As Cop26 draws to a close the outlook on climate change does not feel rosy. Despite nations making a litany of pledges to ameliorate the crisis, the world is apparently no closer to limiting global temperature rises.
And with this comes all of the expected fatalism. Wildfires and flooding and apocalyptic storms have filled the pages of our newspapers and social media feeds for some time now. Back in 2018 the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said legislators had just 12 years to stave off the worst consequences of a warming planet. Greta Thunberg – the poster child of the environmentalist movement – talks about how “our house is on fire”.
Plenty of ink has been spilt on the eco-anxiety and climate-induced depression plaguing young people. And of course this rhetoric has plenty to answer for. Perhaps a level of angst is required for action, but it can quickly give way to nihilism.
One concern is that having a child will worsen all the existing issues: more people equals more carbon consumption, for example
And a concerning phenomenon is looming on the horizon. A recent global survey found 40 per cent of 10,000 16- to 25-year-olds were reluctant to have children due to the climate crisis. Analysis from Morgan Stanley buttressed this evidence.US congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez asked her millions of Instagram followers: given the state of the environment, “is it okay to still have children?”
These anxieties seem to be rooted in two places. One concern is that having a child will worsen all the existing issues: more people equals more carbon consumption, for example. And the other is even more existential than that: who wants to bring new life into a world that may become uninhabitable?
The birth rate in the West has actually been declining for some time now. And we cannot chalk it all up to climate anxiety. In fact there are myriad direct economic factors likely driving this change. But as Morgan Stanley analysts wrote, the impacts of climate anxiety are “impacting fertility rates quicker than any preceding trend in the field of fertility decline”.
Sabrina Tavernise, a reporter who covers demographic change, points out in the New York Times that birth rates decline in times of crisis. It makes perfect sense – why not wait until the war, pandemic, economic collapse (or whatever it might be) is over before having a child?
She cites the financial crash of 2008, which saw the number of women having babies in the US drop broadly in line with expectation. But something baffled demographers after that. Even as the worst impacts of the crash began to wane, the birth rate did not pick up as expected. Rather, it kept going down.
Tavernise chalked this up to many factors, one being the United States’s weak social safety net. But this is not a situation unique to the States. According to the Office of National Statistics in the UK, the birth rate in 2020 fell for the fifth year running. South Korea and Japan have seen record lows. And in Ireland the average number of children for a woman aged between 15 and 44 dropped from four in 1965 to 1.75 in 2018.
Leaving aside the influence of the pandemic and climate anxiety for a moment, what is causing this?
My 27-year-old friend tells me that she does not feel adequately equipped to care for a child without that much-needed personal stability
Of course there is the case of shifting social mores. Women are increasingly reaching parity in wages. Many want to continue pursuing their careers. The normalisation of contraception and the legalisation of abortion matter too. A woman’s worth is increasingly diverging from her mere child-rearing potential.
But individual choices are not made in a vacuum. The cost of housing has not increased in line with wages. For many 20-something-year-olds in Ireland and London homeownership appears little more than a pipe dream. Taking this alongside a hostile rental market, it becomes abundantly clear why having a child feels not just a distant fantasy, but an irresponsible decision. My 27-year-old friend tells me that she does not feel adequately equipped to care for a child without that much-needed personal stability.
And there are the simple costs of childcare too. The OECD found Ireland currently has the fourth-highest childcare cost in the world. In the current configuration of society – one that more or less requires both parents to work – childcare is necessary, but for many totally unaffordable.
If climate anxiety compounds this trend, then the world is facing a serious reckoning. Shoring up the social safety net and dramatically reducing the costs of childcare will require serious economic shifts. But the cost of allowing a population to age is not trivial either: the number of productive members of society falls, and there are simply less young people to look after the old.
But there are real human costs too. And they cannot be expressed in financial terms, nor discussed solely as a function of changing tax burdens. It is a tragedy that anyone who might want children is prevented from doing so. Whether this is thanks to economic precarity or existential fears about the future of the planet is secondary.