Nomad Century
How to Survive the Climate Upheaval
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
Highly Commended for the Wainwright Prize 2023, and shortlisted for the Zócalo Book Prize and the Christopher Moore Prize For Human Rights Writing
'Gaia Vince's new book should be read not just by every politician, but by every person on the planet' Observer
An urgent investigation of the most underreported, seismic consequence of climate change: how it will force us to change where - and how - we live
We are facing a species emergency. With every degree of temperature rise, a billion people will be displaced from the zone in which humans have lived for thousands of years. While we must do everything we can to mitigate the impact of climate change, the brutal truth is that huge swathes of the world are becoming uninhabitable. From Bangladesh to Sudan to the western United States, and in cities from Cardiff to New Orleans to Shanghai, the quadruple threat of drought, heat, wildfires and flooding will utterly reshape Earth's human geography in the coming decades.
In this rousing call to arms, Royal Society Science Book Prize-winning author Gaia Vince describes how we can plan for and manage this unavoidable climate migration while we restore the planet to a fully habitable state. The vital message of this book is that migration is not the problem - it's the solution. Drawing on a wealth of eye-opening data and original reporting, Vince shows how migration brings benefits not only to migrants themselves, but to host countries, many of which face demographic crises and labour shortages. As Vince describes, we will need to move northwards as a species, into the habitable fringes of Europe, Asia and Canada and the greening Arctic circle.
While the climate catastrophe is finally getting the attention it deserves, the inevitability of mass migration has been largely ignored. In Nomad Century, Vince provides, for the first time, an examination of the most pressing question facing humanity.
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Journalist Vince (Transcendence) warns of a "great upheaval" in global migration resulting from climate change in this bracing clarion call. "Fleeing the tropics, the coasts and formerly arable lands, huge populations will need to seek new homes," she writes; "you will be among them, or you will be receiving them." In taking size of the current state of the world, Vince looks back at hundreds of thousands of years of crises and the human responses to them: "whether for exploration and adventure, from disaster to safety, for a new land of opportunity... under duress and by kidnap," Vince argues, migrations have a long history of having "transformed" the world. She lays out a course of action for the coming decades, considering international borders (making a case with some strong stats on how immigration can improve a country's economy, and noting that "opening borders doesn't have to mean no borders"), the changing nature of urban environments ("Around the world, the most successful migrant cities tend to be dense but not too high"), and the need for strong social welfare policies as well as infrastructure investment (she suggests building geographically distributed low-income housing "so there are no ‘pure' rich-only or native only neighbourhoods"). Assertive and provocative, Vince's work is worth a look for policymakers concerned about the future of the planet.