Future Families: Climate Justice, Intimate Life and the Adaptation of the Human

My research asks how the climate emergency is changing our understandings of what it means to be human. All over the world, people are adjusting their expectations about how to live safe, healthy and fulfilling human lives in a radically uncertain ecological future. In much political and media conversation about the climate emergency, the focus is on how to reorganise and transform our societies in areas such as governance, energy, transport, food and housing. As important as all these questions are, they often overlook the fact that if they are to take place, the required changes will depend on changes to how we live our private lives, in the "everyday spaces" of the family and the household.

My PhD research investigated how the idea of 'climate justice' is used and understood within international climate politics between approximately 2009 and 2019. By analysing an extensive set of documents, interviews with international climate experts and observations of international climate change events, I demonstrated that 'climate justice' is increasingly used as a frame for climate change and climate action, and one that highlights that the poorest people in the poorest countries will be affected by climate change. In other words, it talks about climate change as a social justice and 'human' issue as well as just one affecting the natural environment. However, I also argue that as well as simply providing a frame through which we can understand the climate crisis differently, 'climate justice' shows us that the figure of the human - and what it means to be human - are adapting to climate change.

The findings of my PhD research indicate the importance of asking how 'the human' is adapting to climate change. Therefore, my new research develops existing knowledge in this area by proposing a specific domain in which humans are changing their expectations about their lives and futures in a climate-changed world: their private family lives. For some people in wealthier, industrialised countries, the climate emergency is contributing to decisions to have fewer children, or not to have children at all. In other words, they are thinking differently about what a family, and a family life, look like. To look at this more closely, I will conduct in-depth, biographical interviews and focus groups with people who have decided not to have (more) children for reasons related to the climate emergency. This will help me achieve two aims. First, it will help me build an understanding of how participants have understood and made up their minds about (in)voluntary childlessness, family size and the climate emergency over a long period of time. Second, it will shed light on whether and how participants are cultivating any kind of alternative family structures or relationships. As well as contributing to academic scholarship, the findings of this research will be of interest to policymakers, non-governmental and cultural organisations who are invested in an inclusive, publicly accessible collective conversation about how we live under the climate emergency.