Mass climate migration is coming. Gaia Vince says we're not ready

<a class="spreaker-player" href="https://www.spreaker.com/user/15404881/gaia-vince" data-resource="episode_id=53213778" data-theme="light" data-playlist="false" data-width="100%" data-height="200px">Listen to "Gaia Vince on Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World" on Spreaker.</a><script async src="https://widget.spreaker.com/widgets.js"></script> Gaia Vince’s latest book, “Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World,” isn’t what you would call an uplifting read. Her main thesis is, bluntly, that climate change is here, and it’s fundamentally reshaping how we live — droughts, famines, floods, wildfires, and extreme weather are forcing people, on a large scale, to move. Also: It’s probably going to get worse. But according to Vince, there’s a silver lining. If we accept this new reality now, we still have time to manage the movement of all of these people in an equitable, democratic way. We can reimagine our attitudes toward immigrants and handle the changes with a measure of grace that will not only ease the transition for everyone, but may even lead to a more fair world than the one we live in now. For the first episode of the Devex Book Club podcast, Devex President and Editor-in-Chief Raj Kumar sat down with Gaia to talk about what’s on the horizon for humanity, and how we can prepare. TRANSCRIPT Gaia Vince [Intro] What nobody's really talking about is the fact that in the coming decades, there are going to be large populations who simply will not be able to adapt. They're going to have to move. Raj Kumar I'm Raj Kumar, and you're in the Devex Book Club. Maybe you're a global development nerd like me, maybe you work at the U.N. or an NGO. Or maybe you're just excited to hear from some of the world's leading authors on the most important issues of the day. Either way, you're in the right place. Grab a snack, get a comfortable seat. And don't worry, if you haven't read the book, you're very much welcome. Get ready for our discussion. RK Our first book club author is Gaia Vince, whose most recent book, “Nomad Century,” is a sharp, unflinching look at humanity's future once climate change forces billions — that's billions of us, with an “S”— to migrate. It's been described as terrifying, brilliant, and as author Mary Roach put it, the most important book I imagine I'll ever read. Gaia is a science writer and broadcaster exploring the interplay between human systems and the planetary environment. She's an honorary senior research fellow at the Anthropocene Institute at University College London and a regular host of BBC Inside Science. Her first book, “Adventures in the Anthropocene,” won the Royal Society Science Book of the Year prize. Gaia, it's great to have you here. Welcome. GV Hello. So it's a real pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me on. RK The book is fantastic. I'm so excited to dive into it. But maybe we can just start with you. Just tell us a little bit more about you and, and how you got excited to write about what is again, as we'll hear in a little while, a pretty dramatic view of what's coming and what the world needs to do about it. GV Yeah, so I mean, this is a subject that I've been sort of embedded in, I suppose for the last more than a decade. I really started getting interested in how our environment is affecting human populations and human society when I was news editor at the journal Nature. And so I was getting lots of reports coming in from all around the world, papers showing how our hydrological systems are changing, how species are going extinct, how new diseases are springing up in human populations in various places. And I realized that there was one thing that was linking all of that, and that was the way that we were behaving in terms of the earth systems, we were pushing the earth systems into a new geological epoch, which geologists are calling the Anthropocene, the age dominated by humans. And so I went around the world to research that; I spent two and a half years in the end, mainly in the global south, through Asia, Africa, Latin America. And, you know, Australia, North America, and Europe. And I drew those experiences together, the interviews I've done and the research I've found, with people who are really living on the edge of environmental change. And that was at least a decade ago now. And, at the time, the global conversation, certainly among leaders was very much about, you know, should we take climate change seriously, what will happen in the future, if we don't mitigate, if we don't reduce our emissions, and I was sort of banging on the door saying, it's already happening, look, these people are already experiencing it. We do need to mitigate now. But not only that, we need to adapt to these very different conditions. And since I wrote that book, which was “Adventures in the Anthropocene,” I realized that the conversation has shifted; people now accept that anthropological human-driven climate change is underway already, the climate has changed, we are living in a different world, mitigation is now written into global agreements, the idea that we have to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. All these, this energy transition and the push to change the way human systems are working in order to change our impact on the climate. And we're starting to have that conversation about adaptation as well. You know, we are adapting our energy