The Climate Babies Generation Will Divide the World
OPINION |

The Climate Babies Generation Will Divide the World

CLIMATE CHANGE WILL ENCOURAGE THE BIRTH OF MANY POORLY EDUCATED CHILDREN IN THE SOUTHERN HEMISPHERE. FAR FEWER WILL BE BORN IN DEVELOPED COUNTRIES WHERE CHILDREN REQUIRE AN INVESTMENT IN EDUCATION

by Soheil Shayegh, Bocconi Department of Economics

What should we call the generation that will be born after 2020? Generations are often marked by their preceding socioeconomic events: baby boomers, generations X, Y (or millennials), and Z have been results of drastic changes in our social, economic, and technological systems. World War II, rapid economic growth, and widespread use of internet and social media have shaped trends in fertility and human development in the last few decades. However, the next generation will be marked by something rather different.  Unprecedented changes in the environment and the loss of biodiversity on planet Earth have been attributed to climate change and will be the driving forces behind fertility decisions in the decades to come.

First, climate change causes a rise in average temperatures and with this, it will change the way plants and food crops grow in arable areas across the globe. Some cold regions like Canada, Russia, and northern Europe will benefit from rising temperatures while most developing countries around the Equator will face increasing pressure on their agricultural yield. At the same time, other economic sectors may adopt various adaptive measures to counter the negative impacts of climate change. As a result, climate change will hurt some regions and sectors while it will help other regions and sectors with new opportunities.

Second, different climate impacts will translate into wage differences between low-skilled and high-skilled labor. While most people working in agricultural sector are low-skilled, climate-induced reduction in agricultural productivity in developing countries increases food prices and consequently, the wages of this group of labor force.  This can be seen as an incentive for parents in these countries to have more low-skilled children. While the opposite holds for developed countries in the north where an increase in agricultural productivity as a result of climate change can reduce food prices and wages of low-skilled labor working in this sector. Parents in these countries, in contrast to their counterparts in the south, will be inclined to have fewer low-skilled children.

Finally, the last piece of the climate-fertility puzzle lies in the fact that acquiring skills is costly. Therefore, facing a limited budget, parents can choose either to have more low-skilled children or fewer high-skilled ones. This phenomenon is sometimes called quantity-quality tradeoff and can be traced back to our daily decisions about how we spend our money on different goods and services. Parents in developing countries are therefore more inclined to take advantage of rising wages in agricultural sector and have more children with lower education while parents in developed countries in contrast, will have fewer children but will provide them with higher education. As a result, “climate babies” will form a generation deeply divided and inherently unequal in terms of skills and human development pathways: large number of low-skilled people in the south against relatively smaller number of high-skilled people in the north.

Climate babies will be born in a world shattered by environmental disasters and unprecedented biodiversity losses. But a greater challenge for them might be how they will deal with growing divide between developed countries in the north and developing countries in the south. These challenges are indeed centuries old however, our generation’s epic failure in addressing the problem of climate change has worsened them to a scale that will require all the ingenuity and sacrifices that the generation of climate babies will be able to offer.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab0843/meta

 

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