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Overlooked toll of climate change on migrant children in the Americas

Nature Climate Change (2025)Cite this article

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Climate change drives displacement and migration across the Americas, particularly exposing Latin American and Caribbean children to compounded health risks. We explore these health impacts, identify gaps in related US healthcare and health policy, and propose recommendations for how they can respond.

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Fig. 1: Number of children from Latin America and the Caribbean encountered at the US border against climate-related disaster events, 2021–2024.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, USA

    Sebastian Pintea, Ava Acevedo & Juliet Horenziak

  2. Health Disparities Think Tank, Harvard College, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Sebastian Pintea, Ava Acevedo, Juliet Horenziak, Anissa Kurani, Khushi Kohli & Stephanie Wang

  3. Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA

    Anissa Kurani

  4. Georgetown University School of Medicine, Washington DC, USA

    Anissa Kurani

  5. Harvard College, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Khushi Kohli & Stephanie Wang

  6. Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA

    Eugene T. Richardson

  7. Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, MA, USA

    Eugene T. Richardson

  8. Independent consultant, Washington DC, USA

    David Introcaso

  9. Department of Nutrition, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA, USA

    Abrania Marrero

  10. Department of Global and Environmental Health, New York University School of Global Public Health, New York, NY, USA

    Abrania Marrero

Authors
  1. Sebastian Pintea
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  2. Ava Acevedo
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  3. Juliet Horenziak
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  4. Anissa Kurani
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  5. Khushi Kohli
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  6. Stephanie Wang
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  7. Eugene T. Richardson
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  8. David Introcaso
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  9. Abrania Marrero
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Sebastian Pintea.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Nature Climate Change thanks Baltica Cabieses, Anna Dimitrova, Helena Honkaniemi and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Pintea, S., Acevedo, A., Horenziak, J. et al. Overlooked toll of climate change on migrant children in the Americas. Nat. Clim. Chang. (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-025-02525-5

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