By Sherin Raju & Sabiha Alam Choudhury
A UN report has found that one in five people globally expect not to have the number of children they desire, driven by economic, social, and environmental pressures that make the decision increasingly uncertain.
The psychological costs of climate change are no longer a future concern. They are accumulating now, quietly, among India's youngest adults, in the form of anxiety, helplessness, and deepening uncertainty about the kind of future worth building.
According to the World Health Organization, climate change poses one of the most serious threats to human health and well-being this century, with younger generations bearing its longest and heaviest consequences. What is less discussed is where that anxiety leads when it enters the most private decisions a person makes, including whether to have children at all.
The numbers from India are difficult to set aside. A survey of 1,931 young people aged 14 to 25 years, conducted by the Centre for Science and Environment, found that 94 per cent reported being directly impacted by the disruptions caused by climate change, with their daily lives, education, and mental health affected by rising temperatures and extreme weather events.
Around half of all respondents reported increased stress or anxiety related to the worsening climate. A separate study published in the Youth Voice Journal, drawing on survey data from 135 respondents aged 18 to 40 years across India, found that 8.1 per cent of young people experienced climate anxiety most often, while 20 per cent experienced it frequently and 40 per cent occasionally.
The study further found that climate anxiety was associated with behavioral changes in the lifestyles of young people. Internationally, the evidence linking climate concern to reproductive thinking has grown more substantial.
A systematic review published in PLOS Climate, examining 13 studies, of which five quantitative studies involved a combined 10,788 participants, conducted between 2012 and 2022, found that in 12 out of 13 studies, stronger concerns about climate change were associated with a desire for fewer children, or none at all.
A 2025 study published in Genus, drawing on an analytic sample of 4,408 partnered adults from a nationally representative Italian survey, found that the predicted probability of reporting the intention to have a child dropped from 23.6 per cent among those unconcerned about climate change to 15.6 per cent among those who viewed it as a serious problem, a pattern that held even after accounting for age, education, employment, and political values, though this association was statistically significant for short-term fertility intentions and did not reach significance for long-term intentions.
Importantly, a 2025 study of 817 adults in the West Bank, published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, found that climate awareness does not directly reduce fertility intentions but operates through threat perception, meaning that heightened fear about environmental futures indirectly shapes childbearing decisions rather than simply eliminating the desire for children.
In societies where parenthood is embedded in cultural identity and family expectation, climate anxiety reshapes rather than replaces reproductive aspirations.
This distinction is particularly relevant for India. Decisions about marriage and childbearing are rarely made in isolation. Family expectations, cultural values, and social norms continue to shape reproductive aspirations in ways that have no direct parallel in most Western contexts. Parenthood remains central to how many Indians understand identity, continuity, and belonging.
Climate anxiety in this setting may not translate straightforwardly into decisions against having children. It may instead reshape the terms of those decisions, influencing thinking about timing, place of residence, economic preparedness, and the environmental conditions under which children will grow up.
This concern is now being documented at a global level. The United Nations Population Fund's State of World Population Report 2025, drawing on a survey across 14 countries, including India, identified concerns over the state of the world, including climate anxiety, among the key factors shaping whether and when people choose to have children.
The report found that one in five people globally expect not to have the number of children they desire, driven not by a rejection of parenthood but by economic, social, and environmental pressures that make the decision increasingly uncertain.
Rising living costs, job insecurity, and environmental instability, along with persistent gender norms and unequal caregiving burdens, are together reshaping reproductive aspirations among urban Indian youth in ways that earlier generations did not face.
The environmental realities behind this uncertainty are severe. According to the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, South Asia faces some of the most severe projected climate impacts globally, including intensifying heat stress and monsoon disruption.
Deteriorating air quality across major cities, recurrent flooding, prolonged heat seasons, and water stress that is acute across large parts of peninsular and northern India are no longer seasonal inconveniences.
They are the permanent conditions against which a generation is making its most consequential life decisions.
The policy response to this emerging reality remains far behind the scale of the problem. Despite the clear connection between environmental disasters and mental health, India's national mental health programs remain disconnected from the climate crisis.
Flagship schemes like the National Mental Health Programme and the National Suicide Prevention Strategy primarily focus on clinical and medical causes of mental health issues, overlooking the role that environmental stressors play in worsening mental health outcomes.
Even the National Program on Climate Change and Human Health, intended to integrate climate-sensitive health issues, provides only a superficial mention of mental health, with no concrete
roadmap for its inclusion.
State-level action plans, where they exist, address heat, rainfall variability, and vector-borne disease while remaining largely silent on mental health. Climate-induced psychological distress is not evenly distributed. Women, youth, outdoor workers, and communities in climate-vulnerable geographies carry a disproportionate share of it.
A generation navigating this distress while simultaneously making decisions about relationships, family, and the future deserves more than silence from the institutions responsible for their well-being. India has demonstrated the capacity for ambitious, coordinated health responses in polio elimination, reductions in maternal mortality, and the scale of the COVID-19 vaccination drive.
Climate-related mental health, including the quiet anxiety shaping how young Indians think about the future and the families they hope to build, now demands a similar seriousness of purpose. The evidence is no longer too thin to act on. The question is how swiftly policymakers choose to respond.
------------------------------------------
(Sherin Raju is a PhD Scholar, and Dr Sabiha Alam Chaudhary is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities, Social Sciences and Management, both at the National Institute of Technology Karnataka, Surathkal.)
The views expressed are not necessarily those of The South Asian Times.
