I have a younger sister, she's 12. I was 12 when my mother gave birth to her, so I know
what it is like to raise a child because I was really engaging in that as well.
Welcome to crowdscience from the BBC World Service. I'm Geoff Marsh. And this week we're
trying to find an answer to one of life's most common quandaries.
My name is Philine, I live in Salzburg in Austria. My question for crowdscience is,
is it responsible for me to have children?
You want that for yourself. I really would like to have children. But when I look at
the news, I get quite pessimistic and unsure of the future.
The United Nations estimates that drought brought on by the effects of climate change
could displace as many as 700 million people by the end of the decade. Thousands of people
in the Western United States are spending the weekend in evacuation.
We start with these catastrophic floods in western German states.
Right now, I'm 24 years old, and I don't want to have to right now, but I might have someday,
and what will their future look like? And how will the world be when they are my age
or even 50, 60 years old? So I thought about that a bit. And I haven't come to a solution.
Because I don't think not having children is the solution. Yeah, so that's why I wrote
to crowdscience.
Presumably, then if you decided not to have children, that would be a really difficult
decision for you.
Yeah. And I'm not sure I could make the decision honestly. I might be in the position to think
about it right now. But maybe in a few years, I'll be like, yeah, doesn't matter anymore.
I want to fool myself.
Because as far as biological impulses go, this is the big one, isn't it? Yeah, I know,
I know. I can’t promise anything.
In some ways, the fact that you're young, and you have no immediate desire to have children,
makes you a really great person to ask this question, doesn't it? Because it, you can
look at it almost dispassionately.
Yeah, yeah, I can just lean back and think about that and think about all the possibilities
I have. That's, I think why I am having the courage to ask this question right now.
And obviously, the question, is it responsible for you to bring a child onto the planet?
It's a very personal question. And only really, you can answer that.
I'm not looking for a definitive answer. I'm looking for maybe an approach on the question
in an ethical way, and in the scientific way, as well, and maybe some hints how I can tackle
that question for myself.
So you want a philosophical and scientific toolbox. that will be great. I will do my
best. Philine’s question really resonates with me. I am a decade older, but I'm still
struggling with the same predicament because, look, it's hard not to notice that the world's
becoming increasingly scary. I'm almost becoming desensitised to seeing huge tracts of forest
burning, ice sheets disappearing, livelihoods being swept away in floods. Unsurprisingly,
lots of young people are starting to ask whether having children is just wrong. And this isn't
just anecdotal. Researchers have started to document this worrying trend.
So my research through the University of Bath for the past 10 years has been talking primarily
with children and young people about how they feel and what they think about the climate
and biodiversity crisis.
This is Caroline Hickman. She’s a lecturer at the University of Bath in the UK.
And I'm also a psychotherapist and a member of the climate psychology Alliance, who have
been working for 10 years to bring the psychological understanding of climate change into the frame.
Caroline and her colleagues decided recently that they wanted to measure the psychological
impacts from as many young people as possible and from across the globe. Just a few months
ago, they published the results of a massive study into how young people were thinking
and feeling about climate change.
We conducted this research with 10,000 children covering 10 different countries in Australia,
Brazil, Finland, France, India, Nigeria, Philippines, Portugal, the UK and the US. So we wanted
a range of countries, some of whom were in the Global South, and some of whom were facing
the immediate impacts of climate change. So the first thing we asked them was how they
felt about climate change. We knew that young people were afraid, sad, anxious and angry.
There's been previous research done into this over the last few years. What we didn't know
was how scared young people were. And two thirds of children were afraid. Four out of
10 young people told us they were hesitant to have children because of the threat of
climate change. And over half of our respondents told us they felt that humanity was doomed.
Eight out of 10 told us that they thought people were failing to take care of the planet.
48% of young people said they felt ignored and dismissed when they tried to talk about
climate change.
Caroline gave me the full results in all their bleakness and we don't have time here. But
in essence, a huge proportion of young people from across the world are worried about climate
change, they felt ignored and failed by their leaders, and they thought they were being
lied to. And I feel for them, they saw how rapid action based on science was possible
during the pandemic. So why was so little seemingly being done to hold the destruction
of the climate and environment that they could see happening around them? But it was one
of those statistics you might have heard that alarmed me the most, four out of 10 young
people that's 40% said they felt reluctant to have children.
