About 40% of Australian women without kids say they are hesitant to have children because of climate change, a new survey suggests.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cmuch hotter\u201d in 2050.<\/p>\n
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<\/a> voters believed the climate would not change at all.<\/p>\n The survey \u2013 which involved a nationally representative sample of 2,000 people \u2013 found Labor, Greens and independent voters were three times more likely to express high levels of concern about climate change compared with conservative voters.<\/p>\n Sign up: AU Breaking News email<\/a><\/p>\n Concern about climate change was also much more strongly correlated with education level than with age.<\/p>\n Among parents, three in five Labor voters expressed high concern about their children\u2019s future in a changing climate, compared to one in five Coalition voters.<\/p>\n \u201cCompared 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,\u201d Hamilton wrote in a research paper on the survey findings.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Hamilton suggests that greater hesitancy among women points to a \u201cgendered calculus of risk\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cEvidence 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,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Rising levels of climate concern could result in a decline in Australia\u2019s birth rate, Hamilton added.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a massive disconnect between the conversations that are being had among young people about having children, and government and policy discussions about Australia\u2019s demographic future,\u201d he said. \u201cThis survey shows that this is an issue that can\u2019t be ignored.\u201d<\/p>\n The findings roughly align with those of a 2019 Australian Conservation Foundation<\/a> survey, which found that one in three Australian women under 30 said they were reconsidering having children because of concerns about \u201can unsafe future from climate change\u201d.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n Sign up to Breaking News Australia<\/p>\n Get the most important news as it breaks<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com<\/a> to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy<\/a>. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople have ways of explaining it away, or attributing it to natural factors, or are \u2026 unwilling to blame climate change for their misfortune,\u201d Hamilton said.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cexperiencing extreme weather events makes little difference, and what difference it does make is likely short-lived\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cI think the explanation to the counterintuitive effect lies in how people interpret the weather event,\u201d Walker said. \u201cPeople 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.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"About 40% of Australian women without kids say they are hesitant to have children because of climate change,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":281817,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[192,79],"class_list":{"0":"post-281816","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-environment","9":"tag-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281816","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=281816"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281816\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/281817"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=281816"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=281816"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=281816"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}