Nearly every child in the world is now exposed to at least one climate-related hazard, with many facing multiple overlapping risks that threaten their health, education and long-term development, according to a new UNICEF report.

The findings highlight how intensifying climate change is reshaping childhood on a global scale, as heatwaves, floods, droughts and wildfires become more frequent and severe. UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell said children are already experiencing the consequences in their daily lives.

“The lives of children continue to be upended by the impact of heatwaves, wildfires, droughts and floods,” she said, noting that around half of the world’s children now live amid at least three overlapping climate threats.

The report warns that while the physical and mental toll on children is significant, it remains under-measured in global assessments. It also calls for stronger investment in health, education and infrastructure systems designed specifically to withstand climate shocks and protect younger populations.

UNICEF said children are disproportionately affected because their bodies are still developing, making them more vulnerable to heat stress, pollution and disease. Although these biological factors cannot be changed, the agency stressed that governments can reduce risks by strengthening essential services and infrastructure.

The report outlines how climate hazards often trigger cascading crises. Droughts can destroy crops and worsen food insecurity, while also leaving dry vegetation that fuels wildfires. These fires increase air pollution and can be followed by floods, which damage land and increase the spread of waterborne diseases.

Flooding remains one of the most widespread threats, with more than 360 million children globally exposed. UNICEF warns floods can cause drowning, injury and outbreaks of diseases such as cholera and malaria. Damaged housing also increases the risk of mould exposure, contributing to respiratory illness.

Extreme heat is another major concern. More than 1.5 billion children are exposed to frequent heatwaves, which can lead to heat stress and long-term health complications. Pregnant women are also at increased risk of complications, including preterm birth and high blood pressure disorders.

Air pollution remains a nearly universal risk, with about 2.3 billion children living in areas with unsafe air quality. Because their lungs and immune systems are still developing, children are particularly sensitive to long-term damage caused by polluted air.

The report also highlights the growing spread of vector-borne diseases. Around 1 billion children are now at risk of malaria, alongside increasing exposure to dengue and other infections linked to changing climate conditions.

UNICEF says these combined threats are not only a health crisis but also a major barrier to education and development, warning that urgent action is needed to build resilience and protect future generations.

Artificial intelligence systems may be able to imitate human emotional responses in controlled settings, potentially opening new directions for mental health research, according to a recent study from Dresden University of Technology in Germany.

The findings come at a time when mental health conditions are rising globally, with projections suggesting that up to 1.2 billion people could be affected by 2050. Researchers say this growing challenge highlights the need for improved understanding of psychological disorders and more effective treatment approaches, particularly in talk-based therapies that are difficult to model through traditional methods.

Unlike drug development, which can rely on biological testing, psychotherapy research faces limitations because neither animal models nor human trials can fully capture the complexity of emotional and cognitive processes. Scientists involved in the study argue that large language models (LLMs) may help bridge part of this gap.

“Our results show that large language models can reproduce patterns of human affective and cognitive processes under controlled conditions,” said Dr Magdalena Wekenborg, who leads the PsychoDigital Research group at TU Dresden. She added that such systems could support efforts to better understand underlying psychological mechanisms and help explore new forms of psychotherapy research.

The study examined whether LLMs could replicate emotional states such as fear, anxiety, anger, sadness, disgust, worry, and stress when prompted. Researchers then tested whether those induced states could be altered using different emotional regulation techniques, and whether emotional prompting would lead the models to make errors similar to those seen in humans experiencing the same feelings.

Findings showed that while artificial intelligence systems do not experience emotions in a human sense, they are capable of reproducing certain patterns of emotional reasoning through language processing. This allows researchers to observe behaviour that resembles human cognitive responses under structured conditions.

The team also noted that such models offer a level of experimental control that is not possible in human or animal studies. According to researcher Jakob N. Kather, experiments can be repeated under identical conditions and adjusted systematically, allowing for more precise comparisons.

He said this could enable new data-driven approaches in psychological and biomedical research, particularly in areas where ethical or practical constraints have limited traditional experimentation.

While the study does not suggest that artificial intelligence understands emotion as humans do, it highlights how language models may serve as useful tools for exploring aspects of mental health and human cognition in ways that were previously out of reach.