Gaia Vince: It is inevitable. People are already moving. But what’s happening is they’re not necessarily moving to safety. They’re moving from rural areas to cities and that is happening because rural livelihoods are becoming impossible under these conditions and because villages are being washed away and rural areas are becoming unlivable, whereas cities generally have more of the infrastructure and the institutions to help people. But what happens is a lot of people are arriving in slum accommodation which is the most vulnerable part of cities and they are then trapped there because they’ve quite often used their resources to move to cities and can’t move on. So I’m talking about facilitating migration because a lot of people can’t move to safety, they don’t have the finances, they can’t cross borders because of our border limitations. It’s actually quite difficult to migrate even when you’ve got all the resources to hand, if you’ve ever tried moving house you’ll know. What we’re talking about is a sort of tropical band and areas of coastland, small Island states, places around big rivers becoming increasingly unlivable for large numbers of the population. Not everybody living there will have to move, but they can’t sustain these massive populations that they currently have. We’re talking about tens of millions, possibly hundreds of millions to billions over the coming decade having to move. Now we can either leave that situation, as we’re doing at the moment and put up totally inadequate barriers and turn it into a horrific conflict zone as we have for very small trickles of migration compared to what we’re expecting. Or we can put plans in place to actually facilitate and manage this migration so that it helps produce economically vibrant, growing cities in safer places. Everywhere around the planet is going to have to adapt to the new conditions of the Anthropocene, to this changed world that we’re all living in. But some places will be better able to adapt. They have the resources, they are less affected by climate change. They have stronger institutions. They’re just more resilient and these places will be receivers of large numbers of people.
And it needs to be managed so that people moving… and they will largely be moving for work. You know migration is not a security issue. It has been completely framed as a security issue. It’s really a labour issue and if you think you know, all of the trade facilitation that we have in place to get commodities and resources moving swiftly around the world in order to boost economies everywhere. Well human labour is the biggest resource we have. It is the biggest part of our economy and what we’ve been doing is hampering that. So helping people move to jobs and making sure that people are properly included so they don’t live in segregated cities where they are not included in society and in the formal economy, we have examples where that has tragically happened and led to all kinds of difficult outcomes. Sweden is the most obvious example, coming to mind today because we’ve just had the Swedish elections. But if we can facilitate that migration we can move people to safety, we can help feed people in different ways and create new infrastructure that is sustainable and resilient and build hopeful cities with thriving economies. The whole of the Northern hemisphere basically is suffering a demographic crisis and that is going to hit home very soon actually because you know we’re simply not having enough babies to support the ageing population. We need the stimulus of new workforce and we will only achieve that through immigration. Leaders know that, whatever they publicly say in anti-immigration rhetoric. They absolutely know that their economies depend really heavily on immigration and this is a way if it’s managed well that we can meet those two objectives.
Kate Whiting: I think that’s a really good point about the workforce shortages that we have in parts of the world and it doesn’t really make sense when there are so many people who need to move for work. And it makes obvious sense to us that you want to fill those gaps. I think you also mention somebody had said that if borders were removed completely GDP would increase by $90 trillion and so actually migration brings with it economic benefits to countries as well.
Gaia Vince: There have been quite a few different calculations but they are phenomenal if you would completely remove borders because people move generally to where the jobs are and if the jobs are there, it’s because there are vacancies, they need people to fill them. People organise themselves much better, they don’t need the enormous numbers of security barriers that prevent people from just creating their own networks and their own economies.
Kate Whiting: Yeah I think also in light of the war in Ukraine where we’ve seen, Europe can take in… the UK where we are talking now has taken in refugees in the homes for Ukraine programme, who are now finding jobs and adding to the economy. So we know that it can happen in an orderly manner and I suppose it’s really a question of how that happens and what needs to happen and you mention in the book the role of the UN as part of that.
