https://time.com/6209432/climate-change-where-we-will-live/
"While nations rally to reduce their carbon emissions, and try to adapt at-risk
places to hotter conditions, there is an elephant in the room: for large
portions of the world, local conditions are becoming too extreme and there is
no way to adapt. People will have to move to survive.
Over the next fifty years, hotter temperatures combined with more intense
humidity are set to make large swathes of the globe lethal to live in. Fleeing
the tropics, the coasts, and formerly arable lands, huge populations will need
to seek new homes; you will be among them, or you will be receiving them. This
migration has already begun—we have all seen the streams of people fleeing
drought-hit areas in Latin America, Africa, and Asia where farming and other
rural livelihoods have become impossible.
The number of migrants has doubled globally over the past decade, and the issue
of what to do about rapidly increasing populations of displaced people will
only become greater and more urgent as the planet heats.
We can—and we must—prepare. Developing a radical plan for humanity to survive a
far hotter world includes building vast new cities in the more tolerable far
north while abandoning huge areas of the unendurable tropics. It involves
adapting our food, energy, and infrastructure to a changed environment and
demography as billions of people are displaced and seek new homes.
Our best hope lies in cooperating as never before: decoupling the political map
from geography. However unrealistic it sounds, we need to look at the world
afresh and develop new plans based on geology, geography, and ecology. In other
words, identify where the freshwater resources are, where the safe temperatures
are, where gets the most solar or wind energy, and then plan population, food
and energy production around that. The good news is, there’s plenty of room on
Earth. If we allow 20 square meters of space per person—around double the
minimum habitable size for a house allowed under the International Residential
Code—11 billion people would need 220,000 square kilometers of land to live on.
There would be plenty of room to house everyone on earth in a single
country—the surface area of Canada alone is 9.9 million square kilometers. Of
course, I’m not proposing anything as absurd, but this is something to reflect
on when it is claimed that a country is “too full” for more people."
Via Kenny Chaffin.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
