When I started reading Gaia Vince’s new book, temperatures in Britain were hitting 40 degrees Celsius. During breaks, I scrolled past Facebook posts from friends in Iraq, where they topped 50. Later, I took the book with me to Kenya, where some four million people are in desperate need of food in the country’s north because of a record-breaking drought said to be climate-change-related (neighbouring Somalia is now expected to declare a climate-change-related famine). As I filed this review, one third of Pakistan was underwater, with more than 1,100 people dead and 33 million affected by devastating floods.
Vince, who is based in London, is a former editor at Nature and New Scientist. She has lived on three continents and travelled through 50 countries to research her first book, Adventures In The Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made. Her second book, Transcendence, was shortlisted for the Royal Society Science Book Prize. And her latest, Nomad Century: How to Survive the Climate Upheaval, is a “manifesto” for mass migration as a response to climate change: what she calls her “assessment of our best way forward”.
“A great upheaval is coming,” Vince writes in her introduction. “Huge populations will need to seek new homes: you will be among them, or you will be receiving them… We can survive, but to do so will require a planned and deliberate migration of a kind humanity has never before undertaken.”
This could be a catastrophe, she continues, “or, managed well, it could be our salvation.”
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The book begins by hammering home some terrifying statistics about climate change, along with a series of similarly shocking maps. A future of fire, heat, floods, decreased food production, deaths from smoke inhalation, and water scarcity awaits us.
Currently, our planet is at 1.2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, Vince writes. Might it climb 4 degrees above?
Large portions of the Earth would become uninhabitable, making the scale of global migration required “not a challenge we can meet as individuals”. Can we all co-operate to ensure our survival?
“Other species live in the environment they are most suitable for,” Vince writes. “Humans, though, have created a problem for themselves.” That problem is borders.
Vast new cities
Today, only 3.5 per cent of the world’s population are international migrants, compared to 14 per cent in the late 19th century (a time when the Irish were spreading all over the world). In the future, this should drastically increase, she says: vast new cities could be built in the far north while huge parts of the tropics are abandoned.
Nomad Century includes suggestions for change at all levels. These range from adding seaweed to the diet of farm-raised animals to reduce their methane burps; and tweaking the altitude planes fly at to avoid contrails; to having “a global population concentrated in megacity safe havens”.
Vince examines food and energy; advocates for wealth redistribution, universal healthcare and education. She argues that offering social supports to new migrants makes sense from a security perspective. People should be allowed to move with their families, she says, providing them with stability in better climates.
For those who don’t believe in allowing movement for the sake of compassion, there are economic incentives for migration. The global north’s ageing populations make new labourers desperately needed.
Some of Vince’s proposals, such as the creation of temporary refuges for climate refugees on private islands, show clear potential for abuse and have questionable historical precedent (for example, the use of Christmas Island for detaining asylum seekers off Australia, or the recent protests around sending Rohingya refugees to the remote island of Bhasan Char in Bangladesh). The creation of charter cities, operated by wealthy countries on the territory of poorer ones, comes with echoes of colonisation.
That is not the only time that Vince (perhaps necessarily, given the mindset of inaction she is fighting against) gives too much credit to humans. The hope that all people and states will work together has already failed: that’s why the climate crisis has advanced so far.
Her suggestion that a new UN Organisation for Global Migration should be established with “real powers to compel governments to accept refugees” also seems unlikely: there are reasons why the UN Refugee Agency and the International Organisation for Migration have limited capacity and are constantly criticised for their ineffectiveness.
Right now, millions of people are already in need of emergency assistance and potential relocation, but their ability to move is more curtailed than ever. Borders are being fortified, walls and fences built, visa regimes strengthened. Migrants are used as a political football across the West.
Locust plagues
This book would have been bolstered by more sourcing and clarification. Vince says we are witnessing the highest level of human displacement on record, with the number of refugees globally exceeding 100 million for the first time in 2022. However, UNHCR figures have this as the number of people forced to flee their homes, including those internally displaced, with the number of registered refugees less than one third that (UNHCR admittedly often conflates these figures).
At another point, Vince says some 20 per cent of the world’s land was affected by locust plagues in 2020 alone, but the only source I can find for that is the UN saying locusts have the potential to reach that much territory during plague periods. Given how much climate-related discussion is based on future projections, it seems helpful to clarify as much as possible what has already taken place and what is anticipated.
Of course, it is easy to be critical. The bigger truth is that Vince’s perspective and proposals are refreshing in a world where a Don’t Look Up-style denial is solidly in place.
And, with what is happening in Pakistan, Somalia and elsewhere, her proposals do not seem so radical. If this book results in even a smidgen more sympathy for the huge numbers of people being forced away from their homes, that will be a great thing.
Sally Hayden is author of My Fourth Time, We Drowned, winner of the Orwell Prize 2022.
