It is unusual for a book that foresees billions of people displaced by the climate crisis to be optimistic. Yet that’s the tone Gaia Vince strikes in Nomad Century. “We are facing a species emergency – but we can manage it,” she writes, “with a planned and deliberate migration of the kind humanity has never before undertaken.”
Vince, an environmental journalist, stresses that climate displacement is already under way, with people fleeing parts of Latin America, Asia and Africa. Efforts to reduce carbon emissions, though vital to the future survival of humanity, are already unlikely to limit global heating to the extent that we avoid further displacement. The UN’s International Organization for Migration estimates that 1.5 billion people could be forced to move in the next 30 years alone.
