Host: Benjamin Thompson
Hi everyone. Benjamin Thompson here. Welcome to episode two of Nature hits the books, where I chat with authors about their new science books. In this episode, I’m joined by author and journalist Gaia Vince to talk about her book Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World. Gaia has been a news editor here at Nature and New Scientist, and her 2014 book Adventures in the Anthropocene was awarded the Royal Society Book Prize. Gaia’s new book looks at how climate change could render large parts of the globe uninhabitable, and how surviving this catastrophe will require a planned migration of people on a scale never seen before in human history. And I gave her a call to find out more about it. Gaia, hi, thank you so much for joining me today.
Gaia Vince
Hi, Ben. Great to speak to you.
Host: Benjamin Thompson
Gaia, your book Nomad Century is now out. What drew you to migration as a topic? Why are you writing about this now?
Gaia Vince
For years, I’ve been covering climate change and environmental change to our planet, and it’s taken a long time, much too long, for the world to get engaged in the need to mitigate climate change, to reduce our emissions, to cut our emissions to get to net zero, and of course we have to cut below net zero. Now that climate change is already well underway, we also need to talk about adaptation. The world’s been a lot slower, and when I talk about the world, I’m talking mainly about leaders. Scientists have been talking about all of these issues for well over a decade. We have left the relatively comfortable period that our civilisations were formed in – the Holocene epoch – and we’re now moving into the Anthropocene – the age dominated by humans. And that means changes to everything, changes to our energy system, our infrastructure, the materials we use to build everything, our food systems. But what nobody is talking about is that for large areas of the world home to large populations, there will be no way for people to adapt to the very extreme conditions we’re facing over the coming decades. People will have to move. It is now inevitable. But the scale, of course, is not. It could be in the tens of millions. It could be in the hundreds of millions. Some estimates are 1.5 billion by 2050, which is not that far away. So, it seemed essential to start talking about it and in a pragmatic way.
Host: Benjamin Thompson
And what does the world look like that you're kind of picturing in 2050 and through to 2100? What's going to drive this climate-related migration?
Gaia Vince
Well, there are four real drivers of human displacement that make places unliveable. I call them the four horsemen of the Anthropocene. So, it's extreme heat, drought, flooding and fire. And we've seen all of these. Just over the last year or two, we've had back-to-back extreme weather scenarios across most of the world. So, this year, the whole of the west coast of the States was up in flames. The East Coast is flooded. And then we've seen one week in Pakistan, 33 million people were displaced. And the thing is that these extreme events are going to become more frequent, more severe, and they are going to become more back-to-back, so people just aren't able to recover from one event before they're hit with another and, increasingly, they're going to have to move. And climate change is a threat multiplier. It's not just one thing that drives people to move. It's a combination of things, of which climate plays a huge role. Things like poverty, conflict, harvest failures, food shortages, energy shortages, all sorts of things like that, and they're all interconnected. And this really is a planetary-scale problem, and we are a globally dispersed mammal species that is going to have to move according to the new planetary boundaries that are drawn by the climate change we're about to experience more severely.
Host: Benjamin Thompson
And what do those boundaries look like then? Because very early on, you have a map of what the world might look like towards the end of the century in terms of habitable zones, dare I say?
Gaia Vince
Yeah, so, at the moment, we have true borders, not the imaginary borders that we've all invented, our geopolitical borders, but these true planetary borders. Humans can't live in large numbers in Antarctica or in the Sahara Desert. And if we look at the climate models of what is expected as we approach the last decades of this century, we find that things like heat stress, climate impacts from drought to extreme flooding, affect a large swathe of a sort of tropical belt, which is of course home to the largest human populations at the moment. Also, coastlines, they're dangerous, rivers. And these are where the biggest cities are located as well. So, this is an extreme change that we're facing. The more habitable zones of the planet are the ones at higher latitudes and, if you look at the map of the world, the continents are kind of ice-cream-cone-shaped, so there isn't a lot of land in the Southern Hemisphere. We do have places like Patagonia which could be refuges. But largely, we're talking about those northern latitudes, which will and are already being severely impacted by the changing temperature of the planet. They're experiencing some of the greatest warming, but they're coming from a place that is much more manageable. So, those extremes that are felt in the northern latitudes will still be within our habitable zone. And in some cases, they'll actually make them more habitable. The greening of the Arctic is already happening, but there will be increased agricultural productivity there and different crops can be grown. And a lot of them will experience more water, where other places, of course, are affected already by severe drought.
Host: Benjamin Thompson
So, a huge shift in what the globe looks like. In your book, you chose 4 °C of warming as what the world might experience by the end of this century. And of course, there are a lot of models that suggest that it may be a lot higher than that. But it seems like based on current pledges, it's thought that maybe 2.5-2.6 °C is the most recent estimate of where we will end up, which, of course, will still be devastating. What made you look at sort of the 4 °C scenario?
