“I There was a hormonal impulse,” said Professor Camille Parmesan, a leading climate scientist based in France. “Well, it was very strong. But it was, ‘Do we really want to welcome a child into this world that we’re creating?’ Even 30 years ago, it was very clear that the world was going to hell with hand baskets. I’m 62 years old now, and I’m so glad I don’t have children. ”
It’s not just Parmesan cheese. Almost a fifth of female climate experts surveyed are choosing not to have children or have fewer children because of the environmental crisis plaguing the world, according to an exclusive Guardian survey. found.
They said these decisions were extremely difficult. Dr. Shobha Maharaj, an expert on the effects of the climate crisis in Trinidad and Tobago, has chosen to have only one child, her son, who is now six years old. “The choice to have children was and continues to be difficult,” she said.
Maharaj said part of the struggle was fear for his children’s future and the addition of new humans to the planet. “When you grow up on a small island, it becomes a part of who you are. Small islands have already been affected so negatively that there was always a sense of impending loss, and I didn’t want to transfer that to my children.”
“But my husband is the most family-oriented person I know,” Maharaj said. “So this was a compromise. Only one child, no more. Maybe my son will grow up to be someone who can help find a solution?”
The Guardian approached every available lead author or review editor for every report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change since 2018. IPCC reports are the gold standard of climate knowledge. Of the 843 people contacted, 360 answered questions about their life decisions, a high response rate.
Of the 97 female scientists who responded, 17 said they had chosen to have fewer children, including women from Brazil, Chile, Germany, India and Kenya. All but 1% of the scientists surveyed were over the age of 40, and two-thirds were over the age of 50, reflecting the senior positions they achieved in their fields. One in four respondents were women, the same proportion as the overall authors of IPCC reports.
The findings are a key decision made in response to the climate crisis by scientists who know the most about it and who predict that global temperatures will rise above international targets in the coming years. This is the answer to the question regarding the decision-making process. Seven percent of male scientists surveyed said they either had no children or had fewer children than they would have had.
Most of the women scientists interviewed made decisions about their children in the past few decades, when their children were young and the serious dangers of global warming were not yet clear. They said they did not want to increase the world’s population, which is putting a huge environmental burden on the planet, and some expressed concern about the climate chaos their children might have to live with.
The role of global population growth in the destruction of nature and the climate crisis has been a divisive topic for decades. The publication of Professor Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb in 1968 was a particular flashpoint, mentioned by several scientists in their survey responses. The debate has raised allegations of past racism, as countries with rapidly growing populations are primarily located in Africa and Asia. Forced population control is not part of today’s demographic and environmental debates, with better educational opportunities for girls and access to contraception for women wanting to be seen as an effective and humane policy.
Parmesan, from France’s CNRS Ecology Center, said: “When I made my choice, it was very clear that human population growth was a problem in the ecological community. Conservation of biodiversity is absolutely essential to stabilizing populations. It depends on that,” he said.
Professor Regina Rodríguez, an oceanographer at the Federal University of Santa Catarina in Brazil, also chose not to have children, but she is no longer aware of the effects of environmental damage she saw in the rapidly expanding coastal town near São Paulo, where she grew up. I received it.
“The fact that resources are limited was very clear to me from an early age,” she said. “Then I learned about climate change and it became even more clear to me. I am completely comfortable teaching and passing on what I know. there is no. [My husband and I] Don’t regret it for a second. We’re both working on the climate issue and we’re both fighting it. ”
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Professor Lisa Schipper, a climate vulnerability expert at Germany’s University of Bonn, chose to have one child. She said people from the Global North, where each person’s carbon footprint is much larger than those living in the Global South, have a responsibility to think carefully about this choice.
“To be honest, only now, for the first time, am I starting to panic about my child’s future,” she said. “When she was born in 2013, I felt more optimistic about the possibility of reducing emissions. Now I feel guilty for leaving her in this world without my protection. I also feel guilty for contributing to climate change.
An Indian scientist who chose to remain anonymous decided to adopt a child rather than have one of his own. “Too many children in India don’t have a fair chance. We can give that opportunity to those already born,” she said. “We’re not so special that we need to pass on our genes. Our values are more important.”
He cited the low infant mortality rate and the wide gap in emissions between the rich and the poor, saying that wealthy people who choose large families are “self-centered and irresponsible in this day and age.”
The relationship between environmental concerns and fertility selection is complex, and previous studies Found little consistency Beyond age groups and nationalities.Having children or choosing not to have children for environmental reasons, according to recent reviews It may be the result of fear About the future, about population levels, or about not having the resources necessary to raise children.
a Study of Americans aged 27 to 45 The younger IPCC scientists surveyed found that concerns about their children’s well-being in a climate-changing world were a much bigger factor than concerns about their offspring’s carbon footprint. however, Focus group research in Sweden We found that very few people in any age group have changed or plan to change their plans for their children because of concerns about climate change.
Very little research has been done in the Global South. Many researchers point out that some women do not have the freedom or ability to choose whether or not to have children, or how many children to have.
Regarding the debate over the role of population growth in environmental crises, Schipper said, “It doesn’t matter how many people there are, as long as a small number of people are doing most of the damage.” Parmesan disagreed, saying the overall impact is a combination of people’s consumption levels and total population: “Don’t cherry-pick one half of the equation and ignore the other half.”