systems. But what nobody's really talking about is the fact that in the coming decades, there are going to be large populations who simply will not be able to adapt. They're going to have to move, and that's not happening. So this book was really written out of, it was born out of frustration. I wanted to say, look, we need to talk about this right now. Because this is already happening, climate change is already a reality. It's inevitable. It's underway already. And it's going to become an increasing problem. We have choices now, we need to talk about them, we need to raise these choices, democratically, so that we can make decisions. RK We'll get deep into what you're talking about and what the implications are. But I'm just curious how the insight came to you. You know, was it a slow growing insight as you met? People, migrants themselves moving out of communities driven by climate change? Or was it kind of an “aha” moment? That just hits you that we have to have a new way of looking at migration? How did this book kind of come about? In your own mind first, before it ended up on the page? GV Yeah, well, it was a bit of both. So I mean, obviously, I've met a lot of climate migrants. There are huge numbers of depopulated villages, across South America across, you know, the Andes, most of the villages in the Andes, have lost large numbers of people because of repeated droughts, glaciers melt, agricultural lives being impossible now. And, you know, you find those people in the slums of the cities, where a general sort of urban migration has been accelerated in recent decades, because of various reasons. I mean, climate change is a threat multiplier; there are many reasons pushing people to migrate. But also, for my last book, actually, “Transcendence,” I looked at the human story, and how we became this creature that changed our planet, you know, we're essentially another African ape, how on earth did we become this global species that is dispersed everywhere, that is capable through its networks through its technology, transfer, cultural transfer, this incredible species that has changed our planet? And I realized that a large part of that is, is through our migrations, through migrations of ourselves, of our resources, of our ideas. And then I looked at what the situation was where the conversation was nationally, where it was internationally. We're talking about trying to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees [Celsius]. I mean, I actually don't know any serious researchers who think that's feasible. RK Where are we now, you mentioned in the book that already, where are we? GV Yeah, we're somewhere between 1.2 and 1.3 degrees [Celsius] above the pre-industrial average, at the moment, we're going to exceed 1.5 degrees [Celsius], probably in the next six years. You know, that brings with it a lot of dangerous conditions for our species. So you know, carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases, what they do is they trap the sun's energy, they trap the sun's heat in the atmosphere. And that extra energy drives these, these severe storms, these heat waves that sit for a long time over regions, and also cold spells. So these kinds of extreme weathers, it drives larger storms and sea level rise combined to erode coastlines to make living in various places much more dangerous, you get these flash floods. And what's happening is that you get these back-to-back extreme events, which don't leave populations, don't leave communities enough time to recover from each one before they hit with another one. So their resilience is hit. And that's the sort of thing which makes displacement inevitable and means that people, they can't recover and return quite often, and certainly not in the same way. RK There's a passage in the book I want to read because to me, it's sort of the underlying theme of the book. I feel like you're trying to show people that there has always been change in human populations, and there is more change coming. And that sometimes it's hard for us to accept. Here’s that passage: “This century is all change. The coming decades of environmental change will additionally wreck their own social, socio-political disturbances, with disruptions to food availability and other significant challenges. So when looking at this future, the baseline shouldn't be thought of as your current life as lived today. The comparison, rather, is between your future city embroiled in climate adaptive infrastructure changes, a hotter environment with flash floods, more violent storms, poor food availability, a shrunken workforce with little elderly care, the social environment of fear with increased conflict, terrorism, famine, and death broadcast to your screens from the Global South. Or far less of this misery, but many more foreign people living in denser cities.” And so it seems to me what you're trying to do is lay out for us a choice. You know, talk to us a little bit about what you think is coming, you seem to suggest that these back-to-back crises that we're seeing now already will get worse and that it will force people to move. And that, in fact, entire, large areas of the planet, where currently billions of people live will simply be uninhabitable. You know, the case is really compelling in the book, but maybe just talk us through how you've come to the conclusion that that's, that's really the likely future we're headed toward? GV Yeah, well, I mean, at the moment, you know, at 