What does family planning look like in a warming world?

During the past years, Climate change has disrupted the deeply personal decision about whether to have children.

A 2020 study found that 78% of Gen Zers in the US did not plan to have children due to climate change. Some fear bringing children into a world that will suffer increasingly severe consequences from global warming, others worry about the carbon footprint of a new human – by one estimate the equivalent of more than five thousand transatlantic flights.

“Basically there is a scientific consensus that children’s lives are going to be very difficult,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said in 2019. “And it leads young people to have a legitimate question: Is it OK to have more children? ”

For others, fertility appears to be one of humanity’s smallest problems, as decades of efforts to improve access to contraception and abortion and to address infant mortality are yielding positive socio-economic and demographic results. For much of the world, there has never been a better time to have a child.

On a warming planet, our personal and collective futures are colliding in unexpected ways. Here we explore some of the latest thinking, emotions and data.

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The fear is real

1. As temperatures rise, enthusiasm for families decreases. Jade Sasser, associate professor at the University of California Riverside, conducted a survey among 2,500 millennials and Generation Zers for her book Climate anxiety and the children’s question, published this month. “Having and raising children symbolizes a future in which we can feel good about raising children, give them a good life, and leave some kind of legacy,” she writes. “For many people of childbearing age, that hope is threatened by climate change.” A large meta-study of 13 studies among more than 11,000 people (mainly from the Global North) found that 12 of them solid evidence linking greater climate concern to intentions to have fewer or no children at all.

2. More empty daycare centers. When the economy slows, fertility often drops because people postpone having children for a short time. But in the years After the Great Recession of 2008, U.S. birth rates never recovered, the Pew Charitable Trust found. Western states have been hit hardest, with declining school attendance and looming fiscal deficits in the coming decades. Many other developed countries such as Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Australia and even China also have historically low birth rates.