Survey finds 40% of Australian women without kids hesitant to have children because of climate change | Australia news

Around 40 per cent of Australian women without children say they are hesitant to have them because of climate change, a new survey suggests.

The survey, which looked at attitudes towards the impacts of global warming, also found that half of Australians were very or extremely concerned about climate change and two in five thought the climate would be “much warmer” in 2050.

Commissioned by Clive Hamilton, 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 took a nationally representative sample of 2,000 people – found that Labour, Green and independent voters were three times more likely to express strong concerns about climate change than 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 great concern about their children’s future in a changing climate, compared to one in five Coalition voters.

“Compared to men, women expect it to be hotter, are more anxious, and feel more unsafe due to climate change, suggesting that care values ​​make them more open to scientific warnings of danger,” Hamilton wrote in a research paper on the survey results.

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

Hamilton suggests that greater hesitancy among women indicates a “gendered risk calculus.”

“The evidence we have suggests that care values ​​make women much more open to the alarming nature of scientific evidence and the visceral impact that weather events have on people,” he said.

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

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

The findings roughly match those of a 2019 survey by the Australian Conservation Foundation, which found one in three Australian women under 30 said they were reconsidering having children due to concerns about “a dangerous future due to climate change”.

The Roy Morgan survey also involved respondents in areas affected by floods and fires since 2019. Experiencing extreme weather events has only a small effect on concerns about climate change, the survey found.

“People have ways of explaining it or attributing it to natural factors, or are not willing to blame their misfortune on climate change,” Hamilton said.

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

“I think the explanation for this counterintuitive effect lies in how people interpret the weather event,” Walker said. “People who already accept anthropogenic climate change will accept a flood or heat wave as further evidence that climate change is happening; those who already reject climate change will explain away extreme weather events.”

Although the areas identified by the survey as affected by extreme weather events were outside capital cities, concern about the climate crisis was slightly higher in cities than in regional areas.