Yes, that's right. Wow. Yeah, I think that number is much bigger than we ever anticipated.
So although I wasn't hugely surprised about the emotions and the feelings and people were
telling us, I was really surprised, by the way that the feelings impacted on their thinking.
And did you notice any kind of patterns in where anxiety about having children was focused
around the globe?
Yes. And because climate change is not impacting equally across the globe, it's not surprising
that we can see variation by country. So for example, the Philippines 47%, were hesitant
to have children. Maybe unsurprising. Not surprising. Exactly. But it's very variable
by country, Nigeria, only 23% were hesitant to have children. If we look at India, it
is 41%. So it's not an exact correlation with the way that climate change is impacting on
the country.
So you're not surprised that we got a question from a young lady Philine asking whether it
was the right thing to do for her to have children that doesn't presumably surprise
you.
It doesn't surprise me at all, because I've been hearing this from young people for many
years. So I've got young people coming to me for therapy, talking about this. I've got
adults, young adults coming for therapy and couples and singularly saying, We don't know
whether we should have children or not. Because we're concerned about the climate. We also
want children, and we don't know how to deal with this dilemma. So I think that's the most
important thing is to always recognise that this is a dilemma. And there isn't a perfect
right and wrong answer to this question.
Well, bleak as those figures are, I think there's at least some comfort in knowing that
you're not alone Philine, in feeling conflicted by this dilemma, as Caroline puts it, and
actually perhaps those numbers are somewhat reassuring, in the sense that that's a lot
of young people who obviously care about the planet. They are after all her future custodians.
But what about Philine’s question on the climate, the impact of having a child for
that we're going to need some numbers, and I know just a man for the job.
I'm Mike Berners-Lee, I'm a professor at Lancaster University. I'm the author of ‘How bad are
bananas? the carbon footprint of everything’ and ‘There is no planet B’. I think some
people frame up the population growth as you know, the single issue that we need to face
if we want a sustainable world. It is an important part of the equation. But it's not the only
thing. 12 billion careful people could live really well and sustainably on this planet.
On the other hand, 1 billion careless people would trash the place in no time.
Can we get some numbers on the climate footprint of a child born, you know around now?
Well, I don't have the figures for Austria, but I do have some estimates for the UK, for
example, and I think that will be pretty similar. So if you make the basic assumption that a
child born in the UK will start off with a typical average UK person's carbon footprint
and then that that will fall in line with the way that a typical UK person's carbon
footprint is going to fall over time - assuming that the UK meets its carbon commitments to
be net zero by 2050. Then the carbon footprint of that child over its lifetime will come
out at something like 210 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent over its lifetime. Of course,
if it were to be born in average person and not cut its emissions, then it will come out,
maybe twice that or three times that are higher. And if you give birth to a child who ends
up not caring at all about climate change, either because you don't bring it up to care
about it, or it makes its own bad decisions, and it goes off to become both rich and careless,
then it could easily end up with a footprint of 5000 tonnes. On the other hand, if there
are any people in Malawi average typical Malawians listening to this, then their carbon footprint
per year at the moment is not 13 tonnes per year. It's about 0.2 tonnes per year. Although
another sort of dimension in the equation is that I hope going forwards that the economy
of Malawi will improve and the and the quality of life of Malawians and the life expectancy
of Malawians will improve. And of course, unless we're careful, that will also go with
somewhat increased carbon footprint.
So assuming Philine’s child is born, and lives in Austria, and assuming that an Austrians
carbon footprints roughly similar to a Brit, and assuming the global community sticks to
its climate goals of reducing carbon emissions to zero by 2050. And assuming, well, that's
a lot of assuming. More interesting for Philine I reckon, is where those 210 tonnes of carbon
equivalent actually come from, and where someone might actually be able to reduce their own
impact.
While the average person in the UK day to day their carbon footprints about 13 tonnes
a year. And about a quarter of that is the food that they eat. And I'm hoping that will
go down a lot as we come to eat less meat and dairy. That's the biggest thing in that.
