About 40% of Australian women without kids say they are hesitant to have children because of climate change, a new survey suggests.
The survey, on attitudes about the impacts of global heating, also found that half of Australians were very or extremely concerned about climate change and two in five believed the climate would be “much hotter” in 2050.
Commissioned by Clive Hamilton, a professor of public ethics at Charles Sturt University, and carried out by Roy Morgan Research, the survey also found that more than a third of Coalition voters believed the climate would not change at all.
The survey – which involved a nationally representative sample of 2,000 people – found Labor, Greens and independent voters were three times more likely to express high levels of concern about climate change compared with conservative voters.
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Concern about climate change was also much more strongly correlated with education level than with age.
Among parents, three in five Labor voters expressed high concern about their children’s future in a changing climate, compared to one in five Coalition voters.
“Compared to men, women expect it to become hotter, are more anxious, and feel more insecure due to the changing climate, suggesting values of care make them more open to the scientific warnings of danger,” 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 because of the changing climate, but only 17% of men (one in six) reported the same.
Hamilton suggests that greater hesitancy among women points to a “gendered calculus of risk”.
“Evidence we do have suggests that values of care make women much more open to the alarming nature of the scientific evidence and the visceral impact that weather events have on people,” he said.
Rising levels of climate concern could result in a decline in Australia’s birth rate, Hamilton added.
“There’s a massive disconnect between the conversations that are being had 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 can’t be ignored.”
The findings roughly align with those of a 2019 Australian Conservation Foundation survey, which found that one in three Australian women under 30 said they were reconsidering having children because of concerns about “an unsafe future from climate change”.
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The Roy Morgan survey also involved respondents in areas affected by floods and fires since 2019. Living through extreme weather events had only a small effect on concern about climate change, it found.
“People have ways of explaining it away, or attributing it to natural factors, or are … unwilling to blame climate change for their misfortune,” Hamilton said.
Prof Iain Walker, a social psychologist at the University of Melbourne who was not involved in the survey, said that finding was consistent with other research both from Australia and internationally, which suggested that “experiencing extreme weather events makes little difference, and what difference it does make is likely short-lived”.
“I think the explanation to the counterintuitive effect lies in how people interpret the weather event,” Walker said. “People who already accept anthropogenic climate change will accept a flood or heatwave as more evidence that climate change is happening; those who already reject climate change will explain away the extreme weather events.”
Though the areas the survey identified as affected by extreme weather events were outside capital cities, it found that concern about the climate crisis was somewhat higher in cities than regional areas.
