A Century of Climate Migration Upheaval? An Audacious Prediction for the Future

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CHAPTERS 

[00:02:29]: Extreme heat, flooding, and limits to habitability  

[00:04:46]: High-risk regions: coasts, cities, and densely populated areas 

[00:07:51]: Barriers to mobility: cost, social ties, and legal constraints 

[00:12:48]: Public attitudes toward migration and policy challenges 

[00:19:15]: Governance proposals: international coordination and migration planning 

[00:24:07]: Economic arguments for expanded migration 

[00:25:51]: Migration and long-term planning: implications for future cities

TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:02.04] 

Hello. Thanks for tuning in to Changing Climate, Changing Migration. This is a podcast from the Migration Policy Institute that talks about all the different ways climate change and migration are intersecting. I'm your host, Julian Hattem. I am the editor of the Migration Information Source, which is MPI's online magazine where we have published a special collection of articles to go along with this podcast. You can find those on our website at migrationpolicy.org/climate. Today we're looking forward and we're thinking big. Researchers and scientists who make projections about future climate change have made a wide range of estimates about how many people will be forced out of their homes because of storms, sea level rise, drought and other impacts of environmental change over the next few decades. There could be hundreds of millions of so called climate migrants, they say, or even billions in the past. In previous episodes we've talked about some of the tricky and sometimes simplistic math involved in some of these projections and the concern about being too alarmist. But what if that's missing the point? What if debating precisely how many people will move or in what contexts is just a distraction that prevents us from addressing the deeper underlying truth, which is that our global societies will be fundamentally transformed by climate change and that it's going to involve a dramatic reshuffling of where people live?

[00:01:29.16] 

What if being afraid of big thinking is holding us back? That's one of the things I kept thinking as I was reading the new book from Gaia Vince. Gaia is an award winning science journalist and author and her new book is called Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World. I found it equal parts fascinating, provocative and inspiring. It left me with a lot to think about, which is why I am so excited that Gaia agreed to come on the podcast today. Gaia Vince, hello. Thank you for being here.

[00:02:00.17] 

Hello, thank you for having me.

[00:02:03.14] 

So let's get into it. Like I said, I found your book very, very thought provoking and I want to start with some of the big claims you make to listeners of this podcast. Some of those things will seem pretty sensible, they'll make a lot of sense, and some might be a bit more controversial because, because you first see some big changes, right? As you see it, what will the world look like in 2050 or 2075? And I mean, why is this the Nomad Century as you describe it?

[00:02:28.12] 

Yes, well, we are of course facing climate upheaval this century, and the century really is an enormous century of upheaval. So as the temperature of the planet rises, we're getting this more and more heat trapped by our carbon emissions into the, into the atmosphere. That's driving these much more extreme weather conditions. So more extreme storms, we're getting more flooding, more drought, more heat stress, more fires. And these four elements particularly combine to make an area unlivable for people. And if you look at the climate projections over this century, of course we don't know yet what temperature we're going to land on at 2100 or 2050. We are. You know, the last COP was about keeping 1.5 alive. This year the cops more or less come to terms with the fact that 1.5 is going to be, well, let's just say, very unlikely. So we're looking at temperatures a lot greater than that.

[00:03:30.13] 

Just to clarify, that's 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre industrial levels, right?

[00:03:34.09] 

Yes. Does the temperature rise above the pre industrial average? At the moment we're somewhere probably around 1.3 degrees Celsius above the pre industrial average. And we're already seeing, you know, in some places, back to back climate events, extreme weather events, places facing huge heat stress and drought, followed by unmanageable floods, washing away infrastructure, housing. It's causing huge levels of displacement. In one week alone, 33 million people were displaced in Pakistan earlier this year. So you know, we're going to start to see more and more of these things happening as the temperature rises and it will rise way above 1.5, which we're about to hit in the next six, six years, probably it will rise above 2 degrees and then it will come back down. And we're hoping that it will come back down towards the end of the century, we're hoping to bring it down to 2 degrees. At the moment we're heading easily somewhere between 2 and 4 degrees. And let me just say that 4 degrees is absolutely catastrophic. But as the temperature rises over these coming decades, what we're going to find is that large areas of the tropics, of coastlines, rivers, especially river deltas, where some of our most important and largest global cities are located, are increasingly going to become unlivable.

