Climate change ‘apocalypse’ is stopping young people having children, new study claims

Climate change is stopping young people from having children because they fear their offspring will contribute to global warming, a new study has uncovered. 

The study, published in the Climatic Change journal last week, surveyed 607 Americans aged between 27 and 45 about global warming and the impacts it would have on their decision to start families. 

A staggering 59.8 percent of respondents say they are ‘concerned about the carbon footprint of procreation’, while 96.5 percent of those surveyed admit to worrying ‘about the well-being of their existing, expected, or hypothetical children in a climate-changed world’.

Some say they are so anxious about the negative impacts of the climate crisis that they have decided not to become parents. 

‘I feel like I can’t in good conscience bring a child into this world and force them to try and survive what may be apocalyptic conditions,’ one 27-year-old woman told researchers. 

‘Climate change is the sole factor for me in deciding not to have biological children. I don’t want to birth children into a dying world [though] I dearly want to be a mother,’ one 31-year-old respondent stated. 

A number of those surveyed were already parents, six percent of whom say they even regret having kids.  

‘I regret having my kids because I am terrified that they will be facing the end of the world due to climate change,’ a 41-year-old mother wrote.  

One father, aged 42, claimed the world in 2050 would be ‘a hot-house hell, with wars over limited resources, collapsing civilization, failing agriculture, rising seas, melting glaciers, starvation, droughts, floods, mudslides and widespread devastation’. 

Another person surveyed stated that they believed global warming ‘would rival World War I in its sheer terror’.

Lead researcher Matthew Schneider-Mayerson said the respondents’ quotes prove that younger generations are incredibly concerned about climate change. 

‘It is an unprecedented window into the way that [some people] are thinking and feeling about what many consider to be the most important decision in their lives,’ he told The Guardian.  

‘Fears about the lives of existing or potential children were really deep and emotional. It was often heartbreaking to pore through the responses – a lot of people really poured their hearts out.’

The Climactic Change study comes at the tail end of a year filled with natural disasters. 

California and Colorado witnessed some of their largest wildfires on record, with blazes burning across millions of acres of land, destroying homes and taking lives. 

Meanwhile, the 2020 hurricane season – which is still ongoing –  is the most active on record, with a total of 30 named storms, 13 hurricanes, and 6 major hurricanes.