1.2 to 1.3 degrees [Celsius] above the pre-industrial average, we saw last year, 3 million people displaced in the United States, there were 33 million people displaced in just a couple of weeks in Pakistan. This is going to continue. So I mean, if you look at the United States, at the moment, the West Coast is almost continuously facing one disaster after another, whether it's wildfires, whether it's drought, whether it's the severe wind storms in the East Coast, there's flooding, you know, that all sorts of disasters, and that's a very wealthy country, which is best able to adapt to a lot of these changes. Well, the extremely hot zones, if you see those maps, and modeled by climate scientists over the century, at the moment, extremely hot zones cover about 1% of the Earth's land surface. By 2070, it will be 20% of the Earth's land surface. And that's home to today about a third of the world's population. All right, we've got 8 billion people living in the world today, by 2050, that will be somewhere between nine and 10 billion. That's an awful lot of people who are living in places, which for much of the year will be unlivable. Now, when you look ahead and try and predict how many people will have to migrate, there are so many variables and all of that. Of course, when you look ahead, there are so many variables anyway, the earth systems are actually almost the least variable of these situations. We kind of know a lot of the trajectories which we will be following by 2050 in terms of heat, flood, fire, drought, all of these risk factors, but how much adaptation are we going to do? How much are we going to help those people move? There are places which today are unlivable, if you look at, say Qatar or Dubai, these are essentially unlivable for most of the year. And yet, they do support populations, wealthy populations that live in completely artificial environments, and crucially, they're small populations. And that's because they have to have everything brought into them, they have their artificial environment, they have all their food brought in or their water brought in, and everything. They live in essentially an air conditioned shopping mall. And that works for a small population. And small populations like that, I have no doubt, through the century, will continue to persist. But then if you look at a city like Mumbai, that's 22 million people, 9 million of whom are living in slum housing, they are living in concrete boxes with a metal roof and temperatures there are already some 8 to 10 degrees [Celsius] above the temperature in Mumbai city proper. So you know, when the temperature rises, they will have air conditioning in some of the big office blocks, the swanky hotels, and so on. As soon as they're switched on, of course, there's huge power outages everywhere, and they run on generators. Now, you know, as the temperature rises, are all of these little boxes going to be given their own aircon units? How on earth would we power that? How would that work? I mean, even the logistics of cooling the air, it's just not it's just not possible for that many people. RK And I imagine the pushback you get from most people is kind of the optimistic view about innovation and technology. That, sure, the planet will be warming, we'll be moving away from fossil fuels as quickly as we can, we’ll therefore mitigate some of that warming, and then in terms of adaptation, there will be new technologies for you know, energy generation and air conditioning units and you know, other tools that will allow whole swaths of the planet to remain habitable because that's got to be easier than moving hundreds of millions or even billions of people. What do you say to that view? GV To a certain extent, it's true, right? Whenever we have ever faced any environmental problem or any other problem throughout our 2- to 300,000-year history of our species, we have used all of our human tools, and they are technology and social tools, they’re both very important. And yes, of course, it's only because of technology that people can live in a lot of these places that should be uninhabitable. People live in the Arctic, they live in the desert, they live in wetlands and rainforests. They shouldn't be able to live there. Other ape species cannot live in this multitude of environment. But we can. And we do that because we adapt, we adapt our environment, and we adapt ourselves using technology. And that will continue to be a tool. But there are limitations, right? And one of the limitations is how many people can live in those situations. Yes, we can create a completely new environment. And we can do that for ourselves, for our crops, for all sorts of things, and it takes energy. And yes, energy, once we've finished this transition to renewables, energy could well become extremely abundant and extremely cheap. And that would be amazing. And it would solve enormous numbers of social and technological problems that we currently face today. Huge inequality that we face, across the globe, a lot of that is driven through unequal access to energy. So that will make things a lot better. But in terms of the large numbers of people that we have, and the livelihoods that we would like to live, we're not happy just living in, you know, a little factory where everybody has a little kind of aircon room, and we stay in that little room, and it's all great for us. That's not, that doesn't give us human purpose. It doesn't give us pleasure, it doesn't give us