Climate Anxiety Is Altering Family Planning
Short Wave
NPR
4.7 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 30 December 2025
⏱️ 14 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this encore episode of Nature Quest, Short Wave speaks to Alessandra Ram, a journalist covering climate change, who just had a kid. We get into the future she sees for her newborn daughter and ask, how do we raise the next generation in a way that's good for the planet?
Here are the resources recommended by the experts we interviewed for this story:
Action Tools and Community Resources
- The High-Impact Climate Action Guide by Kimberly A. Nicholas
- The Climate Mental Health Network and Climate Emotions Wheel
- The Climate Café® Hub - for finding a local group
- Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question: Deciding Whether to Have Children in an Uncertain Future, by Jade S. Sasser
- Parenting in a Changing Climate: Tools for cultivating resilience, taking action, and practicing hope in the face of climate change, by Elizabeth Bechard
- Under the Sky We Make: How to Be Human in a Warming World, by Kimberly A. Nicholas
- The role of high-socioeconomic-status people in locking in or rapidly reducing energy-driven greenhouse gas emissions, Nielsen, K.S., Nicholas, K.A., Creutzig, F. et al.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. |
| 0:11.7 | Hey everyone, Emily Kwong here, and welcome back to Nature Quest. |
| 0:15.7 | Our monthly segment that brings you a question from a fellow shortwaver, was paying attention to the environment |
| 0:20.8 | and how our choices shape the world. |
| 0:23.7 | I was used to travel around the world |
| 0:26.1 | with Al Jazeera as a documentary producer. |
| 0:29.1 | Alessandro Rahm is a journalist. |
| 0:30.8 | And a lot of those stories, |
| 0:32.7 | even if they didn't start out focusing on climate, |
| 0:36.3 | there were climate narratives there because so many |
| 0:39.1 | stories are climate stories. The stories Alessandra covered at the time were unfolding in other |
| 0:45.2 | countries, in Thailand and in Canada. But over time, she watched these climate narratives get |
| 0:50.5 | closer to where she's from, Puerto Rico, Flint, Michigan, and eventually to her |
| 0:55.5 | home state of California. A house I was living in, we had to evacuate because of a wildfire |
| 1:01.9 | threat, but now that's kind of a threat that everyone around here lives with. And more recently, |
| 1:08.4 | Alessandra has had other reasons to be thinking about the future. |
| 1:12.9 | Because a couple weeks ago, she and her partner had a kid. |
| 1:17.8 | It's 8 a.m. |
| 1:20.2 | We woke up how many times last night? |
| 1:24.6 | Three. |
| 1:25.5 | Three. |
| 1:26.9 | You know, everything has changed in the last two weeks for me |
... |
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