Gaia Vince is an honorary senior research fellow at UCL and a science writer and broadcaster interested in the interplay between humans and the planetary environment. She has held senior editorial posts at Nature and New Scientist, and her writing has appeared in the Guardian, The Times and Scientific American. Her research takes her across the world: she has visited more than 60 countries, lived in three and is currently based in London. 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.
The climate crisis already has millions of people on the move, and that number will steadily grow higher till it breaks the political structures of the planet - unless, as the author suggests, we start now to remake those structures so they can cope, and indeed benefit, from the flow of humans that is now inevitable. An important and provocative start to a crucial conversation -- Bill McKibben This book is a rather astounding addition to a growing body of thought that suggests the twenty-first century is going to include, and even require, lots of human migration-and that handled correctly, this could be part of a good adaptation to the climate and biosphere crisis we are now entering. What Vince gives us here is some cognitive mapping to understand the situation and see a way forward -- Kim Stanley Robinson Nomad Century is the most important book I imagine I'll ever read. Gaia Vince calmly -- without drum-banging or hand-wringing -- sets forth likely consequences and end-of-century projections for our rapidly changing planet. It'll knock you flat. But before you hit the ground, she hands over an impressively detailed survival plan: supporting radical migration from newly uninhabitable regions, rethinking urban structures and food practices, restoring climate. The book is heavily researched, but Gaia's clean, intelligent prose propels the reader -- Mary Roach Terrifying, yet strangely hopeful and immensely important. I'm not sure if you can 'love' a book about our precarious future but this is essential reading. Nomad Century brings together the two most pressing issues of our time: the climate emergency and migration. Every single one of us will be affected by this - and therefore we should all read this book. It's packed with facts, solutions and even some optimism ... so, yes, maybe I actually do 'love' it -- Andrea Wulf