Gaia Vince: The UN is flawed. I think we’ve all seen the evidence for that. But nevertheless in the short time that we have to really address this issue, it is the only body that can carry out international, global negotiations on this level. I think we’ll probably start with regional agreements like for example within the European Union, there is free movement of labour. I think that will probably expand and we’ll get agreements across other regions and then these will tie up and we’ll get those global agreements coming out of that. And various regions are already in the process of forming their own free movement areas for labour. This is something that needs to be managed properly and it will take investment, it absolutely will, but that investment will be more than repaid you know. Initially you do have to put money in to ensure that when large numbers of people come, that the healthcare system, the social systems are in place can actually respond to that. So people do have enough housing, they do have access to education and so on and that native populations don’t feel pushed out or that there is a conflict over resources. It also takes investment in the narrative in actually countering this very poisonous hostile anti-immigration narrative with some facts about immigration: that they don’t increase immigrants, don’t increase crime, that they actually increase the productivity of an economy, they increase the number of jobs and generally wages, when they move in. There’s plenty of research to back that up now. For politicians and policymakers to remain silent as these narratives go unchallenged has led to a really worrying situation, where nations rely entirely on immigrants for their cities to thrive and yet people are confused about whether immigrants actually are a hostile threat to them or whether they should welcome them in.
Kate Whiting: When you were writing your first book, which won the Royal Society of Science Prize, you were the first woman to win that prize and so congratulations for that, Adventures in Anthropocene, you spent two and a half years travelling around the globe. What kind of things did you see and people that you met who were actually struggling now with the impact of climate change?
Gaia Vince: Well I mean everything. So I met people in small island states in the Indian Ocean, in Kiribati and in the Maldives, whose houses had been washed away, who would point to the sea essentially and say ‘oh yes, that’s where our school was’ – there is a visible change. It’s happening so fast that people can see from year-to-year huge change. Then you know, the other end of the scale, in the Andes, so many villages that are being completely deserted because the rains just never came, they just never came and they’re completely dependent on glacial meltwater or rainwater and the glaciers are all gone now. So it’s rain or nothing and then I would find them in the slums of the cities. And it’s easy for a lot of people to imagine that as things get hotter, you do need to adapt, perhaps you buy air conditioning units. Perhaps you change the shape of the house a bit so that it’s insulated or a bit cooler. You know for the many millions something like 9 million slum dwellers in Mumbai alone who are living in basically concrete boxes with corrugated metal roofs, hard up against each other with little alleyways in between, they cannot adapt to the heat that is coming. They’re already 6 to 10 degrees hotter in those slum houses than they are in the proper city of Mumbai, the proper built infrastructure. While some swanky hotels and shopping malls have got aircon, as soon as the heat gets to a certain level, all you can hear is generators pumping out because there are power outages immediately. And you know these generators are running on fossil fuels and so the air is affected. The idea that all of these slum dwellers will have aircon units is ridiculous. You know that would immediately cause a power outage and how would that air be cooled and I mean it’s just not possible.
Mumbai is also affected because it’s on the edge of the ocean, it’s also affected by flood waters as well as extreme heat. There will be a population in Mumbai, it’s going to be a much smaller population, this enormous 20 million population, the majority are going to have to move over the coming decades and perhaps a large number by 2050. That’s the period of time that most mortgages are out. You know that’s the time since 1992, since the Queen’s last jubilee or Billy Ray Cyrus’s Achy Breaky Heart – it’s not that long ago. When we make big financial decisions over what house we’re going to buy or what car we’re going to buy, they are expected to last over that time period. We really need to bear in mind that the world will be very different in 2050, is that financial purchase you’re making a good investment or are you going to be stuck somewhere that you cannot sell? You can’t move from because it’s too risky, it’s in a fire risk zone. We’ve seen wildfires spontaneously erupt even in the UK, let alone across Europe and the US, it’s now continual we’ve had that in Australia for some time But in the UK it’s already happening, so we need to think about that: fire, flood, heat all of these things are really threatening where we live now and will be pushing people to move.
Kate Whiting: I think that’s a really good point that you make about how it’s going to affect everybody. In the book you say about houses in Florida, really enormous mansions and they can’t get insurance and things and obviously then you know how it affects people in slums in Mumbai or Nairobi. So I guess the question is where will these people be living. You say in the book, there are certain areas and also what those houses will look like? There are initiatives that will create lots of homes for people. So what does that look like?
Gaia Vince: Well, we’re going to be largely moving north. We need to move to higher latitudes and if you look at the globe there isn’t much land in higher latitudes in the global south because of the shape of the continents, so we will be moving north. Some cities will be expanded, some existing cities. Churchill, Manitoba, for example, which is a small kind of polar bear outpost at the moment, but it’s in a strategically important place. It’s on the Hudson Bay which will be increasingly experiencing ice-free summers. It’s also linked by railways to the rest of the United States, so it’s in quite a good zone, so places like that will be expanding, places like Scotland, places in Scandinavia, Iceland, Greenland. If we look from space, we can already see visible greening of the Arctic. This part of the planet is heating up four times faster than anywhere else and over the next couple of decades, we’re going to see dramatic change to this whole kind of Arctic belt. Other places we’re going to need entirely new cities built by largely a migrant workforce just as the United States was settled by immigrants, just as Australia was settled by immigrants, we’re going to see that happening.
