Hannah Chin

It can include aunties and uncles and grandparents and other caregivers.

So if you're thinking about making a kid a part of your community, this is for you.

It's something that a lot of folks, but especially younger folks, are thinking about.

Right, Hannah?

Yeah.

I mean, the majority of Gen Zers report that they're worried or anxious about climate change, period.

And more broadly, a Pew Research survey last year found that of folks under 50 who don't plan to have kids, more than a quarter of them say concerns about the environment and climate change are a major factor in that.

And I really wanted to figure out where is this concern coming from?

Like, who or what told us that having kids was a major contributor to climate change?

So I started reporting on this back when I was working on the Gimlet podcast, How to Save a Planet.

And I found a bunch of recent articles, like in the past five or so years, that all cited the exact same paper.

It was published in 2017 in the academic journal Environmental Research Letters.

It's called The Climate Mitigation Gap.

This is Kimberly Nicholas.

She was a co-author of this paper.

She's a professor of sustainability science at Lund University in Sweden.

And she told me that when she and her colleagues published this paper, the press coverage really focused on the fourth individual action.

Have one less child.

Specifically, an average of 58.6 metric tons of CO2 a year if you're in an industrialized country.

That's an equivalent of 7.9 homes energy use for one year.