Cookies help us run our site more efficiently.

By clicking “Accept”, you agree to the storing of cookies on your device to enhance site navigation, analyze site usage, and assist in our marketing efforts. View our Privacy Policy for more information or to customize your cookie preferences.

Accept Deny

GoGreenNation news

Is it ethical to have children as climate change heats up our world?

News Feed
Tuesday, May 28, 2024

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. It is republished with permission. Sign up for their newsletter here.Jade S. Sasser has been studying reproductive choices in the context of climate change for a quarter century. Her 2018 book, “Infertile Ground,” explored how population growth in the Global South has been misguidedly framed as a crisis—a perspective that Sasser argues had its roots in long-standing racial stereotypes about sexuality and promiscuity.But during the COVID-19 pandemic, Sasser, an environmental scientist who teaches at the University of California, Riverside, started asking different questions, this time about reproductive choices in the Global North. In an era in which the planet is getting hotter by the day, she wondered, is it morally, ethically or practically sound to bring children into the world? And do such factors as climate anxiety, race and socio-economic status shape who decides to have kids and who doesn’t?The result is her latest book, “Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question,” which was published last month by the University of California Press and centers on a range of issues that are part of a broader conversation among those who try to practice climate-conscious decision-making.From the outset, Sasser cautions that her work does not attempt to draw any conclusions about what the future might hold or how concerns about global warming might affect population growth going forward.“This book is not predictive,” Sasser said in a recent interview with Inside Climate News. “It’s too soon to be able to say, ‘OK, these are going to be the trends. These people are not going to have children, or are going to have fewer children or this many, that many.’ We’re at the beginning of witnessing what could be a significant trend.”Sasser said that one of the most compelling findings of her research was how survey results showed that women of color were the demographic cohort that reported that they were most likely to have at least one child fewer than what they actually want because of climate change. “No other group in that survey responded that way,” Sasser said.Those survey results, Sasser said, underscore the prevalence of climate anxiety among communities of color. A Yale study published last year found that Hispanic Americans were five times as likely to experience feelings of climate change anxiety when compared to their white counterparts; Black Americans were twice as likely to have those feelings.“There is a really large assumption that we don’t experience climate anxiety,” said Sasser, who is African American. “And we do. How could we not? We experience most of the climate impacts first and worst. And the few surveys that have been done around people of color and climate emotions showed that Black and Latinx people feel more worry and more concerned about climate change than other groups.”Sasser, who also produced a seven-episode podcast as part of the project, said that she hopes her work can help fill what she sees as a void in the public’s awareness of climate anxiety in communities of color.“Every single thing I was reading just didn’t include us in the discussion at all,” Sasser said. “I found myself in conversations with people who were not people of color and they were saying, ‘Well, I think people of color are just more resilient and don’t feel climate anxiety. And this doesn’t factor into their reproductive lives.’ That’s just simply not true. But how would we know that without the research to tell us? But now I’ve started down that road, and I really, really hope that other researchers will take up the mantle and continue studying these questions in the context of race in the future.”Sasser recently sat down with Inside Climate News to talk about the book and how she uses her research to show how climate emotions land hardest on marginalized groups, people of color and low-income groups.This interview has been edited for clarity and length.How did you come to write “Climate and the Kid Question”?This is a book that I was not expecting to write. It was my pandemic pivot project. I was working on something very different, focused on household energy in the Global South. And then COVID happened and I could no longer travel. And so I had to turn to the things that I had been compiling as part of a project that I saw as being on the back burner.And what I had been compiling was articles about young women climate activists who were talking about not having children in response to climate change. And when I had first encountered these articles, I misunderstood them. I thought that these women were motivated by erroneous ideas about overpopulation, or that they weren’t having children because they thought there were too many people on the earth, things like that.But when I delved more deeply into what I was reading, I began to become aware of the whole world of eco-emotions and climate emotions. And that’s when I was introduced to the terms eco-anxiety and climate anxiety. And then I began to understand where these young people were coming from on a much, much deeper level. And so this book is my response to three years of research delving into climate emotions, distressing emotions, in particular, how those emotions are impacting how young people feel morally and ethically about having children, about raising children, about the future. And also what race and inequality have to do with it all.You’ve been studying issues of population growth for a while now, right? That was the focus of your first book, “On Infertile Ground.”I’ve been having those conversations for, I guess, 25 years now. And in those conversations, I’ve always been curious about what motivates young women to want or not want children, to have or not have them at any particular moment in time. And in the first book those questions centered around “how do these really large scale ideas and policies that are informed by ideas about overpopulation, overconsumption of resources, who should or should not have children?” I, at that time, was curious about how that was informing activism, and how everyday experience in places like Madagascar was shaped by that.This book is very different. What is different is that I focus on the United States. I also look at movements in Canada and in England, but I’m not looking at the Global South at all, intentionally. And the reason why is because people in the Global North—specifically the U.S. and Canada and Britain—have really different perspectives on personal reproductive behavior and environmental issues. And what is different is here you have a lot of young people who are very climate aware and climate literate.They’re reading the science. They’re taking environmental studies classes. They’re asking questions about what this means for their personal lives, and they’re making decisions about their personal lives based on what they anticipate is coming in the future. And to see the racial inequality and socio-economic inequality as it shapes those questions—it’s very context specific.And I wanted to get into that context specific stuff here in the United States, because I think it’s really easy for some people to skim over that. I’ve read articles and op-eds in the past saying things like, well, “people in the United States are worried about having children in the context of climate change.” And it makes sense because people in the U.S. over-consume resources. So people in the U.S. are not all the same. We’re not all having the same experiences. We don’t occupy the same social location. We are not impacted by climate change in the same ways.And so I wanted to really shine a light on how social inequality right here makes the experience of climate change and climate injustice very, very difficult for people of color. And how those climate inequalities and climate impacts land on the mental health and emotional health of people of color. And how people of color feel differently about bringing children into the world as a result.Are you a mother? Do you have children? The decision of having a child is such a personal one.I’m not a mother. I think actually that it’s a personal decision that has been made political for so long. And I think that the way that most people talk and write about this issue is that they are actively saying do or don’t. Unfortunately, most environmentalists throughout the history of environmentalism have fallen on the side of saying don’t have children. And I think that has been a very dangerous thing to say in particular, because those that they’ve been telling not to have children have tended to be low-income people and people of color.I think that the other thing is one of the arguments I make in the book that you’ll see is that I personally don’t actually think that this is private. And what I mean by that is the conditions of climate change, which are the conditions that young people today are living in as they make their reproductive decisions. Those aren’t private. Those aren’t personal. Those are public. Those are big public actions that these big actors, corporations and governments and militaries are taking. And we are all living in this big collective shared experience of climate change. And if that’s the social circumstance in which you have to think about whether to have kids or not, it’s really not a private decision.You have to respond to the big social conditions you’re living in. And when people take it on as a private issue or a personal matter, that tends to lead to more feelings of guilt or stigma or like they’re doing something wrong or like there’s something wrong with them for perhaps not wanting to have kids. And so I actually advocate for having this conversation more in public. And really placing responsibility on those who deserve it. And that is the big corporate actors, the fossil fuel companies, the military and governments, government actors, elected officials, who are not creating and supporting climate-forward legislation.In terms of research, the study of climate emotions is still fairly new, right?So, climate emotions have really only been studied in the last 20 years. And as they’re being studied, they are ramping up in real time. So climate emotions are any kind of emotional changes or emotional impact that results from how people experience—either learning about, or living through, or anticipating—the impacts of climate change. So those who don’t necessarily ever experience evacuation from a wildfire or hurricane or flood might still be deeply distressed by climate impacts.If they’re reading the science, they’re looking at the reports or, you know, they’re watching TV, or engrossed in social media and hearing about other people who are experiencing those things. And what climate emotions researchers have been uncovering is that this emotional distress lands hardest on younger people, especially Generation Z.What those researchers have studied less of, and what I do in this book, is understand how other groups, particularly socially marginalized groups, people of color and low-income groups are also people on whom those climate emotions land hardest. And when I say climate emotions, distressing emotions, include things like anxiety, depression, grief, sadness, fear and other emotions like that.How does race play a factor in how we all process those emotions?What I found in a survey that I conducted, doing this research is that for people of color, the most distressing emotions were reported by people of color, who in a statistically significant way, most identified feeling traumatized by the impact of climate change. They also reported feeling fear more so than white respondents.And they also reported feeling overwhelmed. And that came out a lot in interviews, too. What I was not anticipating—but this is also significant—is that when it came to parenting in the midst of climate change, people of color in my study were most likely to report positive or action-oriented emotions, including feeling motivated, feeling determined, feeling a sense of happiness or optimism. Because that was a quantitative survey, I wasn’t able to ask questions about why those positive emotions were there.But I can only imagine that it’s because people of color really have long histories of facing existential threat. Black and Indigenous people, in particular, have had to develop tools to become resilient, to become resilient within community, within family and within social movements. And so I can only imagine that those responses of motivation, joy, determination and happiness come from that sense of “we will survive, we will endure and whatever future is ahead we will be—and we will find a way to thrive.”So, does your work really underscore the importance of African Americans and communities of color—in the face of these threats—drawing strength from family?Not just family. We can trace a long history in the United States of Black people, literally, facing threats to our existence, from literally the earliest days of being in this country through slavery. And so one of the things that has always been a really important institution to protect us from the harms of the outside world is family, and not just family, but multigenerational family. And for us, that often includes chosen family.We all have “play cousins,” “play aunties,” “play uncles”—people who are not biological kin. But the lack of biological relationship does not matter at all. They are members of the family. Building and sustaining those multi-generational ties has always been important to strengthen us, not just against big existential threats, but to strengthen us in a society in which we often don’t have the necessary resources and social supports that we need.We often have the absence of a social safety net to provide for us in the ways that we need to be provided for. Other institutions provide those supports, as well. The church, for example. Say what you want about the Black church—there are challenges, there have always been challenges, but the Black church has been a really important institution in the lives of African Americans, not just for religious reasons, but for social reasons. It was a very important institution throughout the civil rights movement.And it provides a space of safety, solace and community as a buffer against a lot of the challenges of the outside world. How does all of this come back to climate anxiety and the kid question? Well, when you don’t have research that includes African Americans, for example, then you tend to assume that we don’t experience climate anxiety or that, if we do, it doesn’t have any impact on kid questions for us. And that’s not true.We can’t make that assumption, [but] people do make that assumption in the absence of research. And this research is the first and only of its kind that asks these questions and puts race at the center. And why did I want to do that? I wanted to establish an evidence base so that we are not left out of the discussion when it comes to climate, mental health and the kinds of resources that will be provided to communities to respond to the negative mental health impacts of climate change. And I also don’t want us to be left out of the discussion of how climate mental health impacts do, or potentially, will impact reproductive changes. I just want us to be in the discussion, and we can’t be if we’re left out of the research.What was the most surprising finding in your research? And what does all of this mean for the future?The thing that surprised me most, this came out in interviews, is that among some young people—especially those who have taken environmental studies classes in college or were environmental studies majors—there is more and more peer pressure to not have kids, and I was not expecting that. I was expecting to hear things along the lines of, “I really want kids, but I feel like I can’t have them. The world is a scary place, you know, climate change is getting worse.”And I did hear that a lot. But I expected that to be the overwhelming sentiment and what I heard, a number of times and was always surprised, was that, some people I interviewed said, “Well, when I talk to my friends and I say that I want children or that I want a large family, their response is ‘Eww, why would you want that? That’s awful.’” I was not expecting anti-child peer pressure among Gen Z. I did not anticipate that. Those are people who are planning to have one less child. Planning and behavior are not the same thing.So, you know, no one can predict what they will actually do. What does this mean for the future? I think that’s exactly the right question to ask, and none of us can predict. But what we need for the future is for our young people to feel excited and hopeful about the future that’s ahead of them, and to feel empowered to make the decisions that would make them happy in their lives, whether that is having children, adopting children, step-parenting or not being in children’s lives at all.So, for me and for people I interviewed, it’s not fundamentally about babies or about children. That is a way, a high stakes way of getting us to what it fundamentally is about, which is how can we aggressively fight climate change right now and combat lackadaisical attitudes or profit-driven attitudes that really just favor business as usual, because ultimately the problem that needs to be solved is not climate anxiety, it’s climate change. Climate anxiety is a normal, natural response to climate change. Let’s fight and solve climate change, and then you won’t have the thing to be anxious about.