Gaia Vince
I mean, I did a map of 4 °C. There's also a map of 2 °C there. I looked at different scenarios. We might get down to somewhere between 2-3 °C. We might get higher. And really, that is a very, very frightening prospect – 4 °C degrees is terrifying. And one of the reasons I looked at it was because when I talk to the public about these issues, there is an awful lot of anxiety out there, particularly among young people because this is their future, after all. And we can't sugar coat it. The kinds of extremes we're facing, they’re unprecedented in human history. What I really wanted to do was say, ‘Look, this is honestly, what we face. I don't know what temperature we're going to get to. These are the scenarios that are likely. Some are more likely than others.’ And then I wanted to say, ‘Right, let's be pragmatic. Let's not hide from the truth, but let's see, how is this survivable?’ And so, really, Nomad Century is a kind of manifesto of my solutions for the choices and the options that we do have now to survive that, and I lay them out, and they're not simple, and they all have huge drawbacks, of course. But we do still have these choices, so I'd like us to sort of discuss those as a global community and then come up with a path for how we make those things happen. And so, if I picked 4 °C for some of it, it was to say, ‘Look, even if we get to 4 °C, is that survivable for a population that may be 9, perhaps even 10 billion? And if so, how?
Host: Benjamin Thompson
And when you talk about the challenges facing the billions of people who live on Earth and will be born in the future, I guess there's a spectrum of climate impacts that will cause people to move, and this spectrum comes with its own challenges, depending on which group you're looking at, right?
Gaia Vince
So, I mean, of course, there is huge injustice. We live where we are generally because of the accident of where our mother was when we were born. And some people are living on low-lying atolls in the Indian Ocean, like Maldives, Tuvalu, Kiribati, which will entirely disappear. The entire nation, in terms of an internationally recognised, governable state won't be there. That brings with it loss of language, loss of culture, ancestry, all sorts of huge, huge problems. Others of us, people living, say, in London may well move further north to a slightly more habitable climate when it becomes too much drought, water too expensive and so on. In the US, again, a lot of people who have the finances will move for comfort. But there are also a lot of people who won't move because we're not just wildebeest or migrating birds or something. We are humans and we come with our human societies and our cultural baggage and our deeply held behaviours. So, to move from your land, where it might be the only wealth you have that you're going to pass down, it's where you have your entire network of friends and business opportunities, and your language is understood, and your family is there, and to give all that up because your house is being washed away every two years or something, to move to a foreign country where you don't have any of that network, where you may well encounter racism, where it's very difficult to find a job, that's a very expensive transition. There are so many unknowns. That's a really difficult thing to do. And so, already, people are dying needlessly because that move is too difficult, too dangerous, and we all have an obligation to help people to make the safer choice. And that means by facilitating this, by making it easier, by managing this mass migration to come, rather than making it a terrible, life-threatening decision.
Host: Benjamin Thompson
And so, you mention Kiribati, for example, then, a low-lying island nation that is in real peril, right, of increasing sea-level rise. This is a nation that is planning for the future and for mass migration. What, for example, is this nation doing?
Gaia Vince
Yeah, so the leaders of Kiribati, and some other of these low-lying islands, are basically facilitating the migration of their populations now. So, they are ensuring that young people are trained so that they can get jobs in sort of refuge nations. Kiribati is training a lot of nurses that are then relocating to New Zealand and Australia. So, what Kiribati is doing is a sort of managed mass migration over the coming decades, rather than waiting for this huge storm that will wash everyone away, and it becomes an evacuation and an acute emergency and it's unplanned and it's extremely devastating. Other places are also taking this very seriously. So, Bangladesh, which has also been experiencing a lot of migration internally and across borders, as its land becomes inundated from the south, with the Bengal Sea rising and from the northeast deluges down the rivers, people have already had to move from rice farming in rural areas because of salination – too much salt water coming up through the soil and just basically washing the fields and villages away. So, it's preparing people for livelihoods that work in urban environments so that people can make that urban move. And it's trying to manage the migration from rural to urban areas and, from there, training them for jobs in other cities around the world. People who migrate internationally usually migrate from one city to another city, and they need transferable skills for that.
Host: Benjamin Thompson
And on the flip side of that, you write about some of the cities that are preparing to accept climate migrants from around the world and places that have done that maybe better than others.
Gaia Vince
Yeah, some countries have got a much more kind of progressive attitude to this. Canada is planning on trebling its population over the coming decades through migration. This is a national project. It's not something that's being done very subtly by the government amid a lot of anti-migrant narrative. And that wasn't actually very unusual. Until recently, most countries wanted more immigrants to bolster their workforce and make their cities more productive. So, Canada has various schemes to help people into work and to help with inclusivity. And it will be a net winner of climate change, actually, because it's got many cities up in the Arctic Circle that will be enlarged, and they will build new cities. It's going to be the sort of future towards the second half of this century.