[00:05:00.19] 

People are not going to be able to adapt in large numbers to the climate conditions we're bringing. They will have to move and they will largely have to move to higher latitudes. And if you look at the map of the world, the continents are kind of ice cream cone shapes. So there's not a lot of land in the southern hemisphere there at higher latitudes. So we're talking about the northern hemisphere. We're talking about what I like to call the new north, really this new economically productive, vibrant area that will really come into its own around mid century.

[00:05:36.14] 

I want to drill in on that a bit in a second. But I guess first, I mean, I want to be clear, this is very big blue sky thinking, right? The notion that billions of people, entire, if not continents, entire swathes of continents are going to be depopulated. It's a pretty radical idea, I think it's fair to say. And it's something that I think most researchers who study this would, would push back on a bit.

[00:05:57.16] 

So, yes, so to be clear, not everybody in these places is going to have to move. But at the moment, these places are home to some of the world's biggest populations. If you look at places like Mumbai, city of Mumbai, 22 million people living there, well, 9 million of those people live in slums. They live in essentially concrete boxes with a metal sheet for a roof, jam packed against each other with a tiny little airless alleyway in between. Now those slums are already around 6 to 10 degrees hotter than the average city proper. You know, the rest of Mumbai and Mumbai has been hitting extreme temperatures which make working outside unbearable after about 10am so if we talk about adaptation and bear in mind Mumbai is also on the coast where they're suffering all sorts of storm surges, flooding, unsanitary conditions, you know, with sewage coming into people's houses. I mean, it's really quite dire situations if we talk about adaptation. You know, people live in very hot conditions in Dubai, for example, that is a city in a desert. It's home to thousands of people who live in essentially in a shopping mall, an air conditioned shopping mall, if they call that living.

[00:07:18.01] 

And so, you know that it is possible to support a certain population under those conditions, but you know, it is not possible to support 9 million slum dwellers living in those conditions. You couldn't provide air conditioned units to all of those places. You'd get power outages immediately. I mean, it's just not feasible. So, you know, some, some people will be able to stay there in very well adapted sort of microclimates. Just cannot support those enormous populations that exist there at the moment. That's, that's what I'm saying, essentially.

[00:07:50.16] 

I think that's interesting. But migrating, moving is hard. It's expensive, right? I mean, if you live in a slum in Mumbai, it takes money and networks and a variety of other things to be able to move even domestically within India, much less as you propose it. And we'll talk a little bit to places farther north, not to mention, lots of people don't want to move. They and their families have lived in these places for generations, I guess. What about them? Do we force them to move? And I mean, well, yeah, what happened to those people?

[00:08:20.01] 

This is already a huge problem. People are living in places that are extremely dangerous. Many of the people that have died or have suffered severe injuries from climate disasters have been essentially living in places that are already uninhabitable. They should not be living there, certainly not under those circumstances. Moving is really hard. You know, people, quite often the land that they live on is their only wealth to pass on to other people. They have their own social networks. They have family around that can help support them with childcare. They know how the system works in terms of where they can get jobs, where they can find resources or all of those things. They speak the language, you know, to move to, to move even within your country, let alone further afield, you know, to somewhere where you're a stranger, where it's extremely expensive, where you may not speak the language, where you don't have those social networks, where you don't have anyone to look after your kids or your elderly relatives so that you can find work, where you don't even know anyone who can help find with the finding of the work, you know, let alone to move further afield where you may also face racial prejudice or, you know, any.

[00:09:32.00] 

Some other, other difficulties, it's a huge, huge burden. And at the moment, many people are choosing not to make that move because it is so difficult and expensive and they are suffering a result. We all have an obligation to make that move easier, to facilitate migration so that it isn't as traumatic as it is. Because, you know, I mean, I'm all in favor of migration. I think more of us should move. We should explore other cultures, other places, other languages. I think it's very enriching and it breaks down a lot of social barriers. It's brilliant. But, you know, to look at the idea that enormous hundreds of millions of people are going to have to move from their homes because they've been made unlivable because of climate change, well, that really is nothing short of a tragedy. It really is. And we must all do what we can to make it easier and to make the move into something that can also be a positive. You know, we can build these more sustainable, new, clean, green, economically productive societies of the future that are genuinely inclusive, that give people hope for a better future for themselves and their children, so that even though they are leaving behind something incredibly precious and There is nothing more precious than, than the home that you've made and built and are used to for yourself.

