United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) Covers-up UN failures by Blaming Climate Change! • Watts Up With That?

By Jim Steele

United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund, responsible for providing humanitarian and developmental aid to children worldwide, is covering-up its abject failures by telling “heart-wrenching stories” that support the UN’s climate crisis propaganda. For example, a UNICEF study recently and deceptively announced from 2016 to 2021, “Weather disasters caused by climate change displaced 43 million children.”

UNICEF’s study focused on 4 climate related disasters finding “ninety-five percent of those displacements were caused by floods and storms.”  They further paved the way for future cover-ups by projecting, “Floods linked to overflowing rivers could spark 96 million child displacements in the next 30 years.” 

But climate changed has not caused more flooding! In fact overall, flooding has decreased!

Wasko (2019) reported, “Despite more sites around the world presenting increases in rainfall extremes than decreases, the opposite is true for flood magnitudes, with more sites exhibiting decreases rather than increases in flooding.” From the attached illustration, graphic (C), reveals the total area inundated by flooding has decreased over the past 2 decades despite rising CO2. Based on that and other contradictory statistics, Wasko concluded, “changes in rainfall may not be very well related to changes in flooding.” 

While floods are the largest threat to human habitat around the world, exposure to floods is not evenly distributed. From the attached illustration, graphic (A) shows the people of China, India and southeast Asia are the most vulnerable to flooding, in part due to their extremely large populations. China, India, and the Philippines alone experienced nearly 23 million displacements in six years. Furthermore, when we examine the locations where people are most exposed to flood danger and compare the locations experiencing increased precipitation trends, graphic (B), most of the children being displaced are not living in regions of increased precipitation.

So, the first question any critical thinker must ask is, why are there 43 million displaced children where rains and floods are less common?

One reason is poorer populations are more likely to move into flood prone habitat because that land is less coveted by the wealthy who don’t want their infrastructure exposed to natural flooding. Furthermore, the fertility of natural flood plains is advantageous for marginal farmers and fresh water is also more accessible. However, poorer populations are less likely to afford the costs of building adequate drainage and flood control infrastructure. Thus, people in flood plains are most susceptible to disaster when the inevitable flooding recurs. But such inevitable flooding has not deterred a growing population forced to live nearer natural danger.

While the total global population increased by 18.6% from 2000 to 2015,

the number of people living in observed inundated areas increased by 34.1%. Between 2000 and 2015, 58–86 million people, (or 23%–30% of the total flood-exposed population) were newly residing in inundated areas.  Yet only 13% of international disaster funds are allocated to preparedness, mitigation and adaptation.

If UNICEF truly wants to protect the world’s children from the tragedies of flooding displacement, then UNICEF should be working to alleviate families from being forced to live in natural flood plains, or help them build the needed infrastructure to adapt. And UNICEF must stop trying to cover-up their failures by blaming a climate crisis. But it seems most governments are indeed blaming a non-existent climate crisis on their worthless policies that do very little to solve the people’s real problems.