You may have heard of the terms “eco-anxiety” or “eco-distress” being used when one talks about the psychological impact of climate change on people, especially youth. Unless one is living on another planet, one cannot help but recognize the extremes we are witnessing with respect to our climate in recent years, even by former deniers. Across the world, we are seeing more severe weather resulting in flooding, droughts, wildfires, heat waves, tornadoes, etc., etc. This phenomenon has led to many of us to question the future of humankind in light of one major disaster after another.
The grim forecasts have even led to something referred to as “reproductive anxiety”, whereby the young generation in particular is seriously questioning whether or not to have children? On the one hand, people look at the carbon print attributed to having another child born. On the other hand, some question whether it is the responsible thing to do in having a child born into an era of climate and environmental crises. This tends to be an issue primarily among North American and European highly educated classes, who have the luxury of considering all the alternatives. After all, it is the industrialized countries that produce the vast majority of fossil fuel emissions and greenhouse gases.
One can certainly appreciate such arguments among today’s younger generation as we begin a new year. We appear no closer to resolving the issue than we were five decades ago. This has left us with an air of extreme pessimism, especially given recent world events. Governments pay a lot of lip service to reducing carbon and other detrimental emissions, without actually achieving much of anything. However, where I disagree is over the issue of where our future environmentalists, scientists, engineers and other professionals will come from. We have come to believe that we have to better adapt our dwellings, infrastructure and technologies to meet the existing climate change challenges. We will rely heavily on the creativity and productivity of our youngest to commit to developing and implementing new forms of adaptation and effective policies to deal with the multitude of climate change impacts.
Numerous technological experiments are already underway and it is up to the next generation to continue these initiatives. Many of us are fortunately in a position to encourage and support the educational endeavours of our children, especially in the industrialized countries. However, we must realize that the bulk of the impacts of global warning will occur in emerging or lesser developed countries, such as threats of mass starvation, conflict, rising sea levels, deaths and species extinctions. For this reason, we must also support the work of persons in those affected countries, of which there are many. If we do not do more, one can expect that migration from these countries to North America and Europe will continue at even greater rates.
As for the older generation, we must do our fair share of sacrifices. This could mean adapting new forms of green technologies to reduce our carbon footprint. There may be some ways in which to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, including through less air and motor vehicle travel. How we heat and cool our homes is another area where changes can be made. Promoting more urban intensification is also something we should consider, thereby reducing single home dwellings and commuting to work. We have already seen the impact of working from home on travel. We need to better inform ourselves of climate- and energy-related challenges so as to better educate our children and grandchildren. As they say, ignorance is no excuse!
As in the case of Sweden’s Greta Thunberg, we have to encourage and support young environmental activists. At age 15, she started spending time outside the Swedish Parliament to call for stronger action on climate change and later sailed in a yacht to North America, where she attended the 2019 UN Climate Action Summit. It took some time for her parents to eventually support her activism. We need more young people like Ms. Thunberg to come forward and demand that more needs to be done to address climate change issues. Happily, she has been joined by other activists around the world.
FROLITICKS 
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