zoning laws further complicate providers’ efforts to make home spaces safer and more climate resilient.64
3. Integrating climate resiliency and emergency response into governance structures, data collection, and community partnerships to support early educators’ preparedness and recovery training
- Engage the broader community: State and local policymakers need to engage the broader community, including youth, parent, grandparent, and faith-based leadership groups, in climate resiliency planning to help alleviate the outsize burden on early educators.65 Existing parent engagement structures, such as local policy councils through Head Start and Early Head Start,66 serve as helpful models for how this kind of engagement can support program planning and decision-making and strengthen existing partnerships that can help address climate resiliency planning for communities’ child care programs.
- Implement licensing exemptions for climate-related threats: Existing child care regulations typically mandate some amount of daily outdoor time, as well as safety conditions around outdoor play spaces,67 but they lack explicit exceptions for unsafe air quality or heat. Implementing temporary exceptions in licensing statutes would ensure provider compliance while protecting children from climate threats and promoting consistency across the regulatory environment. These improvements, alongside new definitions of child safety, should be integrated into nonmandated state systems such as QRIS to build awareness for eventual adoption into mandatory licensing standards. Developing state and local contingency plans based on scientific evidence would standardize this process and reduce provider burden. Ultimately, integrating climate resiliency into mandatory standards will protect all children, especially marginalized populations.
- Build robust data systems to track environmental risks: Policymakers must more adequately track and provide information about the environmental risks for programs serving young children in order to better address facility needs and mitigate the impacts—including program closures as a result of natural disasters—that climate emergencies have on communities.
4. Developing climate emergency communication tools and practices to connect caregivers with trusted sources of timely, accurate information about climate threats
- Cooperate to make climate-related health alerts and associated guidance more accessible to early educators: Child care providers should have easy access to information about flexibilities afforded to them during extreme weather conditions, such as the ability to suspend requirements for outdoor play in the event of extreme heat or compromised air quality. They should also have easy access to information about impacts on child health, what to do in the event of a climate emergency, and how to coordinate access to services that public health officials recommend to promote children’s safety.
- Use trusted local partners to disseminate public health information: Timely information about climate emergencies is often communicated from state and local public health entities and lacks specific information about distinct impacts on young children or guidance for early educators and providers. Setting up communication processes through child care licensing agencies or child care resource and referral agencies68 and maximizing the use of existing tools, such as air quality trackers,69 that share up-to-the-minute information about climate threats is crucial to distributing climate emergency and disaster recovery information and supporting providers in communicating with families.70
5. Implementing policies that help child care adapt to new conditions in the context of a changing climate
- Expand existing food assistance programs to support access during times of crisis: Policymakers should ensure that food assistance disaster resources,71 such as the reimbursement rates for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and the Child and Adult Care Food Program, are updated to reflect rising costs for families and providers due to inflation and scarcity in the face of increasingly frequent and severe climate events. For example, in emergencies and disaster recovery, infant formula is distributed through the Special Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), but water—which is needed to make the formula—is not an allowable WIC expense.72
- Reestablish and expand federal tools for tracking climate impacts: When developing and reestablishing future federal climate and environmental justice data tools, agencies should consider how to create specific datasets that represent the distinct needs of young children and their caregivers as well as the early care and learning facilities upon which they rely. (Examples include EJScreen73 and the NEMSIS Heat-Related Activation dashboard.74) Early learning settings, including child care programs and schools, should also be integrated into climate risk mapping tools, and early childhood providers should be leveraged as key partners and trusted messengers in climate risk education work, such as that conducted by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration regional climate services75 and the National Climate Assessment.76
- Codify climate protections in state and local legislation: States and the federal government should pass laws and provide resources to address the needs of families and early care providers facing a changing climate. Examples include the Indoor Air Quality and Healthy Schools Act of 2025,77 which would establish a regularly updated national assessment of indoor air quality in schools and child care facilities, and the Community Mental Wellness and Resilience Act of 2023,78which proposed additional funding and federal coordination to establish community mental health assessments and resiliency coordination networks to generate data for planning purposes and strengthen communities’ preparedness for climate disasters. A New York law adopted in December 2024 set maximum classroom temperatures and new thresholds for when heat action plans must take effect.79
- Identify infants, young children, and expectant parents as priority populations in climate resiliency strategies: As municipal, county, regional, and state planners and policymakers create environmental justice and climate action plans for their areas, they should ensure that the needs of infants, young children, and expectant parents are specifically acknowledged and addressed by naming them as priority populations and ensuring that caregivers of young children are included in local planning and input opportunities. Doing so can ensure that local climate policies are responsive to the needs and concerns of members of the early childhood workforce and the families they serve. It also can break down silos in local and state agencies to better meet the needs of those on the front lines of climate change.
Conclusion
The climate is rapidly changing,80 and more frequent and severe extreme weather disasters and emergencies will continue to threaten the health, safety, and economic security of families and communities if the United States does not make an immediate and dedicated shift to a clean energy economy. The early educator workforce, on the front lines of the climate crisis, needs particular support to promote children’s health and learning and to aid in community recovery efforts following climate emergencies and disasters. While the federal government continues to dismantle climate efforts81 and disinvest in the industries and communities most at risk,82 state and local policymakers, community advocates, parents, grandparents, and early educators must join together to prioritize the health and safety of young children, along with the people who care for and educate them.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank Casey Peeks, Jill Rosenthal, Lucero Marquez, Alex Cogan, and Cathleen Kelly for their thoughtful feedback in the development of this report, along with Paige Shoemaker DeMio for her thorough fact-checking.