Last January, Diego Sandoval’s high school in San Diego County closed abruptly one Friday because of wildfires menacing the Southern California area. Classmates evacuated their homes as the fire spread. Frida Vergara, whose school was among the few in the area that didn’t close, recalls that friends with asthma were coughing and wheezing from the smoke.
It wasn’t the first time the students – both 17-year-old seniors in the Sweetwater Union High School District – saw how extreme weather disrupted learning. A year earlier, floods swamped parts of the county, damaging school buildings and closing one for more than a month. The problem is global: At least 242 million students in 85 countries or territories, or 1 in 7 students, lost education time in 2024 because of heat waves, fires, floods and other disasters, according to UNICEF.
Sandoval and Vergara say the connection between events like these and climate change is clear, and scientists agree: Greenhouse gases are trapping heat in the atmosphere and making disruptive and deadly weather events more common. And the two high schoolers say it’s also apparent who should pay for the damage: fossil fuel companies producing the materials that emit those gases…