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Nomad Century - Gaia Vince *****

At risk of saying what everyone else is saying, this is a really important book, because it's covering something that hardly anyone seems to be thinking about, but that has a huge impact on our future. It's not really a climate change science book - for that you'd be better off with something like Bill McGuire's Hothouse Earth - it's more about the politics and economics of dealing with a huge impact of climate change will have - mass migration.

Arguably this means it isn't really a science book at all (anyone who thinks economics is a real science either doesn't know what science is, or doesn't know what economics is). However, because the impending crisis is driven by a scientific issue, and has to respond to scientific forecasts, I think it's worth thinking of it within the popular science canon. What Gaia Vince does very powerfully is show how the changing climate is going to force humanity into large scale migration, with most likely well over a billion people needing to move away from the hottest regions, either within countries or internationally.

Vince is very good on the implications of what she describes as the 'four horsemen of the Anthropocene' - fire, heat, drought and flooding. At the time the book is published, thousands are dying in floods in Pakistan, in a year when we've experienced wildfires, extreme heat and lack of water for crops across the world. As Vince makes clear, while settled people will cling on longer that is strictly feasible, there comes a point when they have to move, becoming refugees - and this will happen on a scale that far exceeds anything we've experienced in the past.

A lot of the book focusses on what will be necessary to deal with such a scale of migration. Vince is convincing in pointing out the benefits of having migrant workers - how they don't suppress wages, but rather boost the economy, as long as they become part of the community where they move into and so spend money in that economy. She is also good at highlighting all the barriers that are in place that will make it difficult to deal with mass migration. This is a massive wake-up call that we have to start thinking about things differently - as soon as possible.

Vince knows that this won't be easy - but she does tend to underestimate what has to be overcome. There's a good argument here that refugees, if allowed to work, don't 'take our jobs', but when it comes to the extra resources that are needed to support them, Vince resorts to hand-waving. We read for example 'There are obvious triggers: immigration can put pressure on host communities when housing, schools, healthcare and other services becomes strained. This can be avoided through careful planning and adequate investment from governments to manage the costs and delivery of services for the enlarged population.' But at a time when governments are struggling to cover costs of a pandemic and a global energy and food price crisis, it's hard to see where all the money would come from for new housing, schools etc. - especially when there's not enough provision already.

Similarly, it's hard to see how Vince's vision of the UN becoming a sort of worldwide EU (bearing in mind all the problems the EU has) would work in practice. Not only is this unlikely in terms of imagining countries like the US, China and Russia would buy into it, but also it's not at all clear where its money would come from. We read 'funds to assist city expansion could come from the new global body for this, the UN Organisation for Global Migration (with powers), which would ease the pain.' But where would that money come from, except the countries that need the money in the first place?

As far as individual input to reduce the impact of climate change, Vince is good on almost all the things we can do like eating less meat and not driving petrol cars... however, like most academics, she has a blind spot when it comes to frequent flying. She repeatedly mentions how she travels all over the place, visiting different continents. But she fails to say that by far the biggest impact a frequent flyer has on climate change is their flying. There's a huge element of 'do as I say, not as I do' - but academics have to realise this has to stop. No more jollies to conferences. No more visiting distant places to do research when local researchers can do this on your behalf. And one final moan. I'm a big enthusiast for nuclear fusion, but Vince's claim that 'the first fusion reactors could start entering grids by 2030' is fantasy, as anyone who has followed the industry over its many decades would realise.

As is often the case with a book like this, then, it is far better on the problems than the solutions. But that doesn't make it any less important, because, unlike climate change itself, the problems described here have not been widely grasped by politicians or the public. This is a book anyone involved or interested in public policy should be reading as a matter of urgency, with the hope that some realistic solutions can be developed. 

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly digest for free here
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