‘We have to adapt’ – Gaia Vince on cities, tech and climate migrants
The climate upheaval is already, arguably, underway.
If your home gets destroyed, if the lush land you once farmed turns into a desert, or if your very life is endangered by your environment, what would you do? Some people move. Studies indicate that climate change is already forcing people to relocate and growing numbers – perhaps many millions – are at risk of what researchers call “displacement”.
Gaia Vince, author of Nomad Century: How to Survive the Climate Upheaval, has thought a lot about this problem. In her book, published in 2022, she spells out the severe risks that many humans face from climate change, and yet manages to inject optimism into the picture: we, as a species, have technologies and strategies that can help us – to save lives, livelihoods, and the planet, too.
Recently, I spoke to Vince about her book and her outlook for the future. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Why did you write your book?
Movement is completely normal – it’s how animals, plants, and life itself responds to a problematic environment. I felt like no-one was talking about this, no-one was being honest about the extent of climate change that we were experiencing now, and would be experiencing in the future. I guess I wrote the book out of a sense of frustration.
Even people who could be described as “climate refugees” didn’t see themselves as climate migrants. A person might move to the city for a better job – but the underlying reason for their search might be that chronic drought in the place where they grew up has made their pre-existing livelihood unsustainable.
When you talk about the “climate upheaval”, can you put a figure on that? How many people are going to move because of climate change?
There isn’t an exact number. We’re expecting to see an expanding area that would be considered “unliveable”, certainly for months of the year, across the tropics. Let’s say, as a ballpark estimate, three billion people will find themselves facing “unliveable” conditions in the coming decades. Will they all move? No. People don’t want to move. It’s hard to do, they have their language, their social networks. But we can’t protect everywhere on Earth.
You discuss how cities and architecture could change to accommodate climate migrants, such as the “partial houses” designed by Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena. How would that work?
It’s an effort to design something that is cheap enough for people to afford and meets their absolute basic needs. So it will have a water supply, electricity, it will be secure, it will have a roof. But it will also be something that the occupants can then develop themselves. This gives people agency in their own lives and futures. It’s a way of building flexibility into cities that I quite like.
Often, a wealthy commercial house-builder will buy a parcel of land and develop it in the very cheapest way possible. I don’t feel like that is remotely inclusive, that doesn’t help people. It very rarely enhances a city. Whereas occasionally there are parts of cities and towns that have been built by the community – where it’s a collective that has bought the land. These houses are built to be lived in.
What specific impacts of climate change might force someone to consider migrating?
I call them the Four Horsemen of the Anthropocene – fire, flood, heat and drought. To take flooding, there are large areas of modern cities where river courses have been constrained and businesses established in places where they might have been at risk of flood once every three to five hundred years. Such flooding could now happen much more frequently. Heat, also, is a killer that is completely unappreciated at the moment. It’s become a major problem and can affect rates of miscarriage, heart attack and stroke.
What can we do about all this?
Everywhere on Earth is going to have to adapt, to some extent. People already live in unliveable places – from the deserts of the Middle East to Antarctica. In the worst-affected locations, small, heavily adapted populations will likely cling on thanks to technology. Thinking about flooding again, consider the potential benefits of rain gardens, which have become popular in China. We can adapt urban infrastructure to be more resilient to extreme rainfall, for instance.
And, in the effort to cut emissions and avert the worst climate impacts, people will likely use energy in a much more passive way, generating their own from sources such as solar or geothermal heat. Electric car batteries can be hooked up to the grid to provide backup power. We can think of them as community batteries, essentially. We will all be part of this huge movement, we’ll all be generating our own energy in various ways.
Some people say we don’t have enough time or resources to adapt to climate change and that all our efforts should be spent on cutting emissions. What do you think?
None of this is easy. We’ve made it very, very hard for ourselves by allowing emissions to rise so much. Now, everything we do is against the backdrop of extreme and deadly climate events. But we have to adapt to these conditions. If we don’t, it’s like saying we shouldn’t treat people with measles, or HIV, or Covid-19 – we should only inoculate them. I think we need to have grown-up conversations about how we manage things. Those conversations start with accepting that we are living in a post-climate change world now.
Yes, it was taboo for a long time to talk about adaptation, which seems completely crazy. This is something that is part of our DNA. We are one of the most adaptable species around. That’s how we survive.
Further reading on this week’s story
Gaia Vince’s book Nomad Century: How to Survive the Climate Upheaval is available in hardback, paperback and audiobook editions.
There are lots of resources for anyone interested in how cities will adapt to climate change but this brief article from the London School of Economics lists some key examples succinctly.
Climate migrants could emerge anywhere, not just in developing countries. This 2018 article in The Guardian includes the experiences of five people across the US who left their homes because of extreme weather.
You might also enjoy this article on the “climate-driven diaspora” by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson.
A recent article from ETH Zurich suggests that while climate change is already forcing some people to move, they often do not migrate to other countries.