a livelihood that's worth looking forward to. We live in social situations, we'd like to go outside, people are gonna have to move to places that are more habitable for for our species. We're a mammal, right, we need to regulate our body temperature otherwise we don't survive. We need access to fresh water, we need access to cool temperatures, essentially, to breathe. If the temperature gets too hot, and it's too humid, we suffer from heat stress, the people that live and work in Qatar and Dubai, and these unlivable places that are doing outside labor, in construction industry or whatever. We know what happens to them, right? They die in much greater numbers, they die of heat stress, they have kidney failure, all sorts of other diseases. So it's not healthy to live like that. And in places where the conditions are already like that people are, you know, farmers are farming at night wearing head torches, because it's cooler. That's not living. So technology can potentially cool our atmosphere. But that again, you know, we can use geoengineering solutions, we could use all sorts of, there are ways of bringing the temperature down. But none of this is easy, right? That also involves enormous global agreements, and global negotiations. And you know, just as mass migration does, just as climate mitigation does, none of this is easy. So let's start talking about them. Let's start because I've got no doubt that in the coming decades, we will be using geoengineering to reduce global temperatures. But I would much rather that that was happening by means of a well-discussed democratic agreement between states, between peoples, where communities that are negatively affected are compensated, where there is an acknowledgment that we have limitations to how we do it. And there are agreements and there are processes, rather than states deciding unilaterally that this is an emergency situation, and they're just going to deploy it. Advertisement The world is facing an unprecedented global food crisis. Here at Devex, we're following the state of food insecurity around the world and the solutions that are needed to overcome it. I'm Teresa Welsh, senior reporter, and I'm also the author of Devex Dish, a free weekly newsletter bringing you a comprehensive look at everything that matters in the world of food. Each Wednesday, Devex Dish will be your guide through the interlocking policy, infrastructure, climate, agriculture, nutrition and human rights issues, remaking the way food is grown and distributed. Visit devex.com/newsletters to subscribe and get your weekly update on the race for a sustainable global food system. RK You mentioned before how, especially in the Andean region, South America, you can already see it, I spent a lot of time there and I see it too, rural people have been forced, because of climate changes, less freshwater, and drier conditions, to leave the mountainous rural areas and to come to cities. In the richer world, you see a bit of the opposite, you know, you talk about how in the U.S., the South, states like Florida might become uninhabitable. But more people are moving there now. More people are currently migrating to these hotter climates. And I imagine they're doing it because they, they feel like well, with relatively cheap energy, and with air conditioning and modern construction, we can survive here. They don't have to worry so much. And they're not thinking — there's even people moving into these coastal communities where the water is still rising. You make the case that you think this is kind of temporary. And you even talked about New York City, and say how the plans to build a U-shaped sea wall around the island of Manhattan, could work at some level, but even then might leave half of the island of Manhattan underwater. Just take us through this mentality, because these are presumably smart, educated people who are familiar with climate and yet are doing something quite opposite from what you're expecting maybe they should do. GV Yeah, I mean, this is what I mean, when, you know, when we model ahead looking at Earth systems, there are parameters, the modeling is complicated. It's very complex. And, of course, we can pretty much plot out what various scenarios mean in terms of temperature rise, and so on. When it comes to human behavior in human societies, it's a lot more complex, because people are driven by motivation, motivations beyond having enough water, having a safe place to live, enough food, sex, right, which is what drives most species. Humans are driven by all sorts of other motivations. And yes, I think, first of all, that even if people intellectually understand the threat of climate change, emotionally, it's much harder to believe that the world has massively changed. I think there are reckonings that come every now and again, if it's your community that's affected, year after year, by not being able to open their windows because of smoke from wildfires, you know, that's really unpleasant that happened, you know, after a while, people start thinking actually, do I want to live here? You know, when they're flooded out, year after year, that's another problem. So, you know, in the absence of these kind of unbearable situations, it takes a bit of time. But, you know, we're also driven by financial concerns, and the insurance industry is a lot better at deciding what is risky and what is not. And places like that are just going to become too expensive to insure. So people won't be able to buy property, buy farmland, buy businesses on flood, you know, where there's a flood risk, where there's fire risk, where there's risk that they won't have access to enough water, all of those things. And the worry, actually, is that people will end up being trapped in these places unable to sell their properties and unable to move to safer locations because they've left it too late. Because no one's going to want to buy somewhere that's a massive flood risk and is uninsurable. And so that's where government policy really needs to help this. You know, movement is hard, it is hard to migrate. We live entirely dependent on other people. We're very hyper social species. That is the key to our success. As a species we rely on this network, not just our blood relatives, but complete strangers to support everything we do. And to leave that network to leave that ability to know where you can get someone to look after your kids, someone who can check in on your parents, who can help you find the job that you need, where you can find work, people who speak your language, all of that, and where you have history and where you feel that you belong. To leave all that is a wrench. And it's very difficult. And for many people, many people who find themselves in climate disasters, actually already know that they shouldn't be living there. But they, you know, they didn't want to leave. People who are living in the Keys right now, they're not living in complete ignorance, they know that they're being flooded, but they don't want to leave. Because that's where their home is, that's where their family is. And when you're forced to leave, when you have to move somewhere where you don't know anybody, where you might not be able to get a job straight away, where you, you're very poor, because your entire wealth is held in the land that you did have, you know, where you may face huge amounts of prejudice because of your skin color, because of your accent, because of your religion, or the clothes you wear, or whatever, it's a really hard decision to make. And if we're going to help people to adapt by moving, we have to make that easier. RK I mean, what you're imagining, you're talking, for example, in the book about how many of the cities and countries in the global north are aging, very quickly, you know, the fertility rates are very low, and they're going to need young workers. And, and what you just said, now, you could imagine young Nigerians for example, 17, 18, 19, university age, instead of going to university in their country, making the decision to move North, go to university in the U.K., and they're become part of a future workforce that that would be needed. And you can see the logic in that, of course, but kind of similar to what I said about people moving to places of greater danger in some parts of the world right now. It feels like governments are moving in the opposite direction of that vision. They're, they're building walls, they're putting up more barriers to migration than ever, and the politics of migration have gotten worse, not better, even as you're calling for governments to kind of change their perspective on this. Do you think that there will be some sort of a tipping point where the politics will shift in and of themselves naturally? Because if you look at sort of the science fiction films and literature around this, it seems to go in the other direction, right? Of more walls, of more barriers, of the people who have everything, the technology, the wealth, walling themselves in from the masses who are trying to get there? How do you think this might actually play out? GV Well, I think that's really interesting that you brought up science fiction, because I think when we do think of the future, we have so many examples of the dystopian, devastating future. But isn't it just as easy and just as helpful, perhaps more helpful, to think of a positive future? I mean, really, when I wrote this book, I wanted to say, at the moment, what's happening is we're not imagining the future at all, really. And when we do imagine it, it's really awful. So as a result, we're kind of making that mental choice not to think about it and just going along with the day to day, and actually, we're facing huge numbers of crises, it's not good enough to do that anymore. We need to have a vision of a future that we want, a livable future that we want. And ideally, that's something that we've discussed, and we've agreed, democratically, a path, you know, a vision that we want. And then we set out the steps to get there. Because it isn't necessarily terrible, the future, it's very easy to just sort of, to go down that route. Because it's quite compelling from a science fiction novel, everybody likes a catastrophe. But actually, it could be better. At the moment we live with huge amounts of environmental degradation. People live with appalling injustice, no access to energy, to clean water, all sorts of, you know, we're not living in the ideal world at the moment. We can imagine better as well as worse. And, you know, better is within our reach. At the moment, we do have many choices. As you say, there is a lot of anti-migrant sentiment out there in leadership. We have been living through really quite a sort of a surge in populace leaders and, and inadequate, really inadequate leaders, not visionary people. You were talking about a tipping point in terms of the demographic crisis that we're facing, where we're not having enough babies in many parts of the world to support our aging population. And that is a real problem. Many places around the world have got really rapidly shrinking populations and huge, important labor force shortages, some of which has been caused by poor handling of the pandemic leading to long COVID and disability, so people can't work and can't rejoin the workforce. Even in these countries, we may see the government saying, you know, with one hand, turn back the boats or send them back to Mexico, whatever the populist rhetoric is; at the same time, they're sort of secretly going come in come in, we need, farm laborers, hospitality workers, nurses, aged care workers, we haven't got enough workers. Of course, and that's going to reach a tipping point. But I think it's also really interesting to note that, where I live in Britain, we've obviously had a lot of conversations nationally about immigration, that the Brexit decision was largely based on a campaign led by fear of migration, fear of immigration. That decision was some years ago now. And if you look at where we are, in terms of our leadership, we have a home secretary, which is prioritizing limiting asylum seekers ability to reach British shores, it's putting in place strategies to send people to Rwanda, which is just kind of unbelievable, actually, I mean, it's completely illogical and unworkable. And it makes no sense from any perspective at all. But if you look at surveys of the British population, you find some of the lowest levels of xenophobia, globally. So acceptance of immigrants is at an all time high. Basically, the general public is in a completely different place from the leadership. And so when it comes to tipping points in, in this conversation in this anti migrant narrative, I think we're pretty close in Britain, and in Europe, generally, we will be. And that will be driven by two things; first of all, the amount of migrants that we have, at the moment, the number of people is pretty small, but migration is going to grow. And soon there will be a pragmatic acceptance, that it's not possible to just turn people back, we have to have ways of managing it, we have to have fair processes, and there has to be a system. At the moment that it's broken, this whole migration system is broken, it's not working for anybody. And the other thing is, in terms of economies, European economies, American economies, they all rely on immigration, and to an increasing extent. If you look at Canada, it has a national policy to triple its population over the coming decades. And it wants to become an economic powerhouse. And it's a very lucky country in terms of its position geographically on the globe. So that's perfectly possible. RK When you think about those attitudinal changes, and Canada might be the best example, and you talk about it in the book, that they're already there, in some ways. It's going to be countries like Canada, like the United States, you talked about Alaska being a key place for people to migrate, some of the northern parts of the U.S., the Great Lakes region, you talk about Scotland, and Iceland, and you talk about the Nordic countries, and especially Russia, which could have large numbers of Chinese migrants perhaps, it is going to take a totally different attitude for people living in those countries today, to envision building many new cities that are not just a small minority of migrants, but that are filled with migrants, that are far more migrants from other places than maybe the native born people of those countries. It's quite a significant attitudinal shift that's required for us to get to this more positive vision that you're imagining we could get to. GV Yeah, and it's going to be huge upheaval, whatever the century, and it's going to take investment, it's going to take financial investment, making sure that we have adequate funds for health care provision for education, for housing, all of infrastructure, but also social investment, and that's what's been lacking a lot. So that investment in really developing an inclusive idea of what nationhood means, that it isn't based on some sort of ethno-nationalism, right, which is anyway biologically nonsense. There is no kind of pure blooded person from anywhere. We are all a mix, mixture a mishmash, from all sorts of different things. And we're not all, we're not sort of one unique identity, we can hold multitudes in our head, we can be, you know, Indian, Canadian, as well as someone who lives in Toronto, or someone who is a banker, but also loves the opera. We can hold all sorts of different ideas and identities in our head, and one does not diminish the other, there will be conflict, but these can be resolved, like multiethnic societies work very well, they're the most productive societies on Earth, they're called cities, right? Cities are built from immigration, that's how they exist, it's people coming from other places in the country, or from overseas, who build those cities. Many of the societies, like the United States, is created really in the last century or so, by immigration, by people from all over the world, you know, finding this common sort of identity and speaking the same language, as well as multiple other languages and creating this idea of a nation. And it is an idea, it's just an idea. We can do it again. But we need to, I think we need to do it deliberately this time, right? Not by accident, not by conflict, not by colonization, but by negotiation, by planning, because we are facing all of us wherever we live, this global earth system challenge to our species and to our societies. And, you know, none of us can afford for another country to disappear or to go completely, you know, if there are endless power outages, droughts, famine in, say, China, that doesn't, it doesn't mean we're unaffected in France, or Britain, or the United States. We're all connected, that affects our economy affects our food supplies, we've had that huge lesson through the pandemic. We're all affected. And when it comes to very fast global change, you know, anything's possible, look how quickly people responded by self-isolating at home, staying at home. That was incredible. And we didn't do it because the government was outside with a gun at our door. You know, we did it by collective acceptance and acknowledgement of the threat and a collective agreement to behave in a certain way to limit the danger. And I think it will, it will happen that way. But we need to take the steps. RK You talk in the book about the nation state as a relatively recent concept, and how even when countries like France and Italy were first conceived that only a small percentage of the population spoke the native language. And you do a great job, I think, showing that nation states are recent and can shift and change, and that cities … around a lot longer, and they will be key to the future. And then you make a point about the need for a stronger kind of global governance structure. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about that. You talk about maybe the United Nations having much more power, or some new agency that can really govern this idea of global migration. What are you envisioning there? GV I mean, the United Nations is not having a particularly good time in terms of PR, there have been all sorts of times they’ve, shall I say, fallen short. But at the moment, you know, we face these, these global crises. And it's our best sort of institution, I guess, to deal with some of these problems. If you look at the COP negotiations for climate, right. I mean, I'd be the first to criticize how that's gone. It's taken decades to get to some sort of agreement. We're going far too slowly. And, you know, that's why we're in this huge mess. But I think it's really interesting that there is a negotiation set up where every country, no matter how big, no matter how tiny, has a seat at that table, and that's really important. And not only have they got a seat, but they have influence. And I think we're seeing a shift change in how responsibilities and and, you know, the injustice is being dealt with globally by different nations. So, for the first time last November in 2022, there was an acceptance that wealthy countries should pay for losses and damages incurred by climate change to poor countries. Now, that might not seem like much, but that is a huge, huge step change. You know, it's not so long ago that many of these countries almost thought it was their divine right to impose their rule on these nations. And now they're accepting that something that not even they did, but their ancestors did, because the pollution that we're producing now will affect future generations, what we're experiencing now is the effect of the pollution our parents, grandparents really produced. So there's an acceptance that that has an unequal impact. And that we should, even if the word “compensate” is not directly being used, that we have a responsibility for people who are poorer, and who are receiving more impacts. And that is really interesting. I think there is a change going on, globally, in the morality around this. And that will affect where people live. We've also got the Law of the Sea, which is currently being negotiated right now around who has the right to exploit, say, a new sea urchin that proves to have cancer solving potential. Would it just be Big Pharma, and the U.S.? Or would the people of the small island state get a benefit, and that's being negotiated now. So I think it's, I think there is this new idea of a global ethics, which is starting to be legislated for, and I think it will have direct impact. And when we talk about the mass movement of people, what we're talking about, if you zoom out, really zoom out, and have a look at our planet, this kind of blue sphere, beautiful sphere, the only form of life in the universe. And it's got this one species, which is dispersed everywhere, this one ape, everywhere, it's built its cities, these little pathetic lego things that can be washed away by storms and landslides, and so on. And it lives everywhere. And then you apply heat to that and look where the heat is. And it's in this big, you know, by mid-century, this huge band around the tropics, coastlines become pretty dangerous, river deltas, where most major cities are where most people live, really dangerous. And then you find this strips of land where, you know, everywhere is affected by climate change, but the impacts are much less in the far north, those lands in the far north, and they're changing rapidly, so rapidly, like some of the fastest changes in the planet is happening in the Arctic right now. What would you do? Right, you would move those people to safety. And, of course, if they're little stick people, and you're some sort of huge god, you can do that. But we are trapped, of course, in these social political systems, and we can't move like that. So I think we need a global body, a global agency to help manage how people can move and to start thinking about this process. Maybe it will just be hundreds of millions, maybe it will be billions. We don't know, but let's start planning for it. RK You know, we had a question come in from one of our readers about sort of what this means to you personally, you mentioned in the book, as a mom that you were kind of panicked Googling, should we move to Canada? You know, what do we do? How have the realizations that you've come to in writing the book, how have they actually affected the kind of personal choices you're making about where to live? Where to have your kids educated, what they might end up doing? How are you thinking about that personally? GV Yeah, well, I mean, it's true. You know, we moved home I guess, five, six years ago, and we chose somewhere that was on top of the hill, rather than on the bottom of a hill for reasons of flood, right? Because that's going to be an increasing problem in London. But in terms of the future, my children are 7 and 9, 10, actually just turned 10, he’d be very upset if I called him 9. And when I think about their future, do I want them conscripted into an army to fight Bangladeshi migrants or Nigerian migrants? You know, I would much rather that they were living in denser cities with a Bangladeshi neighbor and a Nigerian neighbor. That's a much more positive outcome for me. So yeah, of course I do. I do worry about their future. And I worry about it because in a lot of talks that I've given a lot of public events, it is increasingly the young people who seem to feel the gravity of what we're facing. And they feel it in quite a panicked, anxiety-driven way, which is awful. It's awful, that we've left them with that, and this is a generational thing. If we talk about, for example, the reluctance over immigration, it is the older generation, actually, who are much more fearful of migrants, the younger generation are much, much more accepting, they've grown up in schools and neighborhoods where people look different from each other, they might have different accents, they're not afraid of this, these are their school friends, or their school, friends, parents, or you know, it's not a, it's not such a big deal in the way that it was for the older generation. So this is going to change, I just think we need to do it faster. RK You know, I mentioned earlier, science fiction movies, and how dystopian they can be. There's also a genre of science fiction movies that are about alien invasions that are actually much more utopian, that talks about the planet coming together and finding some common approach. And I hope people reading this book, and I hope the conversation you're trying to spark leads to that kind of a realization that we are all in this together. It's an insightful book, in so many ways, really eye-opening. And at least for me, working in global development, one of the key takeaways is just how quickly the context in which we work is shifting, and that even people in our own field who are so awakened to these issues around climate and deal with migration issues every day, that that even we have to be aware of how much more quickly things are going to shift and what that means for those who are dedicated to working on issues like health and education, and supporting and serving refugees and others. GV So climate change is largely the academic study of it is largely driven by Earth scientists, so physicists, atmospheric chemists, and so on, who worked with modeling, and they, you know, they can see this dramatic change coming. Whereas migration studies is driven by social scientists, who sort of look back at and extrapolate, you know, how migration has occurred in the past, and it's quite slow. And you know, there are pushes and pools, and it's, and you can see that sort of slightly increasing. But the problem is that these two need to come together, we need to realize that it's not going to be how it was in the past, you know, there's a natural disaster, people move, you know, a large number of people are displaced, some people go back — what we are facing is unprecedented, we are facing really dramatic system changes, which will completely change the social system. And it's hard to, it's hard to imagine such a big change. But I want us to, you know, I want us to have a vision of a future, and, and then to choose, we have so many choices we really do at the moment, but to choose those parts, consciously and deliberately, and go down with the end in sight of something better, rather than muddling along. RK Well, thank you so much, Gaia, for the book. It really is, I think, an important contribution to the conversation and for taking the time to be with us here on the Devex Book club. It's been fantastic to talk with you. GV It's been a massive pleasure, Raj. Thank you so much for having me on. RK Gaia Vince is a science writer and broadcaster. You can follow her on Twitter at @WanderingGaia. Thank you all for joining. If you liked the podcast, please share with your friends and give us five stars. And we really do want to hear from you. Please leave your thoughts in the comments or send me a message on Twitter at @raj_devex. To learn what we're reading next, make suggestions for future guests or submit questions for authors, be sure to sign up for our Devex Book Club mailing list, which you can find in the description of the show wherever you're listening to this. 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