And then a quarter is about the travel that we do and there's no getting around it, we're
going to need to reduce by quite a bit, the amount of flying we do. And then also in travel
is driving and we need to drive less, but also that will come down as we electrify our
vehicles that will help as well. And then the third quarter is our home energy. And
that will improve especially as our grid electricity decarbonizes and our homes improve. And then
the fourth quarter is everything else. And that specifically, that includes the stuff
that we buy. And we're going to get good at dematerialising, having less stuff, making
our stuff last longer, getting into the habit of having things repaired, buying secondhand,
all those things that are going to dematerialise the economy and help our carbon footprint.
So between all those things, we expecting the carbon footprint to come right down. And
actually the world will reach we hope, net zero by 2050.
You sound quite optimistic about the future. So you've got to think one of two things is
going to happen. Either humanity is going to get on top of the climate crisis, in which
case, if we're clever about it, you know, we can live better than ever before, we can
use this as an opportunity to improve our quality of lives. Like if we're smart about
how we do it as bit of habit changing, but you know what we can, it can be better than
ever. If we don't get on top of the climate crisis, let's just be very clear. Humanity
is heading for a very dark place. So am I hopeful? Well, I think, you know, if we push
hard, and we all try hard and encourage everybody else to be trying hard too, then there's no
reason why we can't do this.
You could argue that the easiest things for Philine to do if she does care about the future
of society and life on Earth is to just not have children. If a couple decide that they're
just not going to have kids for a mixture of lifestyle and environmental reasons, then
I think that is now regarded increasingly as a totally normal lifestyle choice that
people make. Whereas I think when I think the day when I was born, it was more often
seen as well ‘Oh, dear, how sad for them’. I don't think it seemed like that anymore.
And that's, that's really, really good.
Agreed. And when you think about the numbers, a few people deciding not to have children,
especially in the carbon spewing Global North does seem like it could be an impactful and
noble cause. But it is such a tricky one because you never know whether these unborn people
would have gone on to become a persuasive environmentalist president or just a conscientious
person who grew up in a decarbonised world. Mike left me thinking that it certainly could
matter more how you raise a child than whether or not you do and this is actually something
that Philine and I had discussed.
Yeah, actually, I thought about that as well. Instead of not having children it’s maybe
my responsibility to have children and to raise them to be able to check make a change
someday and to educate them to the best of my ability. Make sure they listen to crowdscience.
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, no, exactly. Because the one thing you do have control over if
you have children, is how you try to raise them. You don't have control over who else
is going to have children, and they might not care about the environment, and they might
just be consumers. So in some ways, maybe you have more control over the future. By
having children. That could be true. And I think that's where it is really hard to predict.
Because sometimes parents really want their children to go a certain way, and they give
exactly the opposite. We don’t know what the hypothetical child would turn out to be
like.
Well, I'm afraid I can't help you there Philine although if I had to guess I'd say they'd
be in good hands. But like she said, it is hard to predict, like so many of the issues
raised in this episode. It’s not the complexity of the climate that's hard to predict. We've
got giant computers to crunch those numbers. It's people. If the US and Chinese leaders
don't make bold commitments at COP 26, let's face it, we're all stuffed, and it's the same
for Philine's unborn child. Could it go on to solve world hunger or set up a coal mine?
We don't know. But actually, those are questions about individuals. When it comes to people
more broadly, we can make predictions. What is demography and why is it important?
Okay, good question. Demography is an empirical science, databased science. We basically deal
with two aspects of a population. One aspect is what we call population dynamics, which
is a change, a main factor driver of the change direct driver of birth, death, and migration.
The other thing we have is what you call population statics, not statistics, that's statics. That
means in one point in time, what the size of a population means how many people are
there, and structure of a population, age and sex slash gender.
This is Professor Noriko Tsuya, a demographer from Keio University in Tokyo, Japan.
And my research has been focusing on especially fertility and family change in Japan and other
Asian countries and also other developed countries.
The reason I wanted to get in touch with Noriko is because for the past few decades, Japanese
women have been opting to have fewer and fewer children. In demography speak that is their
fertility rates been going down. And this has now caught up with them, meaning their
overall population is in decline.
Yes, it is declining, ever since 1975. We started having really population decline in
about 2010. More people are dying than people born. And we have very limited number of international
immigration. So we are set to keep losing more population. And meanwhile ageing.