And the kinds of houses we build will have to be appropriate for the Anthropocene conditions so they will need to be built out of sustainable materials. We’ll be moving away from very carbon-intensive materials like concrete and cement. And moving to a lot more things like cross-laminated timber houses. The buildings will have to be very well insulated and much more passive but also they will work harder for producing their own energy, recycling a lot of things like water and air systems throughout them. They will be dense housing considering the number of people that we will have to house. If you consider the global population is going from today’s eight billion up to nine or ten billion by the 2060s before it’s likely coming down to today’s number by the end of the century. That fluctuation means we need some flexibility in our housing structures in our cities and how we plan them.
Studies show that housing that is dense and is mixed – so there’s residential combined with utilitarian combined with commercial industrial all sorts of purposes within the same sort of blocks, everything being walkable rather than zoned off, this is a residential area and then you have to drive to the commercial district or the industrial – having them all closely together makes the most sense in terms of social cohesion and inclusivity of the population, which is really what you want. In terms of the density of the housing itself, architecturally it looks like four to six stories is about right. If you think about the Parisian blocks of housing, that’s about four to six stories generally. So we’re thinking of blocks about that sort of height, any higher and people feel more disenfranchised, they are left out of the shared social areas of the street, and any lower, you start getting these big suburb-style housing complexes that are disenfranchising as well in the US. So there’s a lot of evidence to support dense housing and cities that are genuinely inclusive and this does take investment. It does take investment from government in terms of finance, but also in terms of that really important community building and inclusive messaging.
Kate Whiting: And one of the huge challenges we’ll face alongside rehoming people is how to feed them. We’re seeing huge amounts of feed insecurity already because of drought and lack of water. So how do we go about feeding a 9 billion population?
Gaia Vince: This century is all change. It really is a huge upheaval in every single aspect of our lives because we’re very much living the lives of Victorian or Twentieth Century people where resources were plentiful, the climate was nice and reliable and the global population was quite low. We’ve moved. We’ve left that zone already and we’re moving into much more dangerous territory where people will have to move but also agriculture will have to move – a lot of places will not be agriculturally viable. There won’t be the labour force to do that agriculture as well. I mean already we’re seeing drought everywhere and large agricultural yields losses and hunger across from Yemen to Mali. We’re already seeing the seeds of what will come, so agriculture is something that will have to be completely transformed and the biggest change will be moving to almost completely plant-based diets. So that immediately cuts out the huge ecological destruction of livestock agriculture because not only are forests and other wildlands converted to keep livestock but also to produce the food that is then fed to livestock. It’s an incredibly inefficient way of producing food for humans. So we will move to plant-based diets and also some novel foods. When I say novel, I mean novel to us as westerners, for other places in the world have been eating these foods for a lot longer and that’s things like seaweeds and insects. If you feel squeamish about insects, I think they’re delicious, I’ve eaten them across Asia and in other places. They can be ground up into protein meals that can be added to processed foods or sprinkled on top of other dishes and it’s perfectly delicious.
Kate Whiting: And you won’t even know you’re eating them.
Gaia Vince: It’s a very sustainable form of protein because insects can be kept anywhere. You don’t have to have a huge field. You don’t have to deforest the Amazon to put insects there. You can house them within cities if you want or in car parks, it’s much easier. There are also other forms, so we can get proteins and pretty much all the nutrients we need from genetically modified bacteria, algae, even fungi. These can be grown in vats wherever and they will be added to our regular meals. We’re already eating meat replacement products whether they’re veggie burgers or veggie sausages. These are largely made up of meat protein replacements made from plants or modified or other modified organisms. We will move there slower or faster I think. If you look at the way dairy is being phased out, the number of milk replacements: nut milks or pea milks or oat milk, we seem to have already reached a tipping point in that. That will be a huge change and it will free up a large amount of land that can then be rewilded and restored and that’s really key because during this century, ideally, if we manage it well, we will – at the same time as people are undergoing this upheaval – be restoring the planet’s health, restoring the destroyed and damaged ecosystems so that forests… Parts of the Amazon are already emitting more carbon than they are withdrawing which is terrifying. We rely on the Amazon to set weather patterns but also to withdraw enormous amounts of carbon from the atmosphere if it can’t do that job, we are so screwed. So the restoration of ecosystems will continue and hopefully by the end of the century the planet will be healthy enough for people to return back to some of these unlivable places. And we will get a return to the tropics.
