Gaia Vince

Gaia Vince is one of the most respected environmental commentators of our age. In 2015, she became the first woman to win the Royal Society Science Book of the Year Prize solo for her debut, Adventures in the Anthropocene.

She has held senior editorial posts at Nature and New Scientist, and her writing has appeared in the Guardian, The Times and Scientific American.

She will give a talk in the bookshop on her new book NOMAD CENTURY: How To Survive The Climate Upheaval. It’s urgent investigation of the most underreported, seismic consequence of climate change: how it will force us to change where – and how – we live.

We are facing a species emergency. With every degree of temperature rise, a billion people will be displaced from the zone in which humans have lived for thousands of years. While we must do everything we can to mitigate the impact of climate change, the brutal truth is that huge swathes of the world are becoming uninhabitable. From Bangladesh to Sudan to the western United States, and in cities from Cardiff to New Orleans to Shanghai, the quadruple threat of drought, heat, wildfires and flooding will utterly reshape Earth’s human geography in the coming decades.

In this rousing call to arms, Vince demonstrates how we can plan for and manage this unavoidable climate migration. The vital message of this book is that migration is not the problem-it’s the solution. Rich countries in the north are facing demographic crises and labour shortages. 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, who benefit economically as well as culturally. A borderless world is not something to fear: in fact, studies suggest that it would double global GDP. As Vince describes, we will need to move northwards as a species, into the habitable fringes of Europe and Asia, into Canada and the greening Arctic circle. Nowhere will be spared the devastating impacts of climate disruption, but some places, Vince identifies, will also see some benefits from rising temperatures and growing populations.

While the climate catastrophe is finally getting the attention it deserves, the inevitability of mass migration has been largely ignored. In Nomad Century, Vince provides, for the first time, an examination of the most pressing question facing humanity.