Of course, everyone alive is technically ageing, but that's not what Noriko means here. She
means the population is ageing.
Ageing is an issue relative issue, proportion of elderly in total population is increasing.
Japan is probably the most aged society one of the most ageing society in the world, but
also absolute size started shrinking. And I'm afraid that is going to accelerate before
it settles.
Why would the government be unhappy about an ageing population?
Well, how can you maintain, for example, public pension system, almost everybody expects to
depend on it. And you have to support it somehow. And we have national health insurance scheme.
That's also very difficult because as you age, people get sicker, less healthy, and
they need more expensive health care. We have ageing workforce. And we used to have we still
have what you call seniority wage system. So as workforce get older, it's very difficult
to maintain profitability in the context of economic globalisation.
So with this smaller workforce, looking after a larger elderly section of society is basically
damaging the economy and society as a whole. It is. I mean, shall we say, heavier burden
to carry.
I told Noriko about Philine’s question to see if she thought there any progress But
the situation in Japan.
it's interesting that she's from Austria, because German speaking countries including
Austria, has low fertility alongside Italy and Spain and Portugal, Southern Europe. So
my recommendation is you have to make the woman and men want to have kids. But a lot
of things are making it difficult.
How does the Japanese government try to encourage people to have more children?
Well, you can't really have it, you have to have more kids, because it's individual choice.
But they say that they try to make the child rearing environment more helpful by providing
like childcare services, and paid parental leave, and giving some childcare allowances
and making the workplace more family friendly. And all those sort of things. I think we started
in 1995. I mean, we are trying hard, and we are doing less bad job than before. But clearly,
it's not enough. And the problem is once populations start shrinking, which is the case in Japan,
it's very difficult to stop. Even if women have kids, people who bear children is already
shrink, smaller, even if they have okay fertility, the actual number of birth is shrinking. So
Japan's population is going to keep declining for some time to come. And there are many
other countries in Asia, in some countries in Europe, as well, is going to have this.
It's interesting to hear Noriko’s take on why this is happening in Japan. Although it
sounds more about gender roles than climate change there. The outcomes could be similar.
I think people are searching for the meaning of having a family and having kids. Women
shoulder a lot more than men in terms of juggling family and work responsibilities. And we're
trying hard like policy wise and all those things. But it boils down to the family and
individual relationships.
I came to speak to you Noriko because I thought that maybe we'd find some arguments for why
having children would be good for your society. But it actually sounds like what you're saying
to me is society needs to make it good for you to have children. And that it's that way
around. Both. Oh, it's both. Having kids used to be obligation. But after the war, and especially
I think in the last say ever since mid ‘70s, people's attitudes and the way our society
is functioning started changing, right. But at the same time, though, population is something
that we are part of. It might help to see us as a member of a group in society. And
hopefully, we are not only in the receiving side. of what's happening, but we can really
contribute to what happens.
Yeah, so actually, the decision to have children now should be a personal one, but it will
affect the society you live in later down the line.
Definitely it’s a fact. So you don't have a society you have kids, for yourself or your
family, for your loved ones and for kids. And that's perfectly fine. But at the same
time we are social creature. So what you did and what you would do affects you and other
people and vice versa.
We can all agree that no government should be able to make reproductive decisions for
their citizens. But national governments are very concerned with population issues. It's
true that Philine's possible offspring would feed into a society as with a decision not
to have any children. They may just be small data points on an economic spreadsheet, but
this decision is of real human consequence. And it's not to say that these issues only
apply to countries with low fertility rates rapidly growing populations will have their
own challenges to contend with. Anyway, I'm not suggesting anyone should have a child
to balance the books of a future society. But the reason I think demography is an important
angle to consider here is because I do wonder if Japan's decades old reproductive hesitancy
might actually be a harbinger of things to come. Let's not forget that 40% of young people
from across the world in Caroline's study said they felt hesitant to have children.
If all that hesitancy translated to vast swathes of people not being born, that could cause
real harm. But what about the responsibility to the unborn children themselves? They're
not currently people so they're a trickier demographic to cater for than old age pensioners
alive today. To give them a voice we need to swap lenses once more and this time to
philosophy.
