A fifth of female climate scientists who responded to Guardian survey said they had opted to have no or fewer children
“There is this constant sense of impending loss and I just didn’t want to have to transfer that to my child.” Environmental scientist Dr Shobha Maharaj stands in front of the coastline in San Fernando, Trinidad, where coastal stabilization works have been done, in an attempt to preserve the coastline.“There is this constant sense of impending loss and I just didn’t want to have to transfer that to my child.
Such decisions were extremely difficult, they said. Dr Shobha Maharaj, an expert on the effects of the climate crisis from Trinidad and Tobago, has chosen to have only one child, a son who is now six years old. “Choosing to have a child was and continues to be a struggle,” she said. The Guardian approached every contactable lead author or review editor of all reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change since 2018. The IPCC’s reports are the gold standard of climate knowledge. Of the 843 contacted, 360 replied to the question on life decisions, a high response rate.
Parmesan, at the CNRS ecology centre in France, said: “When I was making my choice, it was very clear in the ecological community that human population growth was a problem: preserving biodiversity was absolutely dependent on stabilising population.” “It is honestly only now that I am starting to panic about my child’s future,” she said. “When she was born in 2013, I felt more optimistic about the possibility of reducing emissions. Now I feel guilty about leaving her in this world without my protection, and guilty about having played a part in the changing climate. So it’s bleak.”
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