[00:10:56.22] 

And you know, where your ancestors reside. You know, there is, there is nothing more precious than that. It's your family, it's, it's your family home. But if you can offer something else, some other positive future, you know, I wrote this book in the face of these terrible climate catastrophes that we're all rushing headlong into to say, you know, it is overwhelming, it is really scary. But let's be pragmatic, let's look at this and say, despite everything, how can we make this into the most positive future that we can imagine? A vision of something that could be something to strive for and then take the steps to get there. And that's really what this is about.

[00:11:37.23] 

So I want to go back to kind of some of the barriers to movement because you talk about rootedness in a place, finances, all of these things, not knowing the language. I mean, there's also very clear legal barriers, right. The places that you're talking about, people moving to, not even global north, global Far north. You talk about north of the 45th parallel, which is about the line between the, the US and Canada. For those of us without geography in mind, places like the Great Lakes regions of North America, Greenland, Alaska, Siberia. Many of these places are places that are legally difficult to get into. I live in the us not an easy country to get into as it is now. Most forcibly displaced people don't go too far for, for all of the reasons we talked about. Only a tiny fraction of the people who are eligible for like refugee resettlement are resettled, especially to the US, Canada, etc. Why should that change? Why would we think that some of these countries are interested in opening the, opening their doors to hundreds of millions, billions of people fleeing disaster who might not necessarily be super wealthy and have kind of social capital and other capacities to benefit local economies in ways that people would want.

[00:12:46.09] 

Yeah, well, we are, we are living at a particularly anti migrant time. This is a time when many global leaders are leading on a nationalist agenda, some ethno nationalist agenda. Very scary. And you know, it is the most obvious trope for a populist leader who feels like their populism is slipping to target minority groups, whether it's migrants, whether it's poor people, whatever. And we have had years now of a very strong anti migrant narrative in many of our, many of our democracies, let alone the countries that are not. So this is extremely unfortunate. It's also sadly not being countered sufficiently by centrist and left wing parties at all. They seem very timid about this. This narrative is going to have to change. It's going to have to change for a few reasons. Firstly, we are facing a huge demographic crisis in many of these countries where we're not having enough babies to, to support an aging workforce. So we actually need people to drive trucks, to as farm laborers, as nurses, doctors, kindergarten teachers, to work in factories. I mean, we really don't have enough labor. And the way to solve that of course is through immigration.

[00:14:05.01] 

And even the most nationalistic governments are with one hand declaring how terrible immigration is and with the other hand beckoning people in desperately because we just don't have, have enough workers. So there's that. And secondly, migration really is inevitable. Climate migration is inevitable now it's already growing. Already four times more people migrate because they've been displaced by extreme weather and climate disasters than through conflict. This is increasingly making a mockery of these imagined borders that we've set up largely over the last century or so. These borders to keep people out. And, and you know, it is even more recent that they are to keep people out. Previously governments were very keen on keeping people in and pulling people in. You know, we had Things like the 10 pound palm scheme to get people to live in Australia. We had an entire Windrush generation desperately to try and get, you know, X empire people into Britain to rebuild after the war. You know, nations actually wanted to bring in more people. That really is going to increase. And there are so many studies now that show the net benefits of immigration, whether it's in terms of economic productivity or places that have high immigration, often have lower crime rates.

[00:15:31.12] 

You know, we can counter a lot of these, a lot of these narratives. But you know, of course this is challenging. We can't escape the fact that this is a huge and it is radical and I'm not an extremist in any way. But I would say that incremental changes at the moment to our societies and our, our planet are just not going to cut it. In the face of this unprecedented threat of climate change that we face. We do need radical solutions and there is going to be this mass movement of people. I say make it work. If you think that, you know, this is not the solution, well then please tell me what the solution is. Have you got a better answer? Because, you know, I don't want to see my kids conscripted into armies to fight Yemeni refugees or Bangladeshi refugees. I would much rather that they were living in denser cities with Bangladeshis and Yemenis as their neighbors, all working together with these kind of aligned values and dreams of building clean, green, productive cities of the future for themselves and their children. That's the future that I want to see. And I also would say that, you know, although this is very challenging, it can be, you know, it can be made to work, but it does need investment.

