handing off problems

In a useful online discussion about climate change on the New Yorker website, environment writer Elizabeth Kolbert spells out the problem:

'Just because you look out the window and things look OK, that's not the issue. The issue is what are we locking in for our kids. We are absolutely determining the world that our children and our grandchildren will live in right now. We could be handing off a problem to our children which they cannot manage because we've made it so big.'