Climate change poses a child labour ‘threat multiplier’
climate change is only making it worse.
Now, a newly developed quantitative approach may help raise its prominence as an environmental, social and governance issue. The AI-driven tool, known as the Child Labor Index, scores companies in three areas: disclosure levels, public perception and the commodity-level exposure of the supply chain to child labor. Fund managers can use the scores to pinpoint high-risk companies and identify others that need to confront the issue.
Among investors, “the level of awareness of child labor is incredibly low,” said Eleanor Harry, chief executive and founder of HACE, the UK-based startup that developed the index. “This will help them monitor risk in their portfolio.”
At least 160 million children, or one in 10, are part of the global workforce—and climate change is a “threat multiplier,” according to recent research published by the International Labour Organization. The United Nations agency found that “a growing number of studies consistently support the view that poverty induces households to rely more on child labor.”
That’s especially true in agriculture, where 70% of all child labor is found. As environmental disasters push more people into poverty, families are forced to pull children from school and put them to work in farm and field.
Villages in Cambodia and Tanzania that were hit by drought, flood and crop failure had much higher levels of child labor, according to the ILO. In Uganda and Pakistan, higher food prices made child labor more likely among non-agricultural
