In the 60,000 years since people began colonizing the continents, a recurring feature of human civilization has been mobility—the ever-constant search for resources and stability. Seismic global events—wars and genocides, revolutions and pandemics—have only accelerated the process. The map of humanity isn’t settled—not now, not ever.
As climate change tips toward full-blown crisis, economies collapse, governments destabilize, and technology disrupts, we’re entering a new age of mass migrations—one that will scatter both the dispossessed and the well-off. Which areas will people abandon and where will they resettle? Which countries will accept or reject them? As today’s world population, which includes four billion restless youth, votes with their feet, what map of human geography will emerge?
In Move, celebrated futurist Parag Khanna provides an illuminating and authoritative vision of the next phase of human civilization—one that is both mobile and sustainable. As the book explores, in the years ahead people will move people to where the resources are and technologies will flow to the people who need them, returning us to our nomadic roots while building more secure habitats.
“An urgent, powerful argument for more open international borders” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review), Move is a fascinating look at the deep trends that are shaping the most likely scenarios for the future. Most important, it guides each of us as we determine our optimal location on humanity’s ever-changing map.
Move : The Forces Uprooting Us
Nomad Century review: a bold plan to manage climate migration
Gaia Vince’s new book, Nomad Century: How to survive the climate upheaval, argues that mass migration caused by Earth’s climate crisis could be turned into a plus. Could her plan work?
Recent natural disasters, ranging from flooding to wildfires, have made clear the effects of climate change in the present moment.
As the climate crisis worsens, a massive amount of people may be forced to move from their homes. The international think-tank Institute for Economics & Peace estimates that 1.2 billion people could be displaced globally by 2050.
Gaia Vince, a science journalist and author of the recent book “Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World,” spoke with ABC News Prime about the argument she makes in her books that nations have to start planning now for future climate refugees, and that there may be silver linings in that process.
PRIME: Gaia, thank you so much for joining us tonight.
VINCE: Huge pleasure, Mona.
PRIME: Your book lays out that rather disturbing scenario that wide swaths of planet Earth will become completely uninhabitable, but it also focuses on solutions. How can we all feel less helpless right now?
VINCE: Yeah, we need to look differently at the problem. Migration is inevitable now. I wrote “Nomad Century” because nobody is talking about the huge upheaval that is coming as climate change makes large parts of the world unlivable. People will not be able to adapt in certain places, they will have to move.
Philippe Lopez/AFP via Getty Images
But migration is not the problem. Migration is the solution. If we manage this, if we plan it, we can actually build thriving cities that save people from some of the worst devastation in some of the poorest parts of the world while also solving demographic issues that we have in the wealthier, northern parts of the world. So it actually could be a win-win if we do it properly and if we actually plan.
But nobody is talking about this issue, it’s very frustrating.
PRIME: Apart from being a climate journalist, as a resident of London, you too experienced the effects of climate change firsthand, during this summer’s heat waves. Infrastructure began to collapse in one of the wealthiest areas of the world, and now conversations are being had surrounding climate adaptation. Is this a situation where humans don’t adjust until the effects of climate change are literally in their backyards?
VINCE: I mean, it’s amazing, isn’t it? We’ve been warned for decades by scientists that climate change is happening. It’s going to increasingly affect our lives. But it’s only when these extreme weather events… we’ve all had this terrible summer of huge heatwaves, my kids couldn’t go to school, it was too hot for them. Our infrastructure is not set up for that.
In the U.S. you’ve also had extreme weather, Kentucky was completely inundated with water, you had the whole of the West Coast of the U.S. on fire more or less with the terrible forest fires. You’ve also had heat waves, drought that has killed thousands of cattle… This is going to become, unfortunately, a matter of life and death, even in the richest nations.
PRIME: Gaia, considering the current stigma surrounding asylum seekers, migration on this scale is sort of hard to fathom. Yet you paint a very humane and optimistic image of what this mass migration could look like if properly facilitated. With that, how do we begin to unpack this political hostility and come to terms with climate displacement?
VINCE: Well, migration is inevitable. And in Nomad Century, what I do is I try to make people realize that what we’ve done is we’ve allowed the narrative around migrants, around refugees, asylum-seekers to become truly toxic. And migration, it’s not a security issue, it’s actually an economic issue.
It turns out that most countries around the world, their economies could not survive without migrants… Who were going to do the everyday jobs that cities rely on? We all rely on migrants. We’re not having enough babies in most nations in the Northern Hemisphere and so as our populations age, we’re going to face huge labor shortages, it’s a demographic crisis. The only way to solve it is through immigration. Let’s make it work. Let’s actually plan it.
PRIME: And in your book, you argue that it doesn’t have to be as scary as it sounds. It could be a win-win for the Global North, who, as you mentioned, has a demographic crisis. But it is sort of crazy to think about what you propose that cities may one day exist in Antarctica. We have a segment on our show called “It’s Not Too Late,” focusing on climate solutions. Do you believe it’s not too late to prepare for this?
VINCE: It’s absolutely not too late. You know, every degree of temperature rise, every tenth of a degree of temperature rise makes a difference, and we have to fight for that.
This is a serious economic and humanitarian issue. We can solve it. We need to mitigate. We need to reduce our emissions. We need to get to net zero. And then we need to cut below that. We need to withdraw the carbon that we’ve already emitted from our atmosphere.
We need to change the way human systems work to make them sustainable with natural systems, because natural systems are much harder to change.
PRIME: And you propose some promising solutions. We appreciate you joining us. “Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World” is now available wherever books are sold.
“The MOST IMPORTANT BOOK I imagine I’ll ever read.”—Mary Roach
FROM AN AWARD-WINNING SCIENCE JOURNALIST comes an urgent investigation of environmental migration—the most underreported, seismic consequence of our climate crisis that will force us to change where—and how—we live.
“An IMPORTANT and PROVOCATIVE start to a crucial conversation.” —Bill McKibben
“We are facing a species emergency. We can survive, but to do so will require a planned and deliberate migration of a kind humanity has never before undertaken. This is the biggest human crisis you’ve never heard of.”
Drought-hit regions bleeding those for whom a rural life has become untenable. Coastlines diminishing year on year. Wildfires and hurricanes leaving widening swaths of destruction. The culprit, most of us accept, is climate change, but not enough of us are confronting one of its biggest, and most present, consequences: a total reshaping of the earth’s human geography. As Gaia Vince points out early in Nomad Century, global migration has doubled in the past decade, on track to see literal billions displaced in the coming decades. What exactly is happening, Vince asks? And how will this new great migration reshape us all?
In this deeply-reported clarion call, Vince draws on a career of environmental reporting and over two years of travel to the front lines of climate migration across the globe, to tell us how the changes already in play will transform our food, our cities, our politics, and much more. Her findings are answers we all need, now more than ever.
Climate Action Australia 