Across Europe, populations are plummeting.
Infertility rates are up and more and more of us are delaying or deciding against becoming parents.
Some people are celebrating that living child free is slowly becoming accepted
but others are worried that traditional values are fading away.
And this dramatic population decline could be a ticking time bomb for our economies.
Throughout this series, I'm crossing Europe
to uncover different perspectives on the continent's baby bust.
My first stop is Greece where plunging birth rates have become so critical that
the government has resorted to paying people 2000€ for every child that is born.
But in the most remote areas this baby bonus is proving too little, too late.
I'm in Arkoi, one of the Dodecanese Islands where only 50 permanent residents remain and
just one child, Christos.
I met him at Europe's smallest school.
Hello, how are you?
Very well.
Amazing.
How old are you Christos? — I am ...
I am 11 years old.
Do you know what you would like to do when you are older?
Without intervention, beyond the government's 2000€ baby bonus,
places like Arkoi risk becoming completely empty.
And hoping to be the ones to save these populations are an organisation called
Hope Genesis.
They financially adopt struggling areas and try to convince the women who live
there to have as many babies as possible.
they're funded by businesses and wealthy individuals
who are also concerned about the lack of greek babies being born.
I joined them as they toured the Dodecanese Islands
to see what difference their programme has made.
Leipsoi is an island of around 700 people.
The population here is also in decline
but Hope Genesis have been working hard to change that.
Local mayor and PE teacher Fotis Mangos met us off the boat.
Hello! — Hello, welcome.
Thank you! — Nice to meet you.
Nice to meet you too.
Do you like my island?
I think I do. It's very nice.
Let's present you to the island. — Thank you.
It's beautiful.
When the sun goes up ... the moment, the morning. — Sunrise.
Sunrise ... it's very nice.
This is a Hope Genesis baby!
We're trying to advertise the program and try and convince in a good way women
to get in the program and make a decision of having a child.
And what do you say to
the women to try and convince them to have a baby? Like, are you encouraging or
kind of facilitating?
First of all, we're trying to identify why they are not having children.
We initially thought that the cost was the main reason but it's equally important the
insecurity that these women feel so we're trying to convince them that it's safe for
them to get pregnant in these areas.
So what was the process of having help to have this baby?
Before you had help, what were some of the reasons why having a baby would have been difficult here?
How old is Harris?
Do you think that you would have had these babies anyway if you
didn't have the help?
What happens to somewhere like this if people don't have babies?
And how does that feel when you imagine it?
I'm leaving these islands and heading across the country to Lefkada an island in the Ionian sea.
I'm here to get a different perspective on Greece's birth rate crisis and question the ethics
of encouraging population growth.
I'm meeting Elisa Dimitras who is an anti-natalist.
Hi. — Hi!
... which literally means she's against birth.
Hello!
She thinks that population growth is dangerous
and immoral because of the destructive impact it's having on the environment.
So this is basically the Facebook group, Greek Vegan Environmental Anti-natalists.
And you set this group up?
I didn't even know at that time that there isn't another,
I don't know the word anti-natalism ... then one thing brings the other, you know?
Social media, you find someone and I'm like, OK, this is getting big,
this is good.
So you feel like this is a movement that is growing?
Yes, yeah. But, you know, it's still a little bit hard in Greece to speak
openly about it ... everyone comes from a village so when they go to the village everyone is like,
OK, when are you going to have kids?
It's like, obvious that sometimes you're going to have kids in Greece.
And when you see people say, well, we will never have kids.
No, you are going to change your mind.
So I think it's time that people realise that we are not baby making machines, you know?
As part of her activism, Elisa volunteers at a sanctuary for abandoned animals.
She took me with her on one of her shifts.
Wow!
She shouldn't be here. I have to call Charlie.
Can you see her?
I don't know, I suppose she shouldn't be here so ...
Should I go and put her with the others?
OK, you're a fugitive!
There is a house with cats ... Oh, there is one more cat outside.
I think that Athena made a hole again. —There's a different cat out here as well, I think.
Oh God, where are the other ten?
When I was at school, I collected all the cats from the neighbourhood and I was taking care
of them with the little money that I had and when my mum died, I realised that all the cats
cannot be, you know, reproducing all the time so I started sterilising one after the other and I
managed to stop the colony in my area.
Do you see a link there?
Just what you are saying about ...
After your mum died, you realised that they couldn't keep reproducing so you tried to
sterilise them. — I never thought about it.
Really? — Yeah, never.
Governments across Europe are simultaneously trying to fight the fertility crisis
and the environmental crisis. How can you do that?
You cannot really save the environment by telling people to have more kids.
This is exactly the opposite.
So I think that they just want to be seen as they are like doing something for the environment but
at the end of the day this is green capitalism. More babies will become more adults and they
will consume more things, they will build more houses, they will buy more cars ...
So everything is financially, you know, based.
I don't think there is any other reason than development and money.
If you don't have kids is 70 times more than 70 times better than going vegan.
So you really cannot fight at the same time the environmental crisis and fertility crisis.
Let's just accept it.
I think it's hard for people to accept this because a lot of people really want children and do you see that
it's part of most people's human nature to want that?
Of course I understand and I'm not against parenting.
I believe that it's humane and normal, people to want to have kids but
I think that it's very selfish to say, no I want to have my own kid with my own genes
and my own DNA.
I believe that at the moment to have a kid it's an environmental crime.
How do you feel about the
fact that the greek government and greek NGOs are trying really hard to push the birth rate up and
make the greek population grow?
I feel frustrated when I think about it because they just look ...
They are focused on Greece and they don't look to what's happening in the whole world.
They don't understand or maybe they understand but they don't care that, you know,
overpopulation is the biggest problem so they only care about not losing the greek genes.
If you ask me, it's very nationalistic.
Back in the Dodecanese Islands, Hope Genesis invite me along as they celebrate their latest success.
Hi! I'm very well, how are you?
They're opening a nursery on the island of Patmos,
as their program has generated 39 babies there in the last two years.
There is a need for these islands to survive, there is economy that can grow through these islands.
It is part of our civilisation, they have been inhabited for more than two and a half thousand years
from the greek people and we feel that this is something that should never be lost
and it has a very long trace and we are responsible to keep these trace,
we, I mean the modern greeks.
So for you this is about Greece's history and tradition and legacy, right?
Exactly.
Is there any way in like, in a moral sense, that within the context of the climate crisis,
it's a weird time to be trying to generate more people rather than fewer?
This is something that we cannot stop from happening
because there are no policies so this is something that needs to be
addressed on a worldwide level but has never been actually addressed or even discussed.
But what's happening in Greece, both through the government and and through Hope Genesis,
is the opposite of population control, it's like, let's make more people ...
Because the country itself is having problems. — OK.
So Greece is a small country and it's having
problems regarding their own population.
It's an interesting dilemma where
the economy as it is now can't function without more people however the more people there are
on the planet than the planet won't function. — Exactly.
So there's no answer actually to that.
The question of how to balance economic growth against the climate crisis is Europe's most
pressing dilemma and for Greece the impact of spiralling local economies and some of the lowest
birth rates on the continent makes balancing the two even harder.
As Hope Genesis and Elisa continue to fight for opposing outcomes,
both the planet and economies continue to buckle.
The question is how the success or failure of either battle will affect our lives in the years to come.