Climate anxiety: 'I don't want to burden the world with my child'

Awareness of the climate crisis has generally been strongest in developed countries, but "climate anxiety" is now also leading some couples in other parts of the world to decide against having children.

Julia Borges' worries about climate change intensified during the first months of the pandemic, when she and others were in isolation, alone with their thoughts.

"I started to picture my city and my university under water," says the 23-year-old agriculture and engineering student from Recife, on Brazil's north-eastern coast.

"I started to have anxiety crises, to the point of thinking about giving up on my own life, because I didn't know how to deal with it all."

Taking a course in climate leadership was little help - it only increased her feeling of responsibility for what was happening. She soon came to the conclusion that it wouldn't be right to have a child.

"I cannot see myself as responsible for the life of another human being, for generating a new life that would become another burden to a planet that is so overloaded already," Julia says.

In 2022 a team from Nottingham University asked adults in 11 countries whether anxiety or distress about climate change had made them think they should not have children, or had made them regret having them. The proportion saying that they did have such thoughts - sometimes, often or always - ranged from 27% in Japan to 74% in India. The study is due to be published next year.

An earlier study published in the Lancet, based on a 2021 survey of 10,000 people aged 16 to 25, found that more than 40% of respondents in Australia, Brazil, India and the Philippines said climate change made them hesitant about having children. In , Portugal, the UK and the US the figure was between 30% and 40%. In Nigeria it was 23%.

And an analysis of 13 earlier studies carried out between 2012 and 2022, which was published this month by researchers from University College London, found that concerns about climate change were typically associated with a desire for fewer children.

This was usually because participants were concerned about the effect climate change might have on their children's lives, or because they felt, like Julia, that more children would only add to pressure on the planet's resources. However, in two studies in Zambia and Ethiopia researchers say the dominant view was that "smaller families are better positioned to themselves during adverse environmental conditions".

In 2019 the singer Miley Cyrus said she wouldn't have children because of the state of the planet, and US congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez asked on Instagram if it would be right to bring children into a world blighted by climate change. The same debate now seems to be happening in countries that are on the front line of the climate crisis.

Julia's concern about climate change only increased when in May 2022, Recife was hit by a storm that caused floods and landslides, leading to more than 120 deaths in the region.

"Just three days before those massive rains, I had given a lecture to children from a local NGO, on the topic of climate crisis. Right on the spot, as that was later the area most affected by the flooding," she says. "That really affected me, in the sense of how can we think about children in the future if the children of the present are already in danger":[]}