For adults, climate change is a ledger of statistics and carbon projections. For children, it is experienced through "sensory disruptions" of daily life: the smell of damp textbooks, the sudden silence of a closed school, and the sight of worried parents whispering about the harvest. In classrooms we visited, children did not describe climate change in scientific terms. They spoke about missing school, losing books, and not knowing where to go when floods arrived. To a child, the "greenhouse effect" is an abstract concept; a flooded playground is a visceral reality.

Anthropology teaches us that learning is a social and emotional process shaped by lived experience. When fear enters the room, the brain’s amygdala takes over, narrowing focus to immediate survival. In this state, attention narrows and memory weakens. A child cannot absorb a lecture on the greenhouse effect when they are hyper-aware of the rain on the roof, wondering if the road home will still be there at 3:00 PM. This "cognitive tunneling" means that even if a child is physically present, they may be mentally absent due to the stress of environmental instability.

Furthermore, recent UNICEF data reveals that South Asia is the most affected region globally, with 128 million students facing climate-related school disruptions in 2024 alone. These disruptions create a "culture of uncertainty" where children stop viewing school as a reliable anchor. Climate education that ignores this emotional reality turns learning into an additional source of stress rather than a solution. By acknowledging emotion and storytelling, education becomes a stabilizing force, moving from "content delivery" to "emotional recovery."