Climate change is an added barrier to youth physical activity, report says - Toronto Star
Climate change is an added barrier to youth physical activity, report says
Heat waves and poor air quality from wildfires pose extra challenges tochildren and youth who need more exercise outside and less time staring at screens, a new report says.
ParticipAction’s latest report card, released Tuesday, gives Canada’s kids a D+ for overall physical activity. It found that 39 per cent of children between the ages of five and 17 met the recommendation of 60 minutes of moderate to vigorous exercise a day.
The letter grade is a slight improvement from a D in 2022, when COVID-19 pandemic restrictions meant kids lost out on organized sports and school activities.
However, while the increasing impact of climate change means kids – especially those with asthma – should switch to indoor activities, those can be too expensive for many families, Tremblay said.
When the air quality worsens due to wildfires, the family heads to an indoor pool at a community centre that offers free admission just for high schoolers but Pringle said that should also be the case for elementary students. The ParticipAction report recommends that physical activity be promoted early in life.
“We know that exercise outdoors supercharges positive effects. It drops your blood pressure more, it improves your self-esteem more, and we know that’s an issue, especially among adolescents and kids,” she said from Vancouver.
Children and youth got a D in sedentary behaviour because 27 per cent of them met the recreational screen time limit of no more than two hours a day. That’s up from an F given in 2022.
Related Knowledge Center: Climate science
What began as a theory in the 1890s — that industrial emissions of carbon dioxide could increase global temperatures — had progressed to a scientific fact a century later. Scientists across a range of disciplines are studying the impact of the still-growing concentration of carbon dioxide and other so-called “greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere as they call for industrial and governmental policies to slow, then halt, the warming of the planet.