It's not responsible to have children, we should rather not have them.
This should be interesting.
I realised that that's a controversial position and that there's lots of arguments required
to defend it.
Meet David Benatar from the University of Cape Town. His name kept cropping up everywhere
in forums I found online dedicated to so called antinatalism, a philosophy, which basically
says that humans should stop procreating. So you're saying that you think in, in all
circumstances, it's morally wrong to bring a new person into existence? Yes. What about
if they were to go on and, you know, live a happy, meaningful life? Well,
I think that judgement of happy and meaningful is all relative. So it can be happy and meaningful
relative to other people, but I think require good arguments to show that even the best
quality human lives are actually not that good. And that even the most meaningful human
lives are not that meaningful. All lives actually filled with considerable suffering. And they
all end in death, which most people will take to be a bad thing.
So quick recap. Your life is devoid of meaning full of suffering, and we're all going to
die. Dear listener, I'm sorry if I've just ruined your day. But look, in David's defence,
if he just never existed, you wouldn't be depressed right now. I mean, are you glad
that you were
brought into existence? Well, I don't answer personal questions. That's an easy get out.
I think they're a distraction. And I think too many people attempt to psychologize. And
what I'm trying quite hard to do is to get people to focus on the arguments and to think
about this in an impersonal dispassionate way. And when I say impersonal, I mean, without
tying it to the identities of particular people making arguments.
Philine, on the other hand, had no such qualms. You know, are you glad that you were brought
into existence?
I guess I am. But I just am because I am living right now. And I don't think if I hadn't been
brought into existence, I would be mad.
Only existers have feelings. Right.
Not bringing someone into the world. I don't think there's any problem in that.
Well neither does David. Here’s his argument.
When we’re deciding whether to bring a being into existence, we have to consider the counterfactual
scenario. That is to say the scenario in which the person never comes into existence. And
I think the absence of the pain that we avoid through not creating somebody is a good thing.
So it's good if we can avoid pain, even if the way to do that is by avoiding bringing
somebody into existence. But the absent pleasures of the never existent, those are not bad.
If you've got an existing person, and they’re deprived of pleasures, that's bad. But if
you have the deprivation of pleasure, and there's nobody who's been deprived, there's
no person there who's suffering that deprivation, then my view is that's not bad. And what you
find then is that so long as a life is going to contain some pain, it's never in the interest
of somebody to be brought into existence.
Presumably, what a good reference point for this is just what currently existing people
think. And you know, most people that I've spoken to you about this, they're kind of
glad that they were brought into existence. How do you explain away the opinions of current
existers?
I just don't think that those judgments are reliable, I think there's a very good evolutionary
explanation for why people have those views. Because people with those sorts of views are
more likely to reproduce. And so it's going to be evolutionarily selected for that kind
of psychology.
So it sounds like you're saying that we are sort of pathologically optimistic, is there
sort of evidence to back that up?
I think there's good psychological evidence for a number of traits that characterise most
people have one of these is known as an optimism bias or a Pollyannaism.
And there's evidence for this, for example, if you ask people to recall past pleasurable
and positive experiences, what you find is that the recall rate differs for those two.
Similarly, when people make projections about the future, if you ask people, where will
you be in 10 years time or in 20 years time, you find that many of the beliefs that they
had about how good things would be it turned out not to be true. I mean, if we were to
follow that thought through to its logical conclusion, you're not only saying that Philine
shouldn't have children, presumably you're saying from a moral standpoint, you think
we should all stop having children and our species should go extinct?
I do think that's the implication. I don't think that that will in fact happen as a result
of people being persuaded by my arguments, but it is a logical implication of everybody
accepting it if they were to do so. And while I think there's something sad about human
extinction, for those of us who already exist or have existed, I don't think that on balance,
it's a bad thing, so long as the extinction is brought about through non procreation as
opposed to extermination. I'm not in favour of exterminating people.
So there's a difference between a life continuing versus a life starting.
Exactly. And that distinction is often not recognised and not made. People instead simply
speak about a life worth living. And I think that those two judgments about a lack of starting
and a life worth continuing, those are different judgments. And we should use different standards
for deciding each of those cases.
