Forty per cent of Australian women without kids hesitant to have children because of climate change, survey finds | Climate crisis

Nearly 40 per cent of childless Australian women say they are reluctant to have children because of climate change, according to a new survey.

The survey on attitudes to the effects of global warming found half of Australians are very or extremely concerned about climate change and two fifths believe the climate will be “much warmer” by 2050.

The poll, commissioned by Clive Hamilton, professor of public ethics at Charles Sturt University, and conducted by Roy Morgan Research, also found that more than a third of Coalition voters believe the climate will never change.

The survey, which included a nationally representative sample of 2,000 people, found that Labour, Greens and independent voters were three times more likely to express high levels of concern about climate change compared to conservative voters.

Concern about climate change was also much more strongly associated with education level than age.

Among parents, three-fifths of Labor voters expressed high concern about their children’s future in a changing climate, compared with one-fifth of Coalition voters.

“Compared with men, women expect the weather to be warmer, be more anxious, and feel more unsafe due to a changing climate, suggesting that their care values ​​make them more receptive to scientific danger warnings,” Hamilton wrote in a research paper on the survey findings.

Among non-parents, 40.4% of women said they were moderately or very hesitant about having children due to the changing climate, while only 17% (one in six) of men reported the same.

Hamilton suggests that greater hesitancy among women points to a “gender-based risk calculation.”

“Our evidence suggests that caring values ​​make women much more receptive to the worrying nature of scientific evidence and the inherent impact of weather events on people,” she said.

Hamilton added that rising levels of climate concern could lead to a decline in Australia’s birth rate.

“There is a huge disconnect between conversations among young people about having children and government and policy discussions about Australia’s demographic future,” he said. “This survey shows that this is an issue that cannot be ignored.”

Findings roughly in line with those from 2019 Australian Conservation Foundation The research found that one in three Australian women under the age of 30 are reconsidering having children due to concerns about an “insecure future due to climate change”.

The Roy Morgan survey also included respondents in areas affected by floods and fires since 2019. Living with extreme weather events had only a small impact on concerns about climate change, the study found.

“People have ways of explaining it or attributing it to natural factors or … they don’t want to blame climate change for their own misfortune,” Hamilton said.

Prof Iain Walker, a social psychologist at the University of Melbourne who was not involved in the survey, said the finding was consistent with other research, both in Australia and internationally, which suggested “experiencing extreme weather events makes little difference and any difference it makes is likely to be short-lived”.

“I think the explanation for the counterintuitive effect has to do with how people interpret the weather phenomenon,” Walker said. “Those who already accept anthropogenic climate change will accept a flood or heatwave as further evidence that climate change is occurring; those who already deny climate change will explain extreme weather events.”

Although the areas identified by the research as being affected by extreme weather events were outside the capital cities, concerns about the climate crisis appeared to be slightly higher in cities than in regional areas.