Climate Anxiety Is Altering Family Planning - Short Wave

Update: 2025-12-30

Description

Gen Z and younger millennials are generally the most climate literate generations. As an age cohort that started learning about climate change in school, they're worried about how to plan for their future jobs, houses and, yes, kids. With climate-related disasters and global warming likely to worsen, climate anxiety is giving way to reproductive anxiety. So, what do experts say about how to navigate the kid question?

On this encore episode of Nature Quest, Short Wave speaks to Alessandra Ram, a journalist covering climate change, who just had a kid. We get into the future she sees for her newborn daughter and ask, how do we raise the next generation in a way that's good for the planet?

Here are the resources recommended by the experts we interviewed for this story:

Action Tools and Community Resources

The High-Impact Climate Action Guide by Kimberly A. Nicholas
The Climate Mental Health Network and Climate Emotions Wheel
The Climate Café® Hub - for finding a local group

Books and Research Papers

Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question: Deciding Whether to Have Children in an Uncertain Future, by Jade S. Sasser
Parenting in a Changing Climate: Tools for cultivating resilience, taking action, and practicing hope in the face of climate change, by Elizabeth Bechard
Under the Sky We Make: How to Be Human in a Warming World, by Kimberly A. Nicholas
The role of high-socioeconomic-status people in locking in or rapidly reducing energy-driven greenhouse gas emissions, Nielsen, K.S., Nicholas, K.A., Creutzig, F. et al.

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