Host: Benjamin Thompson
But of course, when we talk about migration, it is a politically difficult topic for many politicians, for many governments around the world. And there's obviously increased populist rhetoric, things like that. And people are, in many cases, resistant to accepting large amounts of migrants. I mean, that's a barrier to this happening, right?
Gaia Vince
Yeah, there is a lot of anti-migrant narrative, and populist leaders have chosen to vilify migrants. This is a classic trope. I would say that while they are doing this with one face, behind they are also encouraging in more and more migrants because the reality is we actually have workforce shortages everywhere, and the developed world, and not just the developed world anymore, is facing a huge demographic crisis where we're not having enough babies to support our ageing population, and that really is going to hit the proverbial fan very shortly. The only solution to this is immigration. It's an excellent solution because some parts of the world that are the poorest and in the most danger of climate impact also have the youngest populations. These are working-age young people with huge potential to transform the economies of the north. There are also lots of myths. This kind of toxic narrative about immigration, which could be countered and hasn't been, and it's really important that it is. There are myths about the economic impact of immigration. That it lowers wages. It doesn't: the reverse is true. That it raises unemployment. It doesn't: the reverse is true. That it increases the crime rate. It doesn't: the reverse is true. Actually, countless studies show that immigration actually expands economies and makes them more productive. But immigration, especially mass immigration, does require investment to make it work, and that investment will be more than repaid. And when I talk about investment, I mean financial and social. So, we need to make sure that there is enough adequate housing provision, access to health care and education. And at the moment, many governments are failing to provide that for their existing populations, never mind immigrants. Of course, the immigrants themselves bring those jobs. So, it means more GPs, it means more nurses, it means more kindergarten staff. But you do need to invest. You also must invest socially, and that means strongly countering that narrative. It means working on inclusion. That's not easy. But that work, again, is more than repaid. Immigrants need to feel that they are part of this new society, and the native population needs to understand that as well. Everybody needs to feel included in this social project to provide a sustainable, economically productive, green, healthy city for themselves and their children.
Host: Benjamin Thompson
And very early on, you say, ‘Migration will save us because it is migration that made us who we are.’ And you spend a chunk of the early parts of your book looking right back to the very start, I guess, of human migration, almost as a species, I suppose. And that's something that you almost could have easily written just in a sentence, right? Humans have always migrated, and now let's move on to where we are. Why did you take such a sort of long look back at the past, and what relevance does that have to now?
Gaia Vince
I think it's really important to see where we are now. As a very brief aberration in a much more general rule about our species, we are a migratory species. And one thing that I am a bit obsessed with in my work is taking that planetary perspective. So, really stepping back and looking at our planet as this sort of spinning orb and looking at us as this species. We originated as a sort of ape in Africa and then we colonised the whole Earth. And as we did that, we also changed the planet. We built our artificial landscapes, our cities, our farmlands. We changed the forestry patterns. We've changed the outline of our coastlines, everything, because of the type of species we are. We are very hyper social, we move in networks, we cooperate and collaborate, and that has enabled us to occupy sort of places that should be hostile. And also, because of our secondary migrations. We're a species that migrates the stuff of our planet. So, we migrate the water, originally in water pouches, now in canals. And we migrate all the resources, the food, the tools, the collectible items. And so, now, when we think of ourselves as sedentary, it's easy to say, ‘I spend most of my time in this little office in London. I don't migrate, I don't move.’ Well, everything around us, all of the components came from all around the world, and they are the result of an enormous global network of migratory humans. So, we are entirely the products of migration, even if we ourselves are not migrating personally. Now, that success, to be able to be largely sedentary, that success of our migrations is now going to change. We are going to physically migrate more as well. We are going to see a mass migration. We need to make that work. We have all sorts of trade agreements to oil the wheels of getting resources and commodities and money across borders, and yet our biggest economic resource – human labour – we make it incredibly hard to cross borders, and that is so foolish. Some economists calculate that if we removed all borders, the global GDP would at least double.
Host: Benjamin Thompson
Which on paper is a thing where you can show your working and show the graphs. But of course, we very much do live in the real world. Do you think this sort of scenario, where the concept of borders and nations changes as we move forward into this climate crisis, do you think that's a realistic way to look at things?
Gaia Vince
I think we're going to have to change the way we look at human labour moving across borders, for sure. I don't think we're going to abandon the nation state, but I think we're going to have to be a lot more flexible about who works where. It is hugely challenging and it is very difficult, but I would say, if you don't like this as a solution, then what is your alternative solution because is it going to be increased conflict?