[00:16:51.06] 

It needs financial investment. And that means investment in infrastructure, housing, access to health care, education, all the, all the things that governments, through poor policy, are already failing their native populations for. They need to step up and make sure that provision is there not just for the existing population, but for the much wider society. And it also needs, very importantly, social investment. We need to build this idea of an inclusive, greater citizenship, a greater society, that nationhood and nationality is not based on something as trivial as how much melanin you have in your skin or what accent you use to speak with, but it is based on something much more important and much more fundamental, which is, you know, your social dreams of community around, around that national project. So many of us can hold more than, you know, one identity in our head. We don't just see ourselves as one thing. We can be multiple things. You can be from Philadelphia also, you know, from the US also, you know, of Polish extraction. You know, you can hold all these things in your head and that should be acceptable and it should be celebrated because we need to see ourselves as more than one thing.

[00:18:10.12] 

We need to see ourselves as part of a global species on a planet with true planetary boundaries. Not geopolitical boundaries, planetary boundaries. You know, humans as a mammal species cannot live in Antarctica, cannot live in the Sahara, cannot live in enormous numbers in a slum in Mumbai in 2060. There are genuine boundaries for our species and they're the ones that matter.

[00:18:37.00] 

One of the things I was struck by in your book is the kind of the combination of, I would say, pessimism you have about abilities to adapt in place and to tackle climate change more generally, and then this kind of intense optimism about many of the things you were just talking about. You know, it is the case that countries, many governments, have problems, so giving social services to their native born citizens, much less. I think we can imagine a huge new crop of migrants. But you talked about pragmatism a bit ago and before we run out, I want to make sure to talk about these, because you propose. I kind of see them as draft of ideas. But you have a couple of recommendations, possibilities to facilitate this migration. For one, you talk about a new kind of UN migration organization which for our listeners we should be clear would be different than the current International Organization for Migration. And I want to, there's a quote here. This new organization you write would have, quote, real powers to compel governments to accept refugees and was also devised a sensible plan for redistributing people which might include national quotas.

[00:19:37.22] 

You also raise the idea of charter cities that kind of operate under a different set of rules as the neighboring jurisdiction. So as you have a brief mention of for instance, letting Nigeria buy or rent land for its nationals inside Canada. And again, these are very big ideas. I think some of our listeners might find them kind of political non starters. But you seem very optimistic about that despite some of the challenges to national sovereignty. I guess tell me a little bit more about that. I mean again, controversial is kind of an understatement to the idea that Canada will rent out a large part of its country to Nigerians. I mean, why might political leaders except these, you know, when a UN agency telling it what to do when that's already kind of a challenge in many ways.

[00:20:25.21] 

Yeah. I think you need to start from the fact that we are facing this incredibly unprecedented challenge. So people are going to have to move in large numbers. Nigeria, we're talking about hundreds of millions of people moving not just from Nigeria, but from, from Africans, Sub-Saharan Africa particularly. These are, you know, where are these people going to go? We are going to have to look at new governance structures. All of these have existed in different ways. You know, Britain rented Hong Kong from China for 99 years. The US bought Alaska from, from Russia.

[00:21:03.03] 

Okay.

[00:21:04.01] 

A century or so ago. I mean these have all existed in various ideas, you know, you know, my dream is that this is, this century of upheaval is just limited to a century that during this time we are also undertaking the really important work of restoring our planet. So restoring the livability because it's not ideal to have a planet where you can't live on top of it. So you know, that that would require, that would mean that during the, towards the end of the century people would again be able to recolonize the tropics. But we do need some sort of solution and there are, there are positives and negatives to all of these. Nothing is easy. I'm not saying any of this is easy. It's very challenging. But if you have alternative solutions that you think would work better, do tell me. I certainly think this is better than large scale conflict. We're already seeing conflict to a greater or lesser extent around these large people movements. If A state wants to rent land for a city in another territory where nothing is being used at the moment, they would reap tax benefits. They would have, you know, they would get something out of it.