Jade Sasser’s research explores one of the biggest questions facing the climate-conscious. Her new book focuses on the racial dimensions of eco-anxiety and reproduction decisions.

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. It is republished with permission. Sign up for their newsletter here.

Jade S. Sasser has been studying reproductive choices in the context of climate change for a quarter century. Her 2018 book, “Infertile Ground,” explored how population growth in the Global South has been misguidedly framed as a crisis—a perspective that Sasser argues had its roots in long-standing racial stereotypes about sexuality and promiscuity.

But during the COVID-19 pandemic, Sasser, an environmental scientist who teaches at the University of California, Riverside, started asking different questions, this time about reproductive choices in the Global North. In an era in which the planet is getting hotter by the day, she wondered, is it morally, ethically or practically sound to bring children into the world? And do such factors as climate anxiety, race and socio-economic status shape who decides to have kids and who doesn’t?

The result is her latest book, “Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question,” which was published last month by the University of California Press and centers on a range of issues that are part of a broader conversation among those who try to practice climate-conscious decision-making.

From the outset, Sasser cautions that her work does not attempt to draw any conclusions about what the future might hold or how concerns about global warming might affect population growth going forward.

“This book is not predictive,” Sasser said in a recent interview with Inside Climate News. “It’s too soon to be able to say, ‘OK, these are going to be the trends. These people are not going to have children, or are going to have fewer children or this many, that many.’ We’re at the beginning of witnessing what could be a significant trend.”

Sasser said that one of the most compelling findings of her research was how survey results showed that women of color were the demographic cohort that reported that they were most likely to have at least one child fewer than what they actually want because of climate change. “No other group in that survey responded that way,” Sasser said.

Those survey results, Sasser said, underscore the prevalence of climate anxiety among communities of color. A Yale study published last year found that Hispanic Americans were five times as likely to experience feelings of climate change anxiety when compared to their white counterparts; Black Americans were twice as likely to have those feelings.

“There is a really large assumption that we don’t experience climate anxiety,” said Sasser, who is African American. “And we do. How could we not? We experience most of the climate impacts first and worst. And the few surveys that have been done around people of color and climate emotions showed that Black and Latinx people feel more worry and more concerned about climate change than other groups.”

Sasser, who also produced a seven-episode podcast as part of the project, said that she hopes her work can help fill what she sees as a void in the public’s awareness of climate anxiety in communities of color.

“Every single thing I was reading just didn’t include us in the discussion at all,” Sasser said. “I found myself in conversations with people who were not people of color and they were saying, ‘Well, I think people of color are just more resilient and don’t feel climate anxiety. And this doesn’t factor into their reproductive lives.’

