HOW WILL CLIMATE CHANGE IMPACT MY KIDS?

Written by Eve White

I was a scientist once, before I had kids. I remember sitting in conferences as my climate modelling colleagues presented data on sea level rises and temperature increases. It didn’t feel personal to me then. Now, as a mother, it does.

The recent IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report that you might have heard about starkly outlines the difference between 1.5 and 2 degrees warming*. That teeny half a degree could mean the difference between life and death for millions of people. But it’s important to remember that a two degree temperature increase is actually the worst best case scenario, with the world currently tracking towards at least three degrees warming by 2100, by which time I won’t be around, but my children still might be.

As a mum of young kids in 2018, I worry about my kids eating too much sugar, getting enough sleep and having friendship problems at school. I dread the teenage years: social media, cars, sex, drugs, eating disorders, parties. And I worry that I might be completely stuffing up this parenting business without even knowing it. These are my concerns in my privileged, white, two-car-family existence. What will my daughters and their kids lie awake and worry about in 2100? What hopes and fears will they hold for their children and grandchildren?

There are some things about climate change that are certain – or as certain as they can be when it comes to science predicting future events. It is known that with three degrees of warming, we will lose the coral reefs and many other ecosystems, that there will be global food and water shortages on a huge scale, economic impacts of a magnitude that the world has never seen before, mass migration, more frequent bushfires, floods and other natural disasters and that the world’s major coastal cities will be under water and large areas of the world uninhabitable due to drought and heat.

These are the certainties, or the as-certain-as-we-can-bes, which alone are awful enough. But then there is an infinite cast of maybes and unknowns. Diseases like dengue fever and zika virus will spread and evolve due to climate change and a greatly impoverished world may struggle to keep on top of them. Civil and military conflicts are likely to increase due to mass migration and limited water, food and inhabitable land. We can’t blithely assume that our children will be safe from these threats in Australia.

Another unknown is the threat of untested geoengineering strategies – making large scale changes to the earth and its atmosphere in an attempt to cool the planet. Some scientists have expressed concern that a desperate nation might implement an untested solution, like spraying sulphur into the atmosphere, with unforeseen catastrophic consequences for the whole world – my daughters included.

These are possible and plausible scenarios put forward by scientists, not science fiction authors. Every aspect of society as we know it could be changed by climate change in ways that we can’t even imagine now.

Whilst I’m here worrying about my kids eating too much junk food, I wonder what they will be worrying about in the year 2100 in a warmer, hungrier, harsher world. A Tasmania without the kelp forests that they loved snorkelling in as kids; a world without polar bears, koalas and giraffes, and a world in which most people are so busy struggling for their own day-to-day survival that they can’t muster the emotional energy to care about things like koalas or kelp – and no government in the world has any revenue to dedicate to conservation anyway.

In this world, millions of refugees will be fleeing lands rendered uninhabitable through no fault of their own, some of them arriving in drought-stricken Australia where the future may not be looking much better, with food shortages, regular natural disasters that impact millions of people, a severely struggling economy, social problems, and my girls’ home state of Tasmania becoming increasingly overcrowded.

I wonder how my kids will feel as they look to the future. Will they feel hope or only anxiety and despair for their children? And how will they feel looking back and knowing that our generation could have chosen a different future for them, but didn’t?

The good news is that this future is not locked in – yet. We can still choose a different future for our children by limiting warming to 1.5 degrees, but the world needs to make changes urgently and on an unprecedented scale.

The other good news is that we as individuals are not powerless, there are lots of things that we can do to make a difference to our children’s future world.

At a personal level you can: eat less meat, buy local food as much as possible and reduce food waste; drive less and fly less; minimise energy usage and choose green sources of power; and buy less new stuff.

But we need help from above too. Our governments need to know that this matters to us. Email your MP expressing your concern and asking how they plan to support an urgent transition to renewables for the sake of our children’s future.

We can choose a different future for our kids but we need to do it now before it’s too late.

*average global temperature increase since pre-industrial times. 

Author’s Bio 

Eve White is a mum of two girls and a part time editor with a PhD in ecology. She is a founding member of the group Australian Mums for a Safe Climate.