And I suppose I mean, we are constantly bombarded, aren't we with imagery of natural disasters
and famines and apocalyptic kind of predictions from climate scientists? Assuming, as I think
many do that conditions for life on Earth are going to get worse? Do they kind of strengthen
your antinatalist resolve?
Yes, I do think so. I think that the current crisis that we face is actually causing more
people to ask the kind of question that Philine is asking. And I think with good reason, I
think even in the absence of climate change, we should still ask those kinds of questions.
But there's very good reason for thinking that conditions on Earth are going to become
a lot worse than they are now. And make the quality of life a lot lower for very many
people.
Do you see antinatalism and you know, your ideas, gaining popularity? And do you link
that to what's happening in the world around you?
I do think that the crises that we're going through, do occasion those kinds of thoughts
more commonly. And so I think that's part of what's motivating people. But whatever
the cause I think it's welcomed.
Do lots of your colleagues disagree with you? Yes, there's
lots of disagreement of course. I've been persuaded by any of their arguments yet, but
then again, they haven't been persuaded by mine.
Well, it remains to be seen a Philine will be either, I suppose that depends on how she
feels about the bit of David's argument that I still struggle with, that the absent pleasures
of the never existent is not a bad thing. I think it is. But then I am of course, a
biased exister. But perhaps also, my brain just struggles with really abstract concepts
about non existent people. But this all made me realise that maybe the people we should
be focusing on do already exist, Philine and the millions of other people in her shoes.
After all, they're the ones who are going to have the biggest impact on the unborn as
their one day parents. So for one final thoughts, I went back to Caroline, who's made a career
speaking to these people about how she thinks feeling and others should be framing their
anxieties about having children.
We measure mental health by looking at people's capacity to respond to external reality. And
external reality, if we look at what's happening in the world, we look at the ice melting,
we look at the wildfires, we look at the floods in America, Germany and China this year, the
news is telling us that things are getting much worse and rapidly. So it would make perfect
sense to be anxious about this. So this anxiety and this concern, whether you call it eco-anxiety
or climate distress, it makes perfect sense. And it's an emotionally mentally healthy response.
So this is a really comprehensive, emotionally healthy question to be asking. It shows that
these young people care, it shows that they care not just about their own lives, but the
lives of their future children. So this grief and this anxiety, and this concern is actually
a sign that humanity is emotionally stepping into the problem that we've got. Of course,
we need technological solutions, and we need rational solutions. And we need economic and
political solutions. We also need psychological and we need relational solutions to the climate
crisis.
As we've said, throughout this episode, there is no right and wrong answer to this question.
But there are ways to justify whatever decision you come to. And if you're going to be a parent,
I think that's crucial. You never know, you might end up having to defend your position.
There's so much of the future that we can't predict that it's easy to feel powerless.
But in actual fact, what this episodes taught is that whatever decision you do make, it
can make a huge difference. Maybe you don't want children because you want to spend all
your precious time as a busy climate activist. And I think that's great. Maybe you are going
to have children because you want to feed into the future custodians of the planet.
And that's great, too. And whether you agree with David Benatar about the moral case for
starting a life, us existence have to really listen to society's youth. Net zero by 2050
Blah, blah, blah, Net Zero blah, blah, blah, climate neutral, blah, blah, blah. This is
all we hear.
The scale of frustration felt by young people today's palpable, not just from famous activists
like Greta, but from huge numbers of people. Who knows as they continue to feel failed,
they might just decide that children aren't worth the risk. And I don't know about you,
but as a human, I find that kind of tragic. And yet against a noisy backdrop of environmental
apocalypse in the media and the widespread anxieties that incurs, I think that we should
all find some optimism in the fact that people like for them are stopping to ask the question.
Youu gave me a lot of food for thought. And I feel like I'm not hysterical.
Well, that's positive at least. Yeah,
I feel reassured that it was okay to ask this question.
Well, then there's only one last thing for you to do then, and that is to read us the
credits if you'd be so kind.
You've been listening to crowdscience from the BBC World Service. Today's question was
for me Philine in Austria, and was produced and presented by Geoff Marsh. If you've got
a major ethical dilemma or any other sciencey question, why not do what I did and email
the team at crowdscience@bbc.co.uk Thanks for listening, auf weidersehen.