That’s just simply not true. But how would we know that without the research to tell us? But now I’ve started down that road, and I really, really hope that other researchers will take up the mantle and continue studying these questions in the context of race in the future.”

Sasser recently sat down with Inside Climate News to talk about the book and how she uses her research to show how climate emotions land hardest on marginalized groups, people of color and low-income groups.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

How did you come to write “Climate and the Kid Question”?

This is a book that I was not expecting to write. It was my pandemic pivot project. I was working on something very different, focused on household energy in the Global South. And then COVID happened and I could no longer travel. And so I had to turn to the things that I had been compiling as part of a project that I saw as being on the back burner.

And what I had been compiling was articles about young women climate activists who were talking about not having children in response to climate change. And when I had first encountered these articles, I misunderstood them. I thought that these women were motivated by erroneous ideas about overpopulation, or that they weren’t having children because they thought there were too many people on the earth, things like that.

But when I delved more deeply into what I was reading, I began to become aware of the whole world of eco-emotions and climate emotions. And that’s when I was introduced to the terms eco-anxiety and climate anxiety. And then I began to understand where these young people were coming from on a much, much deeper level. And so this book is my response to three years of research delving into climate emotions, distressing emotions, in particular, how those emotions are impacting how young people feel morally and ethically about having children, about raising children, about the future. And also what race and inequality have to do with it all.

You’ve been studying issues of population growth for a while now, right? That was the focus of your first book, “On Infertile Ground.”

I’ve been having those conversations for, I guess, 25 years now. And in those conversations, I’ve always been curious about what motivates young women to want or not want children, to have or not have them at any particular moment in time. And in the first book those questions centered around “how do these really large scale ideas and policies that are informed by ideas about overpopulation, overconsumption of resources, who should or should not have children?”

I, at that time, was curious about how that was informing activism, and how everyday experience in places like Madagascar was shaped by that.

This book is very different. What is different is that I focus on the United States. I also look at movements in Canada and in England, but I’m not looking at the Global South at all, intentionally. And the reason why is because people in the Global North—specifically the U.S. and Canada and Britain—have really different perspectives on personal reproductive behavior and environmental issues. And what is different is here you have a lot of young people who are very climate aware and climate literate.

They’re reading the science. They’re taking environmental studies classes. They’re asking questions about what this means for their personal lives, and they’re making decisions about their personal lives based on what they anticipate is coming in the future. And to see the racial inequality and socio-economic inequality as it shapes those questions—it’s very context specific.

And I wanted to get into that context specific stuff here in the United States, because I think it’s really easy for some people to skim over that. I’ve read articles and op-eds in the past saying things like, well, “people in the United States are worried about having children in the context of climate change.”

And it makes sense because people in the U.S. over-consume resources. So people in the U.S. are not all the same. We’re not all having the same experiences. We don’t occupy the same social location. We are not impacted by climate change in the same ways.

And so I wanted to really shine a light on how social inequality right here makes the experience of climate change and climate injustice very, very difficult for people of color. And how those climate inequalities and climate impacts land on the mental health and emotional health of people of color. And how people of color feel differently about bringing children into the world as a result.

Are you a mother? Do you have children? The decision of having a child is such a personal one.

I’m not a mother. I think actually that it’s a personal decision that has been made political for so long. And I think that the way that most people talk and write about this issue is that they are actively saying do or don’t. Unfortunately, most environmentalists throughout the history of environmentalism have fallen on the side of saying don’t have children. And I think that has been a very dangerous thing to say in particular, because those that they’ve been telling not to have children have tended to be low-income people and people of color.

I think that the other thing is one of the arguments I make in the book that you’ll see is that I personally don’t actually think that this is private. And what I mean by that is the conditions of climate change, which are the conditions that young people today are living in as they make their reproductive decisions. Those aren’t private. Those aren’t personal. Those are public. Those are big public actions that these big actors, corporations and governments and militaries are taking. And we are all living in this big collective shared experience of climate change. And if that’s the social circumstance in which you have to think about whether to have kids or not, it’s really not a private decision.

You have to respond to the big social conditions you’re living in. And when people take it on as a private issue or a personal matter, that tends to lead to more feelings of guilt or stigma or like they’re doing something wrong or like there’s something wrong with them for perhaps not wanting to have kids. And so I actually advocate for having this conversation more in public. And really placing responsibility on those who deserve it. And that is the big corporate actors, the fossil fuel companies, the military and governments, government actors, elected officials, who are not creating and supporting climate-forward legislation.

In terms of research, the study of climate emotions is still fairly new, right?

So, climate emotions have really only been studied in the last 20 years. And as they’re being studied, they are ramping up in real time. So climate emotions are any kind of emotional changes or emotional impact that results from how people experience—either learning about, or living through, or anticipating—the impacts of climate change. So those who don’t necessarily ever experience evacuation from a wildfire or hurricane or flood might still be deeply distressed by climate impacts.

If they’re reading the science, they’re looking at the reports or, you know, they’re watching TV, or engrossed in social media and hearing about other people who are experiencing those things. And what climate emotions researchers have been uncovering is that this emotional distress lands hardest on younger people, especially Generation Z.

What those researchers have studied less of, and what I do in this book, is understand how other groups, particularly socially marginalized groups, people of color and low-income groups are also people on whom those climate emotions land hardest. And when I say climate emotions, distressing emotions, include things like anxiety, depression, grief, sadness, fear and other emotions like that.

How does race play a factor in how we all process those emotions?

What I found in a survey that I conducted, doing this research is that for people of color, the most distressing emotions were reported by people of color, who in a statistically significant way, most identified feeling traumatized by the impact of climate change. They also reported feeling fear more so than white respondents.

And they also reported feeling overwhelmed. And that came out a lot in interviews, too. What I was not anticipating—but this is also significant—is that when it came to parenting in the midst of climate change, people of color in my study were most likely to report positive or action-oriented emotions, including feeling motivated, feeling determined, feeling a sense of happiness or optimism. Because that was a quantitative survey, I wasn’t able to ask questions about why those positive emotions were there.

But I can only imagine that it’s because people of color really have long histories of facing existential threat. Black and Indigenous people, in particular, have had to develop tools to become resilient, to become resilient within community, within family and within social movements. And so I can only imagine that those responses of motivation, joy, determination and happiness come from that sense of “we will survive, we will endure and whatever future is ahead we will be—and we will find a way to thrive.”

So, does your work really underscore the importance of African Americans and communities of color—in the face of these threats—drawing strength from family?

Not just family. We can trace a long history in the United States of Black people, literally, facing threats to our existence, from literally the earliest days of being in this country through slavery. And so one of the things that has always been a really important institution to protect us from the harms of the outside world is family, and not just family, but multigenerational family. And for us, that often includes chosen family.

We all have “play cousins,” “play aunties,” “play uncles”—people who are not biological kin. But the lack of biological relationship does not matter at all. They are members of the family. Building and sustaining those multi-generational ties has always been important to strengthen us, not just against big existential threats, but to strengthen us in a society in which we often don’t have the necessary resources and social supports that we need.

We often have the absence of a social safety net to provide for us in the ways that we need to be provided for. Other institutions provide those supports, as well. The church, for example. Say what you want about the Black church—there are challenges, there have always been challenges, but the Black church has been a really important institution in the lives of African Americans, not just for religious reasons, but for social reasons. It was a very important institution throughout the civil rights movement.

And it provides a space of safety, solace and community as a buffer against a lot of the challenges of the outside world. How does all of this come back to climate anxiety and the kid question? Well, when you don’t have research that includes African Americans, for example, then you tend to assume that we don’t experience climate anxiety or that, if we do, it doesn’t have any impact on kid questions for us. And that’s not true.