[00:22:24.12] 

It's a... It's an option. And people might feel more comfortable about a sort of separation culturally between two very different, very different cultures living and sharing space in one area. These are all ideas. I don't know which ones we're going to go for. I imagine we're going to have a selection of them, but I think that we all need to talk about them and have debates and discuss. At the moment, we're not discussing any of this. We need to sit down and decide together what is more palatable. You know, is it better to welcome, you know, hundreds of millions of people to inside a state, or is it better to... to allow states to move to places? You know, I mean, already, for example, the state of Kiribati, which is going under the waves pretty soon, has a...

[00:23:22.03] 

It's a small Pacific Island country for listeners.

[00:23:24.11] 

Yeah, yeah. It's bought territory in Fiji which is big enough to house its entire population. Now, that is Kiribati land. It's owned and governed by Kiribati. It happens to be inside the territory of Fiji. But I mean, you know, states come to these arrangements, they come to these agreements, and everything's on the table at the moment. But we're not twisting. We're not discussing any of them. And I think that we. We should. And we should make democratic choices rather than wait until these things are imposed upon us through extreme, acute emergency events, with evacuations, with, you know, sudden crises and conflict.

[00:24:07.07] 

Are you making an argument for an end to borders?

[00:24:10.18] 

That's one solution, definitely. I certainly think the way we're handling human movement across borders makes absolutely no sense. Sense economically, culturally, or socially. I mean, it's ridiculous. We make it very easy for commodities, resources, money to flow across borders, but our largest economic resource, which is human labor, we make extremely difficult. I mean, so some economists calculate that if we remove borders altogether, global GDP would immediately at least double. It makes an enormous amount of economic sense. Migration is very much not a security issue. It really is an economic issue and a humanitarian issue. And, you know, if we want to do the best for our economies, which of course underpin all of the other rights and habitable spaces that we manage to occupy, we need to think in a much more strategic way and not be so blinkered by the policies of the past few decades.

[00:25:12.19] 

We're basically about out of time. But I guess, lastly, I Interpreted as you suggest, Nomad Centuries as sort of a manifesto of sorts, it kind of, it imagines a big bold set of changes to dramatically reshape our world. In response to climate change, we have been talking about migration, but you also talk in there a bit about changing what we eat and geoengineering technologies to try and offset some of the impacts of climate change. Some of this sounds a bit science fiction, maybe even dystopian, some folks might say, but I found it very fascinating and provocative. Any last takeaways that you want to leave the listener with before we have to say goodbye?

[00:25:50.22] 

Yeah, well, this century is really a century of huge upheaval. Not just in terms of people movement, but it's also, you know, we are undergoing this huge transition to a zero cost carbon world. And that means building sustainability into our engineering, our architecture, our the way we make our energy, the way our entire food production system has to change. It means a radical change of everything. And humans have two really important characteristics which set them apart from all other animals and which have made us the dominant species that is so capable of changing the planet that we put ourselves at risk. And that is that we are hypersocial. Everything we do involves huge amounts of cooperation and these social tools will be essential in getting through this century. And the other is our technological expertise. We are technological, technologically superior to all other animals and we will be using all of our technological skills as well. So we need our social and our technological skills. Everything will involve challenge. But let's have a vision, a vision of a world that we want to create and that we are happy to live in and then try and make it work.

[00:27:10.10] 

Gaia Vince is an author and journalist. Her new book Nomad Century is out now. Gaia, thank you again. Thanks for coming on. This was fun.

[00:27:18.14] 

Great pleasure.

[00:27:20.20] 

Thank you for listening to Changing Climate, Changing Migration. I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Gaia. For more, please be sure to subscribe to this podcast on your service of choice. You can find all of our episodes in our archives online at migrationpolicy.org/podcasts. And while you're there, you should also explore MPI's other podcasts. If you want to stay on top of what MPI is doing, you can follow us on social media. We're on Twitter and LinkedIn and Facebook and Instagram. Or you can contact me directly at [email protected]. I'd love to hear from you. Yoseph Hamid produced this episode and it was made possible with assistance from Lisa Dixon and Michelle Mittelstadt. The music you're hearing is called Touch by Patrick Patrikios. Once again, my name is Julian Hattem, and I'll see you next time.