What happens to childhood when the climate around us is changing?

Climate change reaches further than heatwaves and rainfall. It reaches into the ground children learn, play, rest and grow on.

Less outdoor play on a hotter afternoon; A school day interrupted by flooding; Feeling hot and sweaty as an ordinary state rather than an occasional one; New pressures landing on the adults responsible for caring for them.

None of this shows up in a weather report, but all of it is invisibly becoming part of what it means to grow up right now.

On 17 September, as part of Climate Week India, Bachpan Manao is joining Mudito for a conversation on exactly this, what a changing climate actually does to childhood, not as a future risk, but as a present, everyday condition.

Three people are joining us, each looking at this from a different scale:

• Mahalakshmi Ganapathy, educator and mother, on what climate shows up as inside a single family’s daily decisions, the small, constant negotiations that don’t make it into any policy document
• Suhel Quader, Nature Conservation Foundation, on the forgotten loss of children’s everyday, casual contact with the natural world, and what citizen science is picking up about that shift
• Riya Kumari, young education practitioner at Yuwa India, on how heat, flooding, and disruption actually land inside a classroom, and who bears that disruption unevenly