We can’t make that assumption, [but] people do make that assumption in the absence of research. And this research is the first and only of its kind that asks these questions and puts race at the center. And why did I want to do that? I wanted to establish an evidence base so that we are not left out of the discussion when it comes to climate, mental health and the kinds of resources that will be provided to communities to respond to the negative mental health impacts of climate change. And I also don’t want us to be left out of the discussion of how climate mental health impacts do, or potentially, will impact reproductive changes. I just want us to be in the discussion, and we can’t be if we’re left out of the research.

What was the most surprising finding in your research? And what does all of this mean for the future?

The thing that surprised me most, this came out in interviews, is that among some young people—especially those who have taken environmental studies classes in college or were environmental studies majors—there is more and more peer pressure to not have kids, and I was not expecting that. I was expecting to hear things along the lines of, “I really want kids, but I feel like I can’t have them. The world is a scary place, you know, climate change is getting worse.”

And I did hear that a lot. But I expected that to be the overwhelming sentiment and what I heard, a number of times and was always surprised, was that, some people I interviewed said, “Well, when I talk to my friends and I say that I want children or that I want a large family, their response is ‘Eww, why would you want that? That’s awful.’” I was not expecting anti-child peer pressure among Gen Z. I did not anticipate that. Those are people who are planning to have one less child. Planning and behavior are not the same thing.

So, you know, no one can predict what they will actually do. What does this mean for the future? I think that’s exactly the right question to ask, and none of us can predict. But what we need for the future is for our young people to feel excited and hopeful about the future that’s ahead of them, and to feel empowered to make the decisions that would make them happy in their lives, whether that is having children, adopting children, step-parenting or not being in children’s lives at all.

So, for me and for people I interviewed, it’s not fundamentally about babies or about children. That is a way, a high stakes way of getting us to what it fundamentally is about, which is how can we aggressively fight climate change right now and combat lackadaisical attitudes or profit-driven attitudes that really just favor business as usual, because ultimately the problem that needs to be solved is not climate anxiety, it’s climate change. Climate anxiety is a normal, natural response to climate change. Let’s fight and solve climate change, and then you won’t have the thing to be anxious about.

Read the full story here.
Photos courtesy of

Related News

‘It can’t withstand the heat’: fears ‘stable’ Patagonia glacier in irreversible decline

Scientists say Perito Moreno, which for decades defied trend of glacial retreat, now rapidly losing massOne of the few stable glaciers in a warming world, Perito Moreno, in Santa Cruz province, Argentina, is now undergoing a possibly irreversible retreat, scientists say.Over the past seven years, it has lost 1.92 sq km (0.74 sq miles) of ice cover and its thickness is decreasing by up to 8 metres (26 ft) a year. Continue reading...

One of the few stable glaciers in a warming world, Perito Moreno, in Santa Cruz province, Argentina, is now undergoing a possibly irreversible retreat, scientists say.Over the past seven years, it has lost 1.92 sq km (0.74 sq miles) of ice cover and its thickness is decreasing by up to 8 metres (26 ft) a year.For decades, Perito Moreno defied the global trend of glacial retreat, maintaining an exceptional balance between snow accumulation and melting. Its dramatic calving events, when massive blocks of ice crashed into Lago Argentino, became a symbol of natural wonder, drawing millions of visitors to southern Patagonia.Dr Lucas Ruiz, a glaciologist at the Argentine Institute of Nivology, Glaciology and Environmental Sciences, said: “The Perito Moreno is a very particular, exceptional glacier. Since records began, it stood out to the first explorers in the late 19th century because it showed no signs of retreat – on the contrary, it was advancing. And it continued to do so until 2018, when we began to see a different behaviour. Since then, its mass loss has become increasingly rapid.”Scientists and local guides warn that the balance is beginning to shift. “The first year the glacier didn’t return to its previous year’s position was 2022. The same happened in 2023, again in 2024, and now in 2025. The truth is, the retreat continues. The glacier keeps thinning, especially along its northern margin,” said Ruiz. This sector is the farthest from tourist walkways and lies above the deepest part of Lago Argentino, the largest freshwater lake in Argentina.Calving events at Perito Moreno, when ice collapses into the lake, are becoming louder, more frequent, and much larger. Photograph: Philipp Rohner/Getty Images/500pxThe summer of 2023-24 recorded a maximum temperature of 11.2C, according to meteorological data collected by Pedro Skvarca, a geophysical engineer and the scientific director of the Glaciarium centre in El Calafate, Patagonia. Over the past 30 years, the average summer temperature rose by 1.2C, a change significant enough to greatly accelerate ice melt.Ice thickness measurements are equally alarming. Between 2018 and 2022, the glacier was thinning at a rate of 4 metres a year. But in the past two years, that has doubled to 8 metres annually.“Perito Moreno’s size no longer matches the current climate; it’s simply too big. It can’t withstand the heat, and the current ice input isn’t enough to compensate,” Ruiz said.Ice that once rested on the lakebed owing to its weight, said Ruiz, had now thinned so much that it was beginning to float, as water pressure overtook the ice’s own.With that anchor lost, the glacier’s front accelerates – not because of increased mass input from the accumulation zone, where snow compacts into ice, but because the front slides and deforms. This movement triggers a feedback loop that further weakens the structure, making the process potentially irreversible.Xabier Blanch Gorriz, a professor in the department of civil and environmental engineering at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, who studies ice calving at the Perito Moreno glacier front, said: “Describing the change as ‘irreversible’ is complex, because glaciers are dynamic systems. But the truth is that the current rate of retreat points to a clearly negative trend.” He added: “The glacier’s retreat and thinning are evident and have accelerated.”Ruiz confirmed another disturbing trend reported by local guides: calving events are becoming louder, more frequent, and much larger. In April, a guide at Los Glaciares national park described watching a tower of ice the height of a 20-storey building collapse into the lake. “It’s only in the last four to six years that we’ve started seeing icebergs this size,” he told Reuters.skip past newsletter promotionThe planet's most important stories. Get all the week's environment news - the good, the bad and the essentialPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionIn January of this year, Blanch Gorriz and his team installed eight photogrammetric systems that capture images every 30 minutes, enabling the generation of 3D models of about 300 metres of the glacier front. Initial comparisons between December and June already reveal significant ice loss. Satellite images further highlight a striking retreat over just 100 days.Today, nothing seems capable of halting the glacier’s retreat. Only a series of cooler summers and wetter winters might slow the trend, but climate projections point in the opposite direction.“What we expect is that, at some point, Perito Moreno will lose contact with the Magallanes peninsula, which has historically acted as a stabilising buttress and slowed the glacier’s response to climate change. When that happens, we’ll likely see a catastrophic retreat to a new equilibrium position, farther back in the narrow valley,” said Ruiz.Such a shift would represent a “new configuration” of the glacier, raising scientific questions about how this natural wonder would behave in the future. “It will be something never seen before – even farther back than what the first researchers documented in the late 19th century,” Ruiz nadded.How long the glacier might hold that future position remains unknown. But what scientists do know is that the valley, unlike the Magallanes peninsula, would not be able to hold the glacier in place.Perito Moreno – Latin America’s most iconic glacier and part of a Unesco world heritage site since 1981 – now joins a regrettable local trend: its neighbours, the Upsala and Viedma glaciers, have retreated at an astonishing rate over the past two decades. It is also part of a global pattern in which, as Ruiz put it, humanity is “digging the grave” of the world’s glaciers.

Climate
Science
Water

Seeing fewer fireflies this year? Here’s why, and how you can help.

