Interviews With People Considering Not Having Children for Reasons Related to Climate Change, 2024

These data were generated as part of an ESRC-funded pilot project examining if, and how, people resident in the UK are reconsidering their family planning and reproductive decisions in light of rapidly accelerating climate change.

Using in-depth, semi-structured interviews grounded in feminist methodological principles, the project sought to create an initial corpus of qualitative data that shed light on two research questions. First, it sought to indicate whether climate change is a factor in participants' deliberations about how to plan their families, and, specifically, whether they planned to have children. Second, it sought to indicate whether, and how, participants are cultivating any kind of alternative family structures and relationships in response to, or anticipation of, accelerating climate change.

Participants were UK residents based in England and Wales. The transcripts compromise interviews with UK residents based in England and Wales who were including climate change in their deliberations about whether to have children (n=6). Interview participants were of reproductive age (n=6) and aged in their 20s, 30s or 40s, while one participant (n=1) was past reproductive age and provided an account of their deliberations and experiences in retrospect.