Not all or nothing: climate change & completed fertility

• In Event: 21016 - Fertility Desires and Patterns in Changing Social Contexts

Abstract

The relationship between concern about climate change and fertility has been the subject of substantial popular and academic attention. While the academic literature pertaining to this topic has largely focused on fertility intentions, it is important to combine this insight with data on completed fertility. Fertility intentions and completed fertility can differ in general, but also because the nature of predicting the effects of climate change may impact fertility intentions and completed fertility differently. To this end, we analyze data from the General Social Survey (GSS) and compare concern about climate change with completed fertility. We observe a negative relationship between climate change concerns and completed fertility. After implementing inverse probability of treatment weighting (IPTW) as a matching strategy, we conduct a probit regression and a Poisson regression. Though our probit regression shows no significant effect of climate change concern on one’s likelihood of having any children, our Poisson regression shows a significant, negative effect of climate change concern on one’s number of children. These results suggest that strong climate concern does not encourage people to give up having children altogether, but that it does reduce the number of children that they have. Our results are consistent with a world in which people’s earnest fear of climate change and earnest desire for children co-exist and co-evolve over time. Given these findings and the fact that our data is cross-sectional, we propose broadening the scope of our analysis to include data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). The SOEP represents various ages and cohorts over more than a decade, allowing us to track parity progression ratios and changing levels of climate concern over time. Combined with our preliminary findings from the GSS, this study would constitute a contribution to the understudied relationship between concern about climate change and completed fertility.

Authors

• Nik van der Wagt, University of California-Berkeley

• Simon Lazzara Cooper, University of California-Berkeley