Fireflies are vulnerable to climate change and habitat loss. Some simple landscaping tricks and turning off porch lights can make a big difference.

It’s firefly season in the Blue Ridge.  As the sun goes down, they begin to blink and glow along the water, in the trees, and across open fields. Some species twinkle in unison, others off and on. One of nature’s loveliest light shows enchants onlookers of all ages, especially in the Smoky Mountains, which is home to about 20 percent of the 100 or so species found in the United States. But many of those who have long delighted in this essential feature of a humid East Coast summer say something feels different. Casual observers and scientists alike are seeing fewer fireflies, and studies show that habitat loss, rising temperatures, light pollution, and drought threaten these beloved bugs. Some populations are already dwindling, including about 18 species in the U.S. and Canada. “We’ve been hearing anecdotal reports of fireflies’ population declining for years,” said Sarah Lower, a biologist at Bucknell University. “Every time I would go out and give a scientific talk somewhere, somebody would raise their hand and say, ‘You know, I’ve been out in my yard and when I’m with a kid I remember there being fireflies everywhere, now I don’t see them.’” Lower and Darin J. McNeil, a wildlife ecologist at the University of Kentucky, examined  firefly population patterns last summer, using citizen science data collected nationwide to draw connections with environmental conditions.Though their observations don’t specifically confirm a decline, they suggest reasons we might be seeing fewer fireflies in some places. Climate change is already reshaping the Southeast with hotter, drier summers — conditions that could push fireflies past their limits. In some wetter regions, though, they may find new habitat. McNeil said these changing patterns are impacting firefly populations already. “They’re very, very sensitive to temperature and weather and things like that,” McNeil said. “In Southern areas where we expect it to get quite warm — and maybe get outside the comfort zone of fireflies — we might expect the fireflies are going to do poorly.” Read Next A year after Helene, river guides in Appalachia are navigating a new world Katie Myers Fireflies are carnivorous beetles. They don’t live long, and spend two years of their short lives in the soil as larvae, hunting slugs and other moisture-loving critters. “Disrupt that access to the soil, McNeil said, “and fireflies disappear very quickly.” The insects thrive in woodland areas (and, oddly, on farmland, despite herbicides), and habitat loss poses a threat. “We have this effect of fragmentation where people are chopping up the forest into little chunks and then the forest that’s left behind doesn’t get managed in any way,” McNeil said. McNeil would like to see researchers study how forest management, including prescribed burning, impacts fireflies. In the meantime, there’s a lot that ordinary folks can do to help them thrive. In western North Carolina, Brannen Basham and Jill Jacobs have built their lives around native landscapes. Their small business, Spriggly’s Beescaping, teaches people about pollinators — and increasingly, fireflies. The pair have a seemingly endless knowledge of fun facts about lightning bugs.  “One random interesting fact is that these animals never stop glowing,” Jacobs said. “They’re glowing as little eggs, even.” And one of the most common front yard genus, Photuris, use their glow to lure nearby males — then eat them. They take firefly conservation seriously, running regular workshops to teach people how to make their yards more welcoming to fireflies and pollinators, particularly as climate change disrupts growing seasons. “Fireflies might enter into their adult form and find themselves emerging into a world in which their favorite plants have either already bloomed or they haven’t bloomed yet,” Basham said. “By increasing the diversity of native plants in your space, you can help ensure that there’s something in bloom at all times of the growing season.” Basham and Jacobs have a few other tips for helping fireflies thrive. You don’t need to be a scientist to help protect fireflies. In fact, the biggest difference comes from how we care for our own backyards. Here are a few things Basham and Jacobs recommend: Turn off your porch lights. Fireflies are incredibly sensitive to artificial light and it can confuse them. Ditch the manicured lawn and embrace native plants. In addition to being easier to care for, they suit the local environment and conserve water. Leave some leaves behind when you rake in the fall. They’re a great place for fireflies to find food, stay cool, and lay eggs. Plant shrubs, tufting grasses, and other, large plants. These can shelter fireflies during rainstorms and other severe weather.  If you spot fireflies, jot down when and where you saw them and add your observations to citizen science databases like iNaturalist, Firefly Watch or Firefly Atlas to help scientists collect data. Even among those who study fireflies, the thrill of spotting them remains magical. Lower has made many excursions to the southern Appalachian mountains to find the famous, ethereal “blue ghosts.” Rather than flicker, the insects emit a continuous bluish-green glow. “You walk into the pitch black woods and at first you can’t really see anything right because your eyes are getting used to the darkness,” Lower said. “But eventually you start to see all these dim glows.” On other nights, Lower has seen so many fireflies it felt like she was walking among he stars. She’s been lucky enough to witness a phenomenon called spotlighting, in which lightning bugs hover in a circle of light. She’s even used pheromones as a tactic to lure them out of their hiding spots in the dead of winter, feeling elated as the creatures drifted toward her: “You can imagine me dancing and yelling and screaming in the forest.” This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Seeing fewer fireflies this year? Here’s why, and how you can help. on Jul 11, 2025.

Climate
Animals
Conservation

Drought is draining water supplies and driving up food costs where you’d least expect

From Mexico City to the Mekong Delta, increasingly severe droughts caused by climate change are laying waste to ecosystems and economies everywhere.

