Eco-reproductive concerns in the age of climate change
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Eco-reproductive concerns in the age of climate change Matthew Schneider-Mayerson 1
& Kit Ling Leong
1
Received: 20 August 2019 / Accepted: 29 October 2020/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract
Media reports and public polls suggest that young people in many countries are increasingly factoring climate change into their reproductive choices, but empirical evidence about this phenomenon is lacking. This article reviews the scholarship on this subject and discusses the results of the first empirical study focused on it, a quantitative and qualitative survey of 607 US-Americans between the ages of 27 and 45. While 59.8% of respondents reported being “very” or “extremely concerned” about the carbon footprint of procreation, 96.5% of respondents were “very” or “extremely concerned” about the well-being of their existing, expected, or hypothetical children in a climate-changed world. This was largely due to an overwhelmingly negative expectation of the future with climate change. Younger respondents were more concerned about the climate impacts their children would experience than older respondents, and there was no statistically significant difference between the eco-reproductive concerns of male and female respondents. These and other results are situated within scholarship about growing climate concern in the USA, the concept of the carbon footprint, the carbon footprint of procreation, individual actions in response to climate change, temporal perceptions of climate change, and expectations about the future in the USA. Potential implications for future research in environmental psychology, environmental sociology, the sociology of reproduction, demography, and climate mitigation are discussed. Keywords Climate change . Climate concern . Carbon footprint . Reproduction . Fertility . Mitigation
1 Introduction In many countries, young people seem to be increasingly connecting climate change to their reproductive choices. This is suggested by the number of news and opinion articles covering
* Matthew Schneider-Mayerson schneider–mayerson@yale–nus.edu.sg
1
Yale-NUS College, College Ave West, Singapore
Climatic Change
this phenomenon (e.g., Bielski 2019; Irfan 2019; Snow 2019) as well as the number of activists, public thinkers, and celebrities that are publicly discussing what was previously a private question. As US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez asked in March 2019, “Is it ok to still have children” in the age of climate change (“Ocasio-Cortez” 2019)? In response to this public questioning of reproductive intentions and practices in the context of climate change, the media and environmental organizations have conducted a handful of public polls (Miller 2018; Australian Conservation Foundation 2019; Morning Consult 2020), though they have often been interpreted and reported inaccurately.1 Empirical data about this phenomenon is needed given its potential significance to the experiences of large numbers of young people today, as well as the potential implications for environmental psychology, the soci
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