Host: Benjamin Thompson
One thing that struck me, Gaia, is that your book is a combination of climate science, there’s some sociology, anthropology, economics. It's a lot in there. And obviously, your background is as a science writer. Why is it important to consider this climate-related migration in an interdisciplinary way, do you think?
Gaia Vince
Yeah, with all my work, I try to be holistic about this because I don't see any of these subjects as operating on their own in some little silo in some little island. I mean, while you're actually doing lab work, of course, you have to be focused on the exact experiment or the exact data that you're producing. But as soon as that hour has passed, if you're a human, you reflect on the world in which you're doing that and the world of its implications. And the reason that we're interested in climate, the reason I'm interested, but most of us are interested in climate change, is not through the academic curiosity of exactly how big an ice sheet might be, but its effect on us, on humans and the societies that we live in and the civilisations we built. If we were a really small population living 200,000 years ago, this climate change wouldn't affect us that much. We would be able to survive much easier through migration, incidentally. But we have created a world and we operate within the parameters of this very human world. And onto this human world, we have imposed these dramatic Earth system changes. And so, we can affect the human system slightly, and that's why we need to decarbonise of course, and I also talk about geoengineering options to try and change the temperature of the atmosphere to try and make it more liveable, but we also have our social tools, and social tipping points can be much more quickly activated, and I would suggest we look at those.
Host: Benjamin Thompson
If this world you talk about in your book is going to happen and the systems need to be put in place, I mean, you talk a few times about the role of the UN, for example, in potentially managing this future migration. As an organisation, I mean, they are criticised often, for example, for maybe not being the most effective. How do you think this whole scenario could be managed? What could be done to figure this all out?
Gaia Vince
Yeah, I mean, the UN has been criticised, completely rightly, for being ineffective, all sorts of scandals and so on. And ideally, we might have something else. But given the time that we have to deal with this and given the organisations that we already have, I suggest we don't completely rethink everything. I think we'd have to get a body within the UN organisation, and we do need a global body. This does need to be globally managed because we're talking about negotiating large numbers of people from essentially the global south to the global north, across different nations. And there are lots of different options. We could have a quota system. I think there should be finances involved from countries of origin and host countries to make this work as well as possible. It could involve buying or renting land in other jurisdictions. And my dream is that over this century, while we do have this large number of people migrating, we are also undertaking that essential work and restoring the planet. So, restoring nature, absolutely changing and adapting, and transforming our energy systems, our food systems, our infrastructure, so that, by the end of the century, places that were unliveable become liveable again. I do see this essentially as a temporary adaptation and management of the severe crisis that we're facing.
Host: Benjamin Thompson
Reading your book, what interested me is that I think you can see a world where everyone pulls together, okay. Is this a campaign of hope? And do you think that it's likely given how well we've done already with dealing with climate change, that this is something that could come to pass?
Gaia Vince
Yeah, I mean, obviously, I would like everyone to pull together and work to create a better world. And it's about creating a vision. It's about thinking ahead, pragmatically, given what we face, what is the best world that I can imagine? What would that be? And what are the steps to get there? And I think we should all undergo that sort of thought experiment, but particularly our leaders. We absolutely need leadership with vision, and we need to get behind that democratically in the countries that we can. So, yeah, of course, it's a positive world, I'm not going to imagine one full of conflict, and that's where I think we're heading at the moment. So, I'm trying to imagine a world which is possible, and how we can get there.
Host: Benjamin Thompson
And what about you, Gaia? Obviously, this book has been out now for a number of weeks. But in your journey writing, I mean, it there's a graph very early on, right, which shows the potential temperatures year on year, and there's a very personal angle from you on that. You mark in, ‘my child finishes school this year’, ‘my grandchild is born potentially this year,’ ‘my child retires this year,’ right? What has this made you think about yourself and your family and the future, do you think?
Gaia Vince
We think about 2100 as this impossibly long timeframe that is kind of not really relevant to our lives now. It's a completely different time. Well, it's not, and I put that in to sort of say people that you love and care about and you have conversations with now, they're going to be around then in 2100, even if you're not. This is the century of your life but also your children's lives. It's not that far away. We do need to think about it. I really hope my children are safe and happy and living in a cleaner world that's less plagued by today's horrendous crises.
Host: Benjamin Thompson
Gaia Vince there, and her book Nomad Century is available now. And that's it for episode two of Nature hits the books. If you have any feedback on the show, why not ping us an email to podcast@nature.com with the subject line Nature hits the books. Otherwise, look out for the next episode in the new year. The music used in this episode was called To Clarity by Airae via Epidemic Sound and Getty Images. I'm Benjamin Thompson. Thanks for listening.