Taking shovels and buckets to a dried-up sandy belt of the Vhombozi River in Zimbabwe last August, groups of Mudzi district villagers gathered to dig with the hope of somehow finding water. The southern African region had entered into a state of severe drought, which had shriveled the Vhombozi, a primary water supply for more than 100,000 people. Before long, a maze of makeshift holes revealed shallow puddles along the otherwise arid riverbed. The frantic digging had worked — there was water. There was just one big problem: It wasn’t blue. It was a muddy brown color, and villagers worried that consuming it would make them ill. But as there were scarcely other options, many took their chances with drinking it and bathing with it.  Almost a year later, the persistent drought has led to a deluge of devastation on the region’s food system. Corn yields dropped 70 percent across the country, causing consumer prices to double. Thousands of cattle were lost to thirst and starvation. A local UNICEF emergency food distribution lost all of the food crops it harvested, which forced the NGO to reduce charitable food provisions from three meals a week to one. Child malnutrition levels in Mudzi doubled, driving up the demand for health care, and causing a quarter of health care clinics to run out of water reserves. Between January and March, about 6 million people in Zimbabwe faced food insecurity. According to a new report by the U.S. National Drought Mitigation Center, or NDMC, and the U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification, or UNCCD, the combined effects of global warming, drought, and El Niño have triggered similar crises all over the world, from Mexico City to the Mekong Delta. Using impact reports alongside government data, scientific and technical research, and media coverage of major drought events, the authors examined case-by-case how droughts compound poverty, hunger, energy insecurity, and ecosystem collapse in climate hot spots around the world. They measured impacts in 2023 and 2024, when the planet saw some of the most widespread and damaging drought events in recorded history. What they found is a lesson and a warning sign: Increasingly severe droughts caused by climate change are laying waste to ecosystems and economies everywhere.  “This report is a blistering reminder that climate change and punishing drought are already devastating lives, livelihoods, and food access,” said Million Belay of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems, and general coordinator of the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa, who wasn’t involved in the research. “We need to get serious about resilience and real adaptation.” A local farmer carries vegetables near a partially dry canal of a Chinampa, or floating garden, in San Gregorio Atlapulco, on the outskirts of Mexico City, Mexico, on May 23, 2024. Daniel Cardenas / Anadolu via Getty Images Mexico City A focal point in the analysis is Mexico, where prolonged drought conditions provoked a water crisis that has had repercussions for food affordability and access.  The situation began to intensify in 2023, when the country entered into a period of historically low rainfall. By June, the bulk of Mexico’s reservoirs dropped below 50 percent capacity. The rainy winter of 2023 brought some relief, but not enough.  By the next summer, 90 percent of the country was experiencing some level of drought, and Mexico City’s water supply system reached a record low of 39 percent capacity. Abnormally low rainfall and high temperatures, made worse by inefficient water infrastructure and overextraction of the city’s aquifer, would persist into early 2025. These struggles to obtain water have been further exacerbated by distribution needs as mandated by a water-sharing treaty Mexico has long shared with the United States.  A severe lack of water has been found to be closely linked with food insecurity, as water scarcity impacts food access through reductions in agricultural production that can fuel food shortages and higher grocery prices. Roughly 42 percent of Mexico’s population was food-insecure in 2021, according to national statistics, with consumer food inflation rates steadily climbing since then. Price hikes were eventually reflected in grocery stores, causing the costs of produce like cilantro to soar by 400 percent, alongside other climbing price tags for goods like onions, broccoli, and avocados.  “Ripple effects can turn regional droughts into global economic shocks,” said NDMC’s Cody Knutson, who co-authored the report. “No country is immune when critical water-dependent systems start to collapse.”  Locals carry banana produce over the dry Solimoes riverbed in the Pesqueiro community in Northern Brazil, on September 30, 2024. Michael Dantas / AFP via Getty Images Amazon Basin During those same years, the Amazon River Basin became another drought and hunger hot spot. According to the new report, climate change caused waterways to drop to historically low levels in September of 2023. Drinking water became contaminated by mass die-offs of marine life, and local communities weren’t able to eat the fish they rely on.  Supply chain transportation was also greatly affected, as the low water levels made it impossible for boats to travel in and out of certain regions. Brazil’s AirForce would be deployed to distribute food and water to several states where river supply routes were impassable.  Residents in some towns dug wells on their own properties to replace river water they would normally depend on for drinking, cooking, and cleaning, according to the U.N.-backed report. Others were stuck waiting on government aid. Disruptions to drinking water and food supplies due to low river levels continued through late 2024 as the drought persisted. By September, waterways that had previously been navigable were bone-dry.  A 2025 report released by the nonprofit ACAPS found that many communities in the Amazon region were already believed to be suffering malnutrition, making them more vulnerable to the emerging health and food insecurity effects of the drought.  Climate change plays “a critical role in food security,” said FAO economist Jung-eun Sohn, who is unaffiliated with the UNCCD report. He noted that warming not only can impact both availability of and access to food, but that natural hazards are “one of three main risks of food insecurity,” along with conflict and economic risks, in hunger hot spots.  A woman stands in a dried-out banana plantation in Ben Tre Province, Vietnam, in 2016. At the time, Vietnam’s Mekong Delta was experiencing its worst drought in 90 years. Christian Berg / Getty Images Mekong Delta  Though a central contributor to the interconnected water-and-food crisis, climate change isn’t the only factor in many hunger hot spots — failing infrastructure and inefficiencies in water delivery systems have also been flagged as critical contributors to widespread water shortages. The compounding effect of El Niño, or a naturally-occurring weather phenomena that drives above-average global heat and more intense natural disasters in parts of the planet, is another culprit.  “It’s now abundantly clear that industrial, chemical-intensive agriculture, with its high water demands and uniform crops, is deeply vulnerable to drought and intensifying the crisis,” said Belay, the IPES expert.  One study found that saltwater intrusion, much like what persistently plagues the Mekong River Delta in Vietnam, also causes a significant reduction in food production. The watershed flows through six Asian countries, and over 20 million people depend on the rice grown in the region, which is Vietnam’s most productive agricultural area. It is also the region of Vietnam that is most vulnerable to hunger, with up to half of its rural households struggling to afford enough food.  A woman looks over her spoiled watermelon field in Ben Tre Province, Vietnam, in 2016. At the time, Vietnam’s Mekong Delta was experiencing its worst drought in 90 years. Christian Berg / Getty Images So when an early heat wave struck the Mekong Delta in 2024, and an abnormally long dry spell followed suit, causing canals to dry up, excessive salinity, heat, and water scarcity killed farmers’ catch in droves, reducing what communities were able to supply and sell, which led to shortages that prompted the local government to intervene and help producers quickly sell their wares. As the drought persisted, communities undertook other desperate measures to mitigate losses; renovating ditches, constructing temporary reservoirs, digging wells, and storing fresh water. Even so, according to the report, up to 110,000 hectares of agricultural resources, including fruit crops, rice fields, and aquaculture, have been impacted in the last year by the drought and excess salinity. The situation contributed to rice shortages, prompting a widespread inflationary effect on market prices. “These instances highlight how interconnected our global economies and food supplies are,” Paula Guastello, NDMC drought impacts researcher and lead author of the report, told Grist. “Drought has widespread implications, especially when it occurs on such a large, intense scale as during the past few years. In today’s global society, it is impossible to ignore the effects of drought occurring in far-off lands.”  All told, the authors argue that without major reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, rising temperatures will lead to more frequent and severe droughts by continuing to inflate heat, evaporation, and volatile precipitation patterns. All the while, urbanization, land use changes, and population growth are expected to continue to strain water resources and influence which assets and areas are most vulnerable to drought impacts. The world’s resilience to those impacts, the report denotes, ultimately depends on the fortification of ecosystems, the adoption of changes to water management, and the pursuit of equitable resource access.  “Proactive drought management is a matter of climate justice, equitable development, and good governance,” said UNCCD Deputy Executive Secretary Andrea Meza in a statement about the report. Stronger early warning systems and real-time drought impact monitoring, for example, those that assess conditions known to fuel food and water insecurity, are some of the ways countries can better fortify their systems in preparedness for the next big drought event. Others include watershed restoration, the broad revival of traditional cultivation practices, and the implementation of alternative water supply technologies to help make infrastructure more climate-resilient. Adaptation methods, however, must also account for the most vulnerable populations, the authors say, and require global cooperation, particularly along critical food trade routes.  “Drought is not just a weather event,” said report co-author and NDMC assistant director Kelly Helm Smith. “It can be a social, economic, and environmental emergency. The question is not whether this will happen again, but whether we will be better prepared next time.” This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Drought is draining water supplies and driving up food costs where you’d least expect on Jul 9, 2025.

Climate
Food
Waste

Provocative new book says we must persuade people to have more babies

The population is set to plummet and we don't know how to stop it, warn Dean Spears and Michael Geruso in their new book, After the Spike

A large population may enable innovation and economies of scalePHILIPPE MONTIGNY/iStockphoto/Get​ty Images After the SpikeDean Spears and Michael Geruso (Bodley Head (UK); Simon & Schuster (US)) Four-Fifths of all the humans who will ever be born may already have been born. The number of children being born worldwide each year peaked at 146 million in 2012 and has been falling overall ever since. This means that the world’s population will peak and start to fall around the 2080s. This fall won’t be gradual. With birth rates already well below replacement levels in many countries including China and India, the world’s population will plummet as fast as it rose. In three centuries, there could be fewer than 2 billion people on Earth, claims a controversial new book. “No future is more likely than that people worldwide choose to have too few children to replace their own generation. Over the long run, this would cause exponential population decline,” write economists Dean Spears and Michael Geruso in After the Spike: The risks of global depopulation and the case for people. This, you might think, could be a good thing. Won’t it help solve many environmental issues facing us today? No, say the authors. Take climate change: their argument isn’t that population size doesn’t matter, but that it changes so slowly that other factors such as how fast the world decarbonises matter far more. The window of opportunity for lowering carbon dioxide emissions by reducing population has largely passed, they write. Spears and Geruso also make the case that there are many benefits to having a large population. For instance, there is more innovation, and economies of scale make the manufacture of things like smartphones feasible. “We get to have nice phones only because we have a lot of neighbors on this planet,” they write. So, in their view, our aim should be to stabilise world population rather than letting it plummet. The problem is we don’t know how, even with the right political will. As we grow richer, we are more reluctant to abandon career and leisure opportuntiies to have children While some government policies have had short-term effects, no country has successfully changed long-term population trends, argue the authors. Take China’s one-child policy. It is widely assumed to have helped reduce population growth – but did it? Spears and Geruso show unlabelled graphs of the populations of China and its neighbours before, during and after the policy was in place, and ask the reader which is China. There is no obvious difference. Attempts to boost falling fertility rates have been no more successful, they say. Birth rates jumped after Romania banned abortion in 1966, but they soon started to fall again. Sweden has tried the carrot rather than the stick by heavily subsidising day care. But the fertility rate there has been falling even further below the replacement rate. All attempts to boost fertility by providing financial incentives are likely to fail, Spears and Geruso argue. While people might say they are having fewer children because they cannot afford larger families, the global pattern is, in fact, that as people become richer they have fewer children. Rather than affordability being the issue, it is more about people deciding that they have better things to do, the authors say. As we grow richer, we are more reluctant to abandon career and leisure opportunities to have children. Even technological advances are unlikely to reverse this, they say. On everything other than the difficulty of stabilising the population, this is a relentlessly optimistic book. For instance, say the authors, dire predictions of mass starvation as the world’s population grew have been shown to be completely wrong. The long-term trend of people living longer and healthier lives can continue, they suggest. “Fears of a depleted, overpopulated future are out of date,” they write. Really? Spears and Geruso also stress that the price of food is key to determining how many go hungry, but fail to point out that food prices are now climbing, with climate change an increasing factor. I’m not so sure things are going to keep getting better for most people. This book is also very much a polemic: with Spears and Geruso labouring their main points, it wasn’t an enjoyable read. That said, if you think that the world’s population isn’t going to fall, or that it will be easy to halt its fall, or that a falling population is a good thing, you really should read it. New Scientist book club Love reading? Come and join our friendly group of fellow book lovers. Every six weeks, we delve into an exciting new title, with members given free access to extracts from our books, articles from our authors and video interviews.

Climate
CO2
Food

‘This is a fight for life’: climate expert on tipping points, doomerism and using wealth as a shield

Economic assumptions about risks of the climate crisis are no longer relevant, says the communications expert Genevieve GuentherClimate breakdown can be observed across many continuous, incremental changes such as soaring carbon dioxide levels, rising seas and heating oceans. The numbers creep up year after year, fuelled by human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.But scientists have also identified at least 16 “tipping points” – thresholds where a tiny shift could cause fundamental parts of the Earth system to change dramatically, irreversibly and with potentially devastating effects. These shifts can interact with each other and create feedback loops that heat the planet further or disrupt weather patterns, with unknown but potentially catastrophic consequences for life on Earth. It is possible some tipping points may already have been passed. Continue reading...

Climate breakdown can be observed across many continuous, incremental changes such as soaring carbon dioxide levels, rising seas and heating oceans. The numbers creep up year after year, fuelled by human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.But scientists have also identified at least 16 “tipping points” – thresholds where a tiny shift could cause fundamental parts of the Earth system to change dramatically, irreversibly and with potentially devastating effects. These shifts can interact with each other and create feedback loops that heat the planet further or disrupt weather patterns, with unknown but potentially catastrophic consequences for life on Earth. It is possible some tipping points may already have been passed.Dr Genevieve Guenther, an American climate communications specialist, is the founding director of End Climate Silence, which studies the representation of global heating in the media and public discourse. Last year, she published The Language of Climate Politics: Fossil Fuel Propaganda and How to Fight It, which was described by Bill McKibben as “a gift to the world”. In the run-up to the Global Tipping Points conference in July, Guenther talks to the Guardian about the need to discuss catastrophic risks when communicating about the climate crisis.The future of her son and all children motivates Dr Genevieve Guenther to protect the planet from further global heating. Photograph: Laila Annmarie Stevens/The GuardianThe climate crisis is pushing globally important ecosystems – ice sheets, coral reefs, ocean circulation and the Amazon rainforest – towards the point of no return. Why is it important to talk about tipping points? We need to correct a false narrative that the climate threat is under control. These enormous risks are potentially catastrophic. They would undo the connections between human and ecological systems that form the basis of all of our civilisation.How have attitudes changed towards these dangers? There was a constructive wave of global climate alarm in the wake of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on 1.5C in 2018. That was the first time scientists made it clear that the difference between 1.5C and 2C would be catastrophic for millions of people and that in order to halt global heating at a relatively safe level, we would need to start zeroing out our emissions almost immediately. Until then, I don’t think policymakers realised the timeline was that short. This prompted a flurry of activism – Greta Thunberg and Indigenous and youth activists – and a surge of media attention. All of this converged to make almost everybody feel that climate change was a terrifying and pressing problem. This prompted new pledges, new corporate sustainability targets, and new policies being passed by government.This led to a backlash by those in the climate movement who prefer to cultivate optimism. Their preferred solution was to drive capitalist investment into renewable technologies so fossil fuels could be beaten out of the marketplace. This group believed climate fear might drive away investors, so they started to argue it was counterproductive to talk about worst-case scenarios. Some commentators even argued we had averted the direst predictions and were now on a more reassuring trajectory of global warming of a little under 3C by 2100.There is a misconception that wealthier places, such as the UK, Europe (including Italy, pictured) and the US will not be affected by the climate crisis but this is wrong, says Guenther. Photograph: Tiziana Fabi/AFP/Getty ImagesBut it is bananas to feel reassured by that because 3C would be a totally catastrophic outcome for humanity. Even at the current level of about 1.5C, the impacts of warming are emerging on the worst side of the range of possible outcomes and there is growing concern of tipping points for the main Atlantic Ocean circulation (Amoc), Antarctic sea ice, corals and rainforests.If the risk of a plane crashing was as high as the risk of the Amoc collapsing, none of us would ever fly because they would not let the plane take off. And the idea that our little spaceship, our planet, is under the risk of essentially crashing and we’re still continuing business as usual is mindblowing. I think part of the problem is that people feel distant from the dangers and don’t realise the children we have in our homes today are threatened with a chaotic, disastrous, unliveable future. Talking about the risks of catastrophe is a very useful way to overcome this kind of false distance.In your book, you write that it’s appropriate to be scared and the more you know, the more likely you are to be worried, as is evident from the statements of scientists and the United Nations secretary general, António Guterres. Why? Some people at the centre of the media, policymaking and even research claim that climate change isn’t going to be that bad for those who live in the wealthy developed world – the UK, Europe and the United States. When you hear these messages, you are lulled into a kind of complacency and it seems reasonable to think that we can continue to live as we do now without putting ourselves, our families, our communities under threat within decades. What my book is designed to do is wake people up and raise the salience and support for phasing out fossil fuels.[It] is written for people who are already concerned about the climate crisis and are willing to entertain a level of anxiety. But the discourse of catastrophe would not be something I would recommend for people who are disengaged from the climate problem. I think that talking about catastrophe with those people can actually backfire because it’ll just either overwhelm them or make them entrench their positions. It can be too threatening.The Donnie Creek wildfire burns in British Columbia, Canada, in 2023. Photograph: Noah Berger/APA recent Yale study found that a degree of climate anxiety was not necessarily bad because it could stir people to collective action. Do you agree? It depends. I talk about three different kinds of doomerism. One is the despair that arises from misunderstanding the science and thinking we’re absolutely on the path to collapse within 20 or 30 years, no matter what we do. That is not true.Second, there’s a kind of nihilistic position taken by people who suggest they are the only ones who can look at the harsh truth. I have disdain for that position.Finally, there’s the doomerism that comes from political frustration, from believing that people who have power are just happy to burn the world down. And that to me is the most reasonable kind of doomerism. To address that kind of doomerism, you need to say: “Yes, this is scary as hell. But we must have courage and turn our fear into action by talking about climate change with others, by calling our elected officials on a regular basis, by demanding our workplaces put their money where their mouth is.”You need to acknowledge people’s feelings, meet them where they are and show how they can assuage their fear by cultivating their bravery and collective action.The most eye-opening part of your book was about the assumptions of the Nobel prize winner William Nordhaus that we’ll probably only face a very low percentage of GDP loss by the end of the century. This surely depends on ignoring tipping points? The only way Nordhaus can get the result that he does is if he fails to price the risk of catastrophe and leaves out a goodly chunk of the costs of global heating. In his models, he does not account for climate damages to labour productivity, buildings, infrastructure, transportation, non-coastal real estate, insurance, communication, government services and other sectors. But the most shocking thing he leaves out of his models is the risk that global heating could set off catastrophes, whether they are physical tipping points or wars from societal responses. That is why the percentage of global damages that he estimates is so ridiculously lowballed.The idea that climate change will just take off only a small margin of economic growth is not founded on anything empirical. It’s just a kind of quasi-religious faith in the power of capitalism to decouple itself from the planet on which it exists. That’s absurd and it’s unscientific.Some economists suggest wealth can provide almost unlimited protection from catastrophe because it is better to be in a steel and concrete building in a storm than it is to be in a wooden shack. How true is that? There’s no evidence that these protections are unlimited, though there are economists who suggest we can always substitute technologies or human-made products for ecosystems or even other planets like Mars for Earth itself. This goes back to an economic growth theorist named Robert Solow, who claims technological innovation can increase human productivity indefinitely. He stressed that it was just a theory, but the economists advising Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s took this as gospel and argued it was possible to ignore environmental externalities – the costs of our economic system, including our greenhouse gas pollution – because you could protect yourself as long as you kept increasing your wealth.Floods due to heavy rains at Porto Alegre airport left a plane stranded on the runway in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, last year. Photograph: Diego Vara/ReutersExcept when it comes to the climate crisis? Yes, the whole spectacle of our planet heating up this quickly should call all of those economic assumptions into question. But because climate change is affecting the poor first and worst, this is used as evidence that poverty is the problem. This is a misrepresentation of reality because the poor are not the only ones who are affected by the climate crisis. This is a slow-moving but accelerating crisis that will root and spread. And it could change for the worst quite dramatically as we hit tipping points.The difference between gradual warming and tipping points is similar to the difference between chronic, manageable ailments and acute, life-threatening diseases, isn’t it? Yes. When people downplay the effects of climate change, they often represent the problem as a case of planetary diabetes – as if it were a kind of illness that you can bumble along with, but still have a relatively good quality of life as long as you use your technologies, your insulin, whatever, to sustain your health. But this is not how climate scientists represent climate change. Dr Joelle Gergis, one of the lead authors on the latest IPCC report, prefers to represent climate change as a cancer – a disease that takes hold and grows and metastasises until the day when it is no longer curable and becomes terminal. You could also think of that as a tipping point.This is a fight for life. And like all fights, you need a tremendous amount of bravery to take it on. Before I started working on climate change, I didn’t think of myself as a fighter, but I became one because I felt I have a responsibility to preserve the world for my son and children everywhere. That kind of fierce protectiveness is part of the way that I love. We can draw on that to have more strength than our enemies because I don’t think they’re motivated by love. I believe love is an infinite resource and the power of it is greater than that of greed or hate. If it weren’t, we wouldn’t be here.Tipping points: on the edge? – a series on our future Composite: Getty/Guardian DesignTipping points – in the Amazon, Antarctic, coral reefs and more – could cause fundamental parts of the Earth system to change dramatically, irreversibly and with devastating effects. In this series, we ask the experts about the latest science – and how it makes them feel. Tomorrow, David Obura talks about the collapse of coral reefsRead more

