World Environment Day 2025: No, it’s not just about counting number of heat wave days; let’s count how many school days are lost in fetching water

Talking about climate change often begins and ends with a familiar string of buzzwords — rising temperatures, number of heat wave days, controlling emission, reducing carbon footprints, achieving net zero and combatting poly-hydrocarbons. These are significant indicators, but the conversation becomes dangerously narrow when it excludes how climate change plays out in the daily lives of the most vulnerable. At the centre of this overlooked reality are children — especially girls from marginalised and resource-poor communities — whose education, health, and safety are quietly being eroded by a crisis they had no part in creating.

What happens when a girl can no longer attend school regularly, not because she lacks ambition, not even because there is no school in her village — but just because she has to spend hours each day fetching water from distant sources? What happens when climate change, far from being an abstract global concern, shapes her everyday life-story?  

Invisible cost of drought

Maithili (name changed to protect identity), an adolescent girl belonging to the Mawaasi community and hailing from Padho village in Satna district of Madhya Pradesh, doesn’t need a climate model to explain the crisis. She lives it. Now pursuing a Bachelor of Arts degree, she describes how her education has been compromised by something as fundamental as water.

“Our Grandma used to tell us that the Vindhyachal region, which our small village is a part of, had always been known for its lush green forests and natural wealth. But over the years, with the forests thinning and rainfall becoming unreliable, even our basic water sources have dried up. I had to walk three kilometres daily to fetch water, through forest paths that take up four hours of my day, leaving almost no time for me to go to school. Sometimes I wondered — was I studying, or just surviving?”

There are many tribal communities native to the region — the Kol, Gond, Mawaasi, and Khairwar — who have traditionally relied on forest produce, subsistence farming, and daily wage labour. With the increasing ecological stress brought on by climate change, their fragile livelihoods are now under further pressure. Forests are thinning, aquifers are depleting, and surface water sources are becoming unreliable. The impact of this is disproportionately borne by adolescent girls, who are tasked with water collection, often at the cost of their schooling.

Weight of gender norms

And then, there are assumptions that it’s the women and girls who should shoulder the burden of water collection — a social expectation rooted in deep-seated gender norms that assign caregiving and domestic responsibilities exclusively to them. This expectation — unquestioned and inherited — makes the climate crisis a double burden for girls. Not only are they impacted by environmental stress, but they are also bound by societal roles that dictate their response to it. In drought-prone areas, it is rarely the boys who walk miles for water; it is the girls who lose school hours, safety, and childhoods. This isn’t just climate vulnerability — it is climate injustice shaped by gendered marginalisation.

Water burden versus school attendance

The result is a slow, silent slide away from education. Girls like Priya (name changed), a 10th standard student, and 18-year-old Suhani (name changed) know this too well. With tube wells and shallow bores frequently failing during the peak summer months, these girls are forced to cover long distances daily, just to fetch potable water for their families. Each hour spent hauling water is an hour lost from school, from homework, from rest, from play. Gradually, their academic performance suffers. Dropouts increase. Futures shrink.

The tragedy lies not only in the time lost but also in what this indicates about our climate policies—that they rarely centre children. To put it bluntly, climate change is not only an environmental issue; it is a child rights and human rights crisis. In regions like Vindhyachal, where reduced rainfall leads to falling groundwater levels, children are grappling with multiple deprivations—loss of study time, waterborne illnesses, food insecurity. If we don’t invest in climate-resilient child rights now, we risk losing an entire generation to cascading vulnerabilities.

A borewell can lead to a breakthrough

Despite being included under the ‘Nal Jal Yojana’ by the government, Padho, a small village in the Malgosa Panchayat, is grappling with critical water crisis. Although a new water tank is proposed and expected to be operational by 2030, the current water supply situation remains dire.

The situation worsens during the summer months when water demand peaks. The district collector has visited the village to assess the crisis and continues to monitor the functionality of the pump, reflecting a proactive administrative approach.

But all is not bleak. In Padho village, where girls once routinely walked hours for water, a small but meaningful change has taken root. After sustained pressure from the community, the public health engineering department installed a new borewell in the vicinity. For students like Priya and Suhani, this has meant a significant shift—they can now focus on her studies without the daily stress of a long trek for water. This seemingly modest intervention has had a transformative impact on her ability to attend school regularly.

What this tells us is that the solutions are not always elusive or impossibly expensive. They are often about people’s awareness and infrastructure leading to sustainable change at the grassroots. A functioning borewell, a restored traditional water body, or the integration of water security into local education plans can go a long way in making climate resilience child-centred. Local governance mechanisms, community water management, solar-powered borewells, and afforestation efforts—all of these need to speak to the everyday lives of girls like Maithili and Shefali.

From local losses to global questions

This is no longer the time to ask whether climate-resilient frameworks that prioritise child rights are needed. The question is: how soon can we implement them? Because the cost of delay is not just environmental degradation—it is lost childhoods, stunted potential, and the denial of basic rights.

Climate change is a global phenomenon, but its impact is hyper-local. It unfolds in the hours stolen from a girl’s day, in the books she couldn’t read, and in the school education she might have to dropout. Every step we take to support her—be it access to water, a climate-smart school curriculum, or a safe commute—has implications that ripple far beyond her village. It is not just the environment we must fight for; it is for the futures of those who will inherit it.

Soha Moitra is Director, CRY (North)

Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth