Nomad Century: How to Survive the Climate Upheaval

Product Information

Vince, an environmental journalist, stresses that climate displacement is already under way, with people fleeing parts of Latin America, Asia and Africa. The result would be widespread and perpetual conflict across the world, and a tragic new chapter of suffering in human history. Ice melt and coral reef loss are already dangerously accelerating: solar reflectivity, such as cloud brightening, should be deployed without delay, and other technologies to reduce temperatures should be explored. But today we lack a coherent plan; we are simply experiencing our world heating up, and reacting to each new shock – each drought, each typhoon, each blazing forest, each heaving boat of migrants – with a new patch-​­up. The number of migrants has doubled globally over the past decade, and the issue of what to do about rapidly increasing populations of displaced people will only become greater and more urgent as the planet heats.

What this misses is that the very process of treating parts of life as beyond politics – for example, by allowing society to be increasingly governed by market dynamics – has led to a resurgence of the “tribalism” Vince wants us to move beyond. She highlights the wealth of evidence showing that it enriches both migrants and their destinations and attacks the rhetoric of British politicians and media who seek to demonise asylum seekers who arrive on our shores. In Nomad Century, Vince provides, for the first time, an examination of the most pressing question facing humanity. In the global south, extreme climate change will push vast numbers of people from their homes, with large regions becoming uninhabitable; in the planet’s more comfortable north, economies will struggle to survive demographic changes with massive workforce shortages and an impoverished elderly population. But we do now have to contemplate an extraordinary future in which the impact of global heating makes the migration of billions inevitable.Nomad Century is a landmark work - terrifying in its message and urgency, but ultimately empowering in its conviction about a path forward. This means having the courage to envision a different way of being a human: in effect, unsticking people from their fixed abodes and setting them free to roam, free to seek the safe places. Gaia Vince calmly — without drum-banging or hand-wringing — sets forth likely consequences and end-of-century projections for our rapidly changing planet.

The Neukölln neighbourhood of Berlin, for instance, welcomed tens of thousands of refugees from Syria’s brutal civil war, creating new jobs and economic opportunities. Aiming to foster the fruitful exchange of expertise and perspectives across fields to help us rise to this critical challenge, opinions expressed do not necessarily represent the views of the OECD. I make and present science documentaries for radio and television, and I give talks around the world. While the climate catastrophe is finally getting the attention it deserves, the inevitability of mass migration has been largely ignored.The coming migration of billions of people from the tropics can be planned, with new cities constructed to accommodate the climate migrants and provide them with the opportunity to build new lives. Fleeing the tropics, the coasts and formerly arable lands, huge populations will need to seek new homes; you will be among them, or you will be receiving them. The Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, has said that she dreams of sending planes full of migrants to Rwanda. This isn't a distant or unrealistic prospect: climate models suggest we're currently heading towards a 3°C-4°C rise by the end of the century - less than three generations away. This is as close to the truth, to the real story of the corruption, vulgarities, horrors, and lies of the Kingdom and its current despot as we are likely to get.

Brought together, this new population mix can adapt and build cities capable of withstanding the new extremes of flood, fire, drought and heat. But policymakers are in denial about the number of people who will be forced to move as the impacts of climate change become more profound, argues the scientist Gaia Vince in Nomad Century: How to Survive the Climate Upheaval (John Murray). This isn't a distant or unrealistic prospect: climate models suggest we're currently heading towards a 3 DegreesC-4 DegreesC rise by the end of the century - less than three generations away. Through astonishing interviews with powerful insiders, Blood and Oil tells how MBS's cabal played the Saudi economy and capitalised on the omnipotence of feudal power while effectively stamping out dissent, before allegations of his extreme brutality and excess began to slip out. 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.

The climate crisis already has millions of people on the move, and that number will steadily grow higher till it breaks the political structures of the planet - unless, as the author suggests, we start now to remake those structures so they can cope, and indeed benefit, from the flow of humans that is now inevitable. Read this to understand our future -- Henry Mance Nomad Century will broaden your horizon when thinking about the biggest humanitarian crisis of known history. However, China has more successfully managed the flow of about 400 million people into its cities over the past three decades through huge construction and infrastructure programmes. The final part of this book describes how and why would-be Caesars come to grief, from the Gunpowder Plot to Trump's march on the Capitol and the ejection of Boris Johnson by his own MPs, and ends with a defence of the grubby glories of parliamentary politics and a thought-provoking roadmap of the way back to constitutional government.

This book is a passion project born out of frustration for the way we are dealing with the biggest crisis humanity has faced in its history. But before you hit the ground, she hands over an impressively detailed survival plan: supporting radical migration from newly uninhabitable regions, rethinking urban structures and food practices, restoring climate.My first choice is Nomad Century by Gaia Vince, a brilliant and disturbing analysis of how climate change will affect the world's migration patterns. Vince's perspectives and proposals are refreshing in a world where a Don't-Look-Up-style denial is solidly in place. The question, she says, is whether the transition will be managed calmly or whether "hunger and conflict will erupt - an unconscionable outcome that would endanger us all" -- Anhana Ahuja, Books of the Year * New Statesman * After a year in which wildfires, storms and floods have driven thousands from their homes, this book's warning about a rising population of climate migrants has a chilling resonance.