Climate
CO2
Crisis

Suggested Viewing

Sounding the Alarm ~ America's Climate Crisis

"It's really hard being a fire family. Every day it's getting worse." -Brett, wife of Marin County Battalion Chief in California.Every day, Americans who live close to the land and sea face the dangers of climate change—from a firefighter in California, to a beekeeper in Arizona, to a climate refugee losing her home in Florida. The changing climate affects our food systems, water and way of life. These American families are in the trenches sacrificing everything while facing depression, PTSD, and suicide—collateral damage of a crisis unchecked. Award-winning filmmaker, Peter Goetz, captures America's faces and voices, shot in 2020 leading up to the presidential election. Goetz and the Biden campaign made history, producing the first national climate spot to run during a presidential election. But this film dives deeper into the American climate crisis to explore the lives of the people who are sounding the alarm, worried about their grandchildren’s future, asking, "If not us, then who?" This is a story of the resilience, perseverance, and ingenuity of the American people. Ever hopeful, they collectively take on a common enemy. As the young, Navajo solar visionary Brett Issac insists, "We've got to turn this train around before it's too late."

Climate
Crisis
Government

CO2? CO-Nee!

Joep van Dijk is a passionate climate scientist. He likes to search for extreme examples that show how life can be lived sustainably. This documentary follows Joep on his CO2-neutral journey from Amsterdam to the United States of America and shows how this choice inspires himself and others to live a climate conscious life.

Climate
CO2
Sustainable

Evangelicals for Climate Action

This film introduces Evangelical Christians working for action on climate change and the environment. They explain how they became passionate about the environment, their fears about the future of our planet, and how their passion is based on their deep faith and love for creation. They call on all other Evangelicals to join them.

Climate
Culture

Inside The Grand Canyon

This guerrilla style documentary film captures a Colorado River rafting expedition through the Grand Canyon. Exhilarating and sometimes dangerous expeditions like this are not often considered when discussing global climate change but could be helpful to enlighten more folks about the changes to our planet. This rafting trip will soon be a thing of the past with record draughts continuing due to ongoing global climate change caused largely by humans. This is just a tiny slice of natures many warning signs of things to come. We find ourselves in a world of ongoing disbelief and hesitation in lieu of planning for the clear and present dangers from climate change. The Colorado River has already reached devastating levels for communities that depend on the water and electrical power resource. Government study in 2022 showed that Lake Powell could reach ""dead pool"" by 2023. There is no plan to mitigate the catastrophe that will leave over a million and a half people with no electricity.

Water
Climate
Sustainable

Uncovering the Permian Climate Bomb

The fossil fuel industry is building a global threat in the oil fields of West Texas. Miguel Escoto, who has lived close to this region his whole life, witnesses the industry’s villainy for the first time by viewing oil and gas site emissions through optical gas imaging cameras, becoming a stand-in for a world that has yet to grasp the gravity of the Permian Climate Bomb.

Pollution
Activism
Climate

Join us to forge
a sustainable future

Our team is always growing.
Become a partner, volunteer, sponsor, or intern today.
Let us know how you would like to get involved!

CONTACT US

sign up for our mailing list to stay informed on the latest films and environmental headlines.

Subscribers receive a free day pass for streaming Cinema Verde.
Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.