Around 40% of Australian women without children are hesitant to have children because of climate change, according to a new survey.
The global warming survey also found half of Australians are very or extremely concerned about climate change, with two in five believing the climate will be “much hotter” in 2050.
The poll, commissioned by Clive Hamilton, professor of public ethics at Charles Sturt University, and carried out by Roy Morgan Research, also found that more than a third of those surveyed Coalition voters believed the climate would not change at all.
The poll, which included a nationally representative sample of 2,000 people, found that Labor, Greens and independent voters were three times more likely to express high levels of concern about climate change compared to 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 said they were more concerned about their children's future in a changing climate, compared with one in five Coalition voters.
“Compared with men, women expect it to get hotter, are more anxious, and feel more insecure about climate change, suggesting that caring values make them more open to scientific warnings about danger,” Hamilton wrote in a research paper about the study's findings.
Among non-parents, 40.4% of women said they were moderately or very hesitant to have children due to climate change, but only 17% of men (one in six) reported the same.
Hamilton suggests that greater hesitancy among women indicates a “gendered calculation of risk.”
“The evidence we have suggests that caring values make women much more open to the disturbing nature of scientific evidence and the visceral impact that weather events have on people,” he said.
Growing climate concerns could lead to a decline in Australia's birth rate, Hamilton added.
“There is a huge gap between young people talking about having children and government and policy discussions about Australia's demographic future,” he said. “This study shows that this problem cannot be ignored.”
The results are roughly consistent with the 2019 study. Australian Conservation Foundation The study found one in three Australian women under 30 said they were reconsidering having children due to concerns about an “insecure future due to climate change”.
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Roy Morgan's survey also included respondents from areas affected by floods and fires since 2019. It found that experiencing extreme weather events had only a small impact on concerns about climate change.
“People have ways of explaining it away or chalking it up to natural factors, or … they're not willing to blame climate change for their misfortunes,” Hamilton said.
Professor Ian Walker, a social psychologist at the University of Melbourne who was not involved in the survey, said the results were consistent with other research, both in Australia and overseas, which suggests that “experiencing extreme weather events does not matter much and that what it does does is likely to be short-lived.”
“I think the explanation for the inconsistent effect is how people interpret the weather event,” Walker said. “People who already accept human-caused climate change will accept a flood or heat wave as further evidence that climate change is happening; those who already deny climate change will explain away extreme weather events.”
Although the areas the study identified as being affected by extreme weather events were outside capital cities, it found that concern about the climate crisis was slightly higher in cities than in regions.
