More than 11,000 climate change scientists have come together to issue an urgent request: Quit having so many babies.
The dire warning was published Tuesday in the journal BioScience, “declaring clearly and unequivocally that planet Earth is facing a climate emergency” based on their accumulation of 40 years of data.
“The climate crisis has arrived and is accelerating faster than most scientists expected,” they write. “It is more severe than anticipated, threatening natural ecosystems and the fate of humanity.”
But for such a complicated issue, the solutions for everyday people are pretty plain and simple: “The greatest influence individuals can have in combating climate change is to have one fewer child,” ecologist and lead author William Ripple told Business Insider.
He and his colleagues write that the world is growing by more than 80 million people per year — more than 200,000 per day — so gradually reducing the growth “within a framework that ensures social integrity” would lessen greenhouse-gas emissions and biodiversity loss.
Some millennials and Gen Zers are already heeding their advice: They’re refusing to procreate for environmental reasons. A growing movement of “BirthStrikers” is vowing not to have kids “due to the severity of the ecological crisis,” the movement’s leader told the Guardian.
Ripple adds that another way to address the crisis is by eating a plant-based diet. He says doing so would improve health, lower greenhouse-gas emissions, reduce food waste and “free up croplands for growing much-needed human plant food instead of livestock feed, while releasing some grazing land to support natural climate solutions.”
Better stock up on veggie patties and birth control quick: the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change recently announced that the planet has only 11 years to prevent a climate change “catastrophe.”