Summer Camp in a Climate-Changed World

Two young people watch from shore as a canoe with a child in a life vest enters a lake. — Credit: Cora Bates on Unsplash

Just a few weeks ago, I was there in the sweltering dorms, classrooms, auditoriums, cafeteria, and gym of a summer camp. I took a week away, as I have for many years, to return to my alma mater and teach creative writing to high school–aged campers.

But this year during our camp the temperatures soared into the high 90s. Although air conditioned, the outdated buildings struggled to keep pace with the high heat and humidity. Campers dealt with dehydration and exhaustion. I scrapped a planned field trip to a historic site. We ended the week much more weary than usual, and without as much of the outdoor camaraderie that usually defines summer camp.

In Texas over this Fourth of July weekend, camp became deadly along the Guadalupe River, which rose 26 feet in the middle of the night in a torrential flash flood. As of this writing, at least 27 people from Camp Mystic, an all-girls religious camp on the banks of the river, have died, most of them children. The death toll of the Texas floods currently stands at 120 people. Many more are still missing.

Across the globe, summers are becoming more and more dangerous, marked by increasing heat waves, wildfires, and floods. How is this impacting the future of summer camps, including nonprofits which historically have offered camp opportunities to children from urban areas? Can we still send our kids to camp—and if so, how can we mitigate these climate risks?

Why Camp Matters

Summer camp has long been a chance for children to interact with peers, have access to the outdoors, and participate in confidence-building and leadership activities. According to the Harvard Graduate School of Education, summer camp provides essential learning, particularly in the area of social-emotional growth.

For many children, camp may be their first and only childhood exposure to nature.

“Camp staff, parents, and children reported increases in children’s self-esteem, independence, leadership, friendship skills, social comfort, and values and decision-making skills, from the beginning to the end of a session,” according to Harvard, which cited a 2005 study by the American Camp Association (ACA) of 80 camps, finding significant gains in social-emotional learning following camp.

Children usually have some independence at camp, many for the first time: picking out their own clothes, for example, or getting themselves to and from activities on time. Without parents around, children learn autonomy and can build self-confidence through trying new tasks from knot-tying to kayaking. They meet a new group of peers, make and maintain friendships, deal with conflict, and model teamwork.

For many children, camp may be their first and only childhood exposure to nature. Nonprofits like the YMCA and the Boys & Girls Clubs of America offer a host of camps with low fees, while other nonprofits have special initiatives or scholarships devoted to sending children to camp for free.

For nearly a hundred years, Camp Joy from the Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Cincinnati has welcomed thousands of campers from Cincinnati, OH. As the camp states on its website, “As most of these kids reside in Cincinnati’s urban core, activities like hiking, mountain biking and rock climbing are often new to them. For some, it’s the first time they’ve ever spent away from home.”

“The survival of people in local camps and low-lying areas in many cases depended not on official evacuations, but on whether they were paying attention, on their own, to weather alerts.”

Getting out of a city for even a week or two also means getting away from poor air quality, smog, and pollution. Cities also tend to be hotter than rural areas due to fewer trees and high buildings that trap heat, so summer camps in shady or wooded areas can provide relief from climbing temperatures.

And summer camps can provide escape in other ways too. As part of building an intentional community, camps often have phone restrictions or screen limitations for campers, which can give children a much-needed break from technology.

But this last aspect can also be dangerous.

Improving Climate Preparedness

When it came to the Texas floods, as The New York Times wrote, “The survival of people in local camps and low-lying areas in many cases depended not on official evacuations, but on whether they were paying attention, on their own, to weather alerts in the middle of the night.” Located in the same town as Camp Mystic, Presbyterian Mo-Ranch Assembly Camp suffered no causalities. But at that camp, a facilities manager was awake at 1:00 am, saw the rising river, and alerted camp officials to evacuate.

It’s difficult to expect teenage counselors, likely exhausted from a full day of taking care of children outdoors in the heat, to be keeping watch over their phone alerts at 1:00 am. It’s also difficult to know how connected many summer camps—which are often in remote, wooded, mountainous, or rural locations—can be to internet or phone service, or how dependable that reception is.

The National Weather Service has lost about 600 staff since February of this year.

When I went to camp in rural Ohio, there was one landline in the kitchen for emergencies. When my sister went to horse camp, a highlight was a big overnight campout that required hours of riding deep into the woods. I’m not sure anyone had phones that would work in that remote location, an issue that occurred at Camp Mystic, according to the Associated Press (AP) which noted the camp did have a disaster plan, approved by Texas inspectors just two days before the deadly flood.

It’s not clear if the plan was followed or practiced in advance. On July 12, news broke that the camp had asked for and been granted repeated appeals by federal regulators to remove camp buildings from their flood map, “loosening oversight as the camp operated and expanded in a dangerous flood plain,” as The Texas Tribune wrote.

The National Weather Service, the agency responsible for alerting the public about weather events—despite being decimated in recent months as President Trump’s administration conducted massive staff cuts to the federal agency—did put out timely alerts about the flood. But on the local level, alerts did not go out to residents’ phones, via a private system called CodeRED, until hours later in the morning, according to The New York Times.

If that’s the case, it’s not even phones that residents needed to pay attention to in the middle of the night but their windows, where the river may or may not have been visible, due to the extreme darkness of the area. A former Camp Mystic counselor told the AP the darkness would have affected campers’ ability to escape.

But the former counselor also did not recall ever receiving emergency evacuation instructions at camp. That type of training needs to happen early and often in our age of climate crisis, especially given climate change denial and inaction on the part of government officials and the Trump administration.

Children should still be able to grow from and enjoy summer camp, but the changing climate may mean new precautions need to be put in place, such as disaster evacuation drills for staff and campers. Weather warnings need to be taken seriously, and communities need to be able to get critical, timely information about weather in their area. The National Weather Service has lost about 600 staff since February of this year. That agency needs to be restored and strengthened, according to Tom Fahy, legislative director of the National Weather Service Employees Organization.

As Fahy told the BBC: “Staffing has to be increased, we have to do this across the country, we need more individuals to do this. You can’t run a weather forecast office on a bare bones operation. Too many things are at stake, too many lives at are at stake.”