Lebanon’s children growing up with climate anxiety

The most overlooked consequence of climate change is not measured in degrees Celsius, rainfall levels, or water reserves.

It is something quieter and harder to quantify.

An unease that settles into daily life in subtle ways: a dry tap where water used to run, a classroom that grows heavier with heat, a sense that the systems once taken for granted are no longer stable.

In Lebanon, these shifts are becoming part of childhood itself.

A recent study found that more than 90 percent of children and young people say climate change makes them feel anxious, and almost the same proportion say it makes them feel sad.

To understand what these shifts mean in practice, The Beiruter spoke with Kevin Bonel, Kevin Bonel, WaSH (Water, Sanitation and Hygiene) Specialist at UNICEF Lebanon. For him, what is often described as emotional response is only the surface of a deeper transformation, one in which climate change is already shaping the water children drink, the air they breathe, the food they consume, and the schools they attend.

What is emerging is not only climate anxiety. It is a different way of growing up.

A generation shaped by overlapping crises

For children in Lebanon, climate change does not arrive in isolation.

It enters a country already shaped by economic collapse, political paralysis, infrastructure decay, the aftermath of the Beirut port explosion, and recurring security shocks.

“Climate change does not replace these crises, it amplifies them.”

Children hear daily conversations about water shortages. They experience rising food prices linked to agricultural instability. They witness floods, wildfires, and increasingly extreme weather events affecting communities across the country.

But as Bonel stresses, the key issue is not only environmental change.

It is the compounding effect of multiple systems breaking at the same time.

Climate risks converging across systems

Across Lebanon, climate pressure is no longer confined to a single sector. Water, heat, food systems, and environmental conditions are now unfolding in parallel, creating overlapping pressures that reinforce one another in daily life.

Water stress and infrastructure breakdown

Since 1950, temperatures in Lebanon have risen by approximately 1.6°C, while rainfall has declined by around 11 millimeters per month per decade. These long-term shifts are reshaping daily conditions through longer dry seasons, reduced snow coverage, and increasing stress on already fragile water systems. Bonel notes that projections suggest up to 30 percent less water availability by 2080.

The effects are already visible. Families increasingly rely on water trucking, while those who cannot afford it are pushed toward unsafe sources, increasing exposure to waterborne disease. Children are particularly vulnerable, Bonel explains, because their immune systems are still developing and they are more sensitive to heat, dehydration, and polluted air.

This strain sits on top of a deeper structural breakdown in water governance. Groundwater levels have dropped by 30 to 35 meters over four decades, while seawater intrusion is advancing inland in coastal aquifers, in some areas reaching up to seven kilometers, affecting both drinking water and agriculture. Unregulated private wells are accelerating depletion, while in some cities 50 to 60 percent of distributed water is lost through leaking pipelines or illegal connections. At the center of this system, Lebanon still lacks a national monitoring framework to track extraction and supply, making effective management extremely difficult.

Heat, pollution, and urban exposure

Rising temperatures are increasingly shaping daily life in urban environments. Children are exposed to heat stress in overcrowded classrooms, particularly during prolonged electricity shortages that limit cooling and ventilation.

At the same time, air quality has deteriorated since the economic collapse, driven by increased reliance on diesel generators and widespread open waste burning. These combined pressures are not isolated phenomena. Heat, pollution, and infrastructure failure now interact, creating layered environmental exposure that directly affects children’s health and learning conditions.

Food systems under climate pressure

Agriculture, one of Lebanon’s most climate-sensitive sectors, is increasingly destabilized by irregular rainfall, droughts, floods, and soil degradation. Reduced precipitation lowers agricultural yields, directly affecting rural livelihoods and driving higher food prices.

In already vulnerable regions, more than one million people face acute food insecurity linked to overlapping economic and environmental crises. Climate change does not create this pressure alone, but it intensifies existing structural fragilities within the food system, making recovery more difficult and volatility more persistent.

Rainfall volatility and environmental instability

Lebanon is no longer experiencing a simple cycle of drought. It is experiencing climate instability.

Rainfall patterns have become increasingly erratic, shifting between prolonged dry periods and sudden heavy downpours that overwhelm drainage systems, contaminate water sources, and trigger flooding, often within the same season.

This volatility adds a layer of unpredictability across all systems, affecting water availability, agriculture, and infrastructure resilience simultaneously.

Toward adaptive water use

Alongside these structural pressures, UNICEF is supporting more resilient approaches to water use. In areas such as the Bekaa, including projects like Zarrile, treated wastewater is being reused for agriculture. When properly treated, it can safely replace freshwater irrigation, reducing pressure on groundwater and contributing to a more circular system of water use under climate stress.

Rebuilding the system from the ground up

Despite the scale of the challenge, Bonel emphasizes that the response is not only humanitarian but institutional.

UNICEF is working across multiple ministries, including the Ministry of Energy and Water, the Ministry of Environment, the designated national authority for climate coordination, and the Ministry of Agriculture, to strengthen data systems, improve governance, and support both technical and nature-based solutions.

At the core of this effort is a shift toward rebuilding the technical foundations of water governance. This includes tracking extraction levels, assessing whether supply can meet rising demand, monitoring groundwater and aquifer sustainability, and integrating climate data to better understand snow coverage and seasonal water availability.

Alongside this institutional work, UNICEF is also supporting practical interventions on the ground. These include protecting natural springs from contamination and introducing nature-based solutions such as small check dams designed to improve aquifer recharge and retain seasonal rainfall.

But Bonel is also clear about the limitation: without reliable data, functional monitoring systems, and coordinated governance across institutions, long-term water security remains impossible to guarantee.

The challenge, he stresses, is not only emergency response. It is rebuilding the systems that allow Lebanon to understand, manage, and plan its water future.

Children on the frontline of climate inequality

At its core, the crisis unfolding in Lebanon is one of fairness. Climate change is fundamentally unjust.

It is not driven by the children who are now living its consequences, yet they are among those most affected.

They face greater exposure to heat, higher vulnerability to disease, and increasing dependence on fragile systems of water and food supply. At the same time, they are growing up in a country where economic collapse, political instability, environmental stress, and infrastructure breakdown overlap and reinforce one another, leaving resilience increasingly out of reach.

As Kevin Bonel makes clear, climate change in Lebanon is no longer a distant horizon.

It is already embedded in the systems that shape daily survival, and it is quietly defining the limits of an entire generation’s future.