The Climate Case for Having More Children and Why we Should Be Concerned by the UK’s Record low Fertility Rate

The fertility rate in the UK is now at its lowest ever recorded level, new figures from the Office for National Statistics have revealed.

Some traditional environmentalists will be dancing in the streets. As a climate activist, I’ve long been exposed to the seam of Malthusian mistrust of human numbers among some deep greens, veering into outright misanthropy which views humans as being little more than a virus that the global ecosystem would be better off without.

Over the last ten years or so, the contact between the green movement and the traditional left has done a lot to shift the focus from so-called overpopulation among some of the poorest people on the planet, to overconsumption among a vanishingly small elite. 

It has recently become more common for leftwing environmentalists to ask whether or not it is even ethical to have children in the midst of a climate crisis.

Indeed, it might be that the rise in eco-anxiety is playing some part in the plummeting birth rates around the world, with a survey in 2021 finding that 40% of respondents from a range of countries saying climate change made them climate change made them more hesitant to have children. 

However, new UK research that found only a quarter of millennials who say they want children are trying for one cited financial pressures, career considerations and simply not feeling ready as the leading reasons. 

Whatever the reason, this gap between wanted children and having them is broadly reflected beyond our borders, with research finding that, generally speaking, women across Europe report having roughly one fewer child than they would like, suggesting that falling birth rates are not wholly the result of positive trends like women’s emancipation and rising prosperity.

In the UK, despite a rightwing which is becoming increasingly obsessed with the birthrate, we’ve lived through a decade and a half of a Conservative Government which has set conditions which have made it difficult to have children.

The new leader of the party, Kemi Badenoch, recently referred to the UK’s maternity pay as being “excessive”. It is set at one of the lowest levels in the OECD.

Whether it’s improving provision for parental leave, or lifting the two child benefit cap, many of the policies which would enable more people to have babies would also have the effect of lifting existing children out of poverty, and for that reason alone they are worth doing. But I believe it is also important to help bring more babies into the world, not in spite of the climate crisis, but partly because of it.

A recent episode of the Outrage and Optimism podcast, hosted (among others) by the architect of the Paris Agreement Christiana Figueres, considered whether it was OK to have kids in the climate crisis.

One of the reasons they gave in favour of having them was the likelihood of younger people being recruited into climate activism. However plausible or desirable this strikes you as being, this is startlingly narrow in its outlook. 

Yes, we need climate activists. But we also need teachers, doctors, siblings, neighbours, and the myriad other roles which enable normal social reproduction. The huge question they failed to consider was the most telling, and nobody in the green left is asking it. How on earth are we meant to get through the centuries ahead with a permanently ageing global population?

Often the issue of an ageing population is presented as if this is a temporary problem resulting from the overabundance of baby boomers and that, once we find a way of getting them to their graves as comfortably as possible, and plugging the gap with immigration in the meantime, some sort of demographic stability will be restored. 

The reality is that, with falling birthrates, an ageing population is a structural reality of our society for at least a century, pretty much no matter what happens. The gap between working age people and the retired and elderly is going to grow wider and wider. This should be of concern to us all, not just fertility obsessives on the right.

In the short term, immigration will play a part in demographic redistribution, and indeed this is already the only thing propping up the labour market in the UK.

Climate stress mixed with demographic stress could, for a while, end up cancelling each other out to some extent, with younger people from increasingly uninhabitable places moving to supplement ageing populations in less affected areas, as set out in Gaia Vince’s Nomad Century.

However, when birth rates are plummeting almost literally everywhere, this is a demographic redistribution which can only work once. Sooner or later, someone, somewhere needs to start having some more babies.

Consider the recent flash floods in Spain. We know that such events will get worse and worse. We also know that the populations exposed to them will be getting older and older.

On the most practical level, we need a certain number of youngish, healthy people to rescue survivors, revive the injured, and restore the built environment. But we also need to more broadly preserve our social fabric as disaster and instability threatens to tear it apart. 

Rightwing concerns about birth rate often focus on ensuring we replicate little units of economic activity, a reduction of human lives which rightly rankles with the left. But a consistent pipeline of younger people is also integral to the things we more instinctively champion, like community resilience and cooperative living.

Outside of wage labour and formal economic activity, young people play a critical part in the functioning of society in its broadest sense. 

Were you a part of a mutual aid group during COVID-19? Such networks will be harder to sustain when the ratio between younger and older people is effectively inverted. Especially when we’re doing this in the aftermath of increasingly frequent hurricanes and earthquakes, not just popping to Boots.

I am conscious that writing this risks associating me with extremely unsavoury figures, and indeed taking any interest in fertility either way quickly has you rubbing up against woman haters, white supremacists and weirdos.

But child friendly demands can be positive and progressive, like higher wages, better childcare and a stronger social safety net. It’s time the left looked at this seriously, not just to enable individuals to choose to have children, but on behalf of a society which needs them.

Some of us are too frightened to have children on this hot planet, and I don’t stand in judgement of anyone’s sincere and understandable anxiety.

But it’s clear that there are plenty of us who are having fewer children than we actually want. And it’s equally frightening to think about people growing old in a world of several degrees of warming and massive generational imbalance.

The ONS anticipates birth rates recovering ever so slightly in the years ahead, rising from today’s low of 1.44 to 1.59 in 2045. But this is still far below replacement levels of 2.1. 

The environmentalist left has rightly cast aside concerns of overpopulation. Now it’s time to consider the opposite problem.

The challenges of the century ahead are well known: scarcity and conflict, displacement of people, automation and the possibility of mass unemployment, to mention just a few. We do not want to add to this potent mix the literally unprecedented demographic stress of a permanently ageing global population.