“I’m not saying that that is a decision that everyone should make,” she says, “but it’s not something I am struggling with much any more.” Credit: Nature Source: Nature analysis She says many friends and colleagues have arrived at the same conclusion.
Credit: Nature Source: Nature analysisįor Arias, who frequently sees the impacts of political instability out of her office window as immigrants from strife-torn Venezuela wander the streets seeking food and shelter, the choice about children came naturally. More than 60% said that they experience anxiety, grief or other distress because of concerns over climate change. Just under half said that global warming has caused them to reconsider major life decisions, such as where to live and whether to have children. Most of the survey’s respondents-88%-said they think global warming constitutes a ‘crisis’, and nearly as many said they expect to see catastrophic impacts of climate change in their lifetimes.
That is far beyond the Paris agreement’s goal to limit warming to 1.5–2 ☌. Six in ten of the respondents said that they expect the world to warm by at least 3 ☌ by the end of the century, compared with what conditions were like before the Industrial Revolution. Their answers suggest strong scepticism that governments will markedly slow the pace of global warming, despite political promises made by international leaders as part of the 2015 Paris climate agreement. Nature conducted an anonymous survey of the 233 living IPCC authors last month and received responses from 92 scientists-about 40% of the group. Many other leading climate researchers share Arias’s concerns about the future. That assessment, which makes clear that the world is running out of time to avoid the most severe impacts of climate change, will figure prominently in climate negotiations over the next two weeks at the COP26 meeting in Glasgow, UK. “My answer was no,” says Arias, a researcher at the University of Antioquia in Medellín, who was one of the 234 scientists who wrote a climate-science report published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in August (see go./3pjupro).
With such an uncertain future, she thought hard several years ago about whether to have children. She isn’t confident that international leaders will slow global warming or that her own government can handle the expected fallout, such as mass migrations and civil unrest over rising inequality.
Shifting rain patterns threaten water supplies in her home city of Medellín, Colombia, while rising sea levels endanger the country’s coastline. As a leading climate scientist, Paola Arias doesn’t need to look far to see the world changing.
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