Kate Whiting: That’s really hopeful. I know in the book you discuss some sort of best-practice examples almost of how people have already started rehoming their own citizens or advertise for people to come and Canada for example, wants to actively encourage more migrants. So are there any particular…
Gaia Vince: Canada is planning on tripling its population in the coming decades through immigration, it’s bringing people in and I think it will have to go higher than that. They’re very open about that, it’s not apologetic ‘we’re trying to keep people out’. It’s very much government policy that the citizens have bought into. It can feel like an aberration if you look at current politics but actually, there have been plenty of times throughout history and currently, now, where messaging has been the opposite, encouraging people to come. Australia had this whole £10 Pom scheme, where they paid people to come to the country. We will be fighting over immigrants soon as this demographic crisis hits. Because of the impact of things like Brexit, we’re already fighting over trying to get labourers for farmwork, for care work, for hospitality. We have shortages in major industries.
Kate Whiting: Reading this as a mother, I know obviously the climate crisis will affect everybody and you say in the book as a mother yourself, you know if it has a different impact because you’re thinking about the future of your children and what world they’re going to live in. When you were researching did it make you want to run for the hills so to speak or you know actually think about your future?
Gaia Vince: Yeah I mean, what we are facing is horrendous. It is a huge horrible crisis and it terrifies me because this is the world that my children are going to have to… I mean I’m going to be around in 2050. They’re going to be around at the end of the century in 2100, you know, it’s horrific. And you can either fall into despair and say we’re all doomed and there’s nothing we can do, so then we won’t do anything. Or you know we can be pragmatic and say there is still quite a lot we can do, we do have choices. And we need to manage this so that people have liveable, productive, healthy cities to live in rather than absolute despair, war, not enough food, energy that cuts out the whole time. I think that these choices, managing migration even on an unprecedented scale, even this very huge challenge that I’m talking about: living with people that weren’t born where you were born and didn’t grow up where you grew up and forming a community, a society on our shared planet is a much better solution than having to enrol in an army because we’re fighting over what land there is. I would much prefer that future for my children. I just really hope that we actually start a conversation about the genuine situation as we face it: this really is a serious catastrophe that we face, but that we do have choices and what the choices are like, be really honest about what the choices are and how we can make them work rather than resorting to tribalism and sort of petty tropes that populist leaders keep falling back on in that very predictable way.
Kate Whiting: It will take cooperation and we saw that with the pandemic that we are able to move and work altogether in a united way to solve a crisis. You end the book with an eight-point manifesto which is a kind of combination of statements of fact and actions that need to happen. How hopeful are you that we’ll be able to accomplish all those things and turn this around?
Gaia Vince: You know we are an incredible species. We completely rely on the fact that we cooperate, we’re super-cooperators, we cooperate beyond our family group beyond just our small friendship. We cooperate internationally, globally with complete strangers to make this incredibly networked world. In fact, we’re so efficient at that, that we dominated the planet and we’ve pushed it into this terrible situation. We can push it out with our social skills of cooperation. We also have incredible technological skills. We are able to deliberately change where water flows, how energy is produced, the temperature of the atmosphere. We can do all of those and we need to combine those but in a democratic way. We need to come up with solutions to this problem, which are out there, they really are. It is my hope that this will be a century of upheaval, but it will be one in which we emerge as a fairer, more just, healthier society on a much more sustainable planet and going forward we continue within those ecological limits.
Kate Whiting: Gaia Vince, thank you very much for your time today.
Gaia Vince: Thanks Kate.
Beatrice Di Caro: That was author Gaia Vince speaking to Kate Whiting
Big thanks for joining us on the World Economic Forum Book Club Podcast.
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This episode of the Book Club Podcast was presented by my colleague Kate Whiting and myself, Beatrice Di Caro. Production was with Gareth Nolan and thanks to our podcast editor Robin Pomeroy.
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This article was originally published in the World Economic Forum.
Source: The Print
