Laurie: Hello, and welcome to our latest Nesta Talks To, our conversation event series with today's most exciting thinkers on big topics related to our emissions and innovation methods.

My name is Laurie Smith, and I lead lots of research in the Discovery Hub at Nesta, the UK's innovation agency for social good. We design test and scale solutions to society's biggest problems. Our three missions are to help people live healthier lives, create a sustainable future where the economy works for both people and the planet, and give every child a fair start.

The Discovery Hub is responsible for helping bring the outside into the organisation by considering the consequences of external trends for Nesta's work, which provides a nice link to the subject of today's discussion, climate change and migration. And here to talk about this topic is Gaia Vince.

Gaia is a journalist, writer, and broadcaster and honorary senior research fellow at University College London. She writes for publications including The Observer, The Guardian, and presents science programmes on BBC Radio 4. She's also an award-winning author.

And today, we're here to talk about her book, Nomad Century. Welcome, Gaia.

Gaia: Hi, Laurie. It's such a pleasure to be with you today.

Laurie: Thank you for joining us. Now, before I start, I just wanted to invite our audience to join the conversation in the comments box, which is on the right-hand side of their screen, and ask any questions throughout the event. Closed captions can be accessed via the LinkedIn live stream.

So let's start off. And so migration has hit the headlines in the UK over the last fortnight, as I'm sure you're aware, following the tweets by BBC sports commentator Gary Lineker about the UK government's migration policies, which many say is increasingly hostile to certain migrants. Now, obviously, your book predates this particular case.

You do make a strong case in favour of migration, both for the migrants themselves, but also for the recipient countries. Perhaps you could walk us through that a little.

Gaia: Yeah, so you're completely right. The situation we find ourselves in at the moment with this very hostile narrative towards migration is not new. Actually, it's been building, at least, for the-- well, since just before Brexit, really, and has become-- yeah, it's become increasingly toxic.

And it's not just the UK. It's also-- it rises with populist governments. It's a particular narrative that is antiforeigner but particularly anti-immigrant. So yes, but on the other hand, we also find ourselves at the moment in this massive demographic crisis. We're not having enough babies to support an elderly population, an ageing population. And that's really going to be a huge problem in many of the states in the Northern Hemisphere and elsewhere, actually.

Over half of countries are not having enough babies to support the ageing population. And that is a huge economic problem. But closer to today, economies simply cannot function without immigration. We have shortages, labour shortages in every sector, from hospitality to dentists to nurses to teachers to truck drivers to train drivers to farm labourers. You name it, we've got shortages in all of these.

Part of that is related to the migration policies that come with Brexit. And it's also due to the huge disruption of COVID and so on. But what we should be doing is making it much easier for that labour exchange to happen.

I mean, one of the points I really want to make in this book, Nomad Century, is that migration is an economic issue. It's not a security issue. It really is an economic issue. And, of course, it's also a humanitarian issue.

And we could be doing so much better to manage that and to make it much easier to exchange people in the way that we already-- for our economies, we already make it very easy to move money and resources and goods across borders. We have all sorts of agreements.

But our biggest economic resource is human labour. And our current border policies make it very hard for people to cross borders and boost the economies that they move to, increase productivity. I mean, some economists calculate that if all borders were removed, global GDP would double if not triple.

Laurie: Wow. Now, in this case, you've sort of specifically written about climate change and migration, as I mentioned. I suppose, what got you interested in the collision of those two trends? Why that particular topic, and why you?

Gaia: Yeah, so I've been looking at the effects of our human changes to the planet on us and on the natural world for well over a decade. I travelled around the world for two and 1/2 years continuously, mainly in the Global South, to really try and understand what communities at the front line of these huge changes, as we enter this new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, the age dominated by humans, what effect that was having on people and how they were managing this dramatic change.

And as part of that, I also saw an enormous amount of climate migration, actually, even though it's not labelled as such. There is very little migration that's actually labelled as climate migration. But I'll just give you an example.

When I was in the Andes in South America, many of the villages there have been-- they've been experiencing huge droughts, huge water shortages, because most of their water comes from glaciers. And, of course, these glaciers have disappeared now. Most of the lower ones have disappeared, and the higher ones, the meltwater paths are very different.

There's been disruption to the climate that they experienced before. So what little precipitation they do receive doesn't come in the same places or the right times for agriculture. And so many of these villages are completely depopulating.

So people are leaving these sort of deserted villages and moving to the slums of, say, Lima or La Paz, or all the way moving up to Mexico. And they're working in factories, or they're working as street hawkers or in various other sort of trades.

And so they're classed very much as sort of urban economic migrants, as though they're moving for the economy. And, of course, they are because migration encompasses these huge different range of pushes and pulls to make people leave. But the initial reason that they had to leave their villages is because the climate has made it impossible for them to stay. They've become unlivable in those places.

And as I look at this huge movement that is coming, it's already occurring across Asia, across Africa, across South America. There is this huge movement towards the cities and towards slums and to places which the climate models show are themselves becoming increasingly unlivable.

You know, Mumbai is right in the tropics-- 22 million people, 7 to 9 million living in slums in temperatures that are very dangerous very regularly. They're constantly inundated. This is not sustainable.

And in the coming decades, they will not be able to adapt to the changed climate, certainly not in those numbers. They're going to have to move. And I realise that the global conversation that leaders are having, it's finally moved to-- when I started my career, it was very much about we need to talk about mitigation. We need to talk about curbing our carbon emissions to prevent climate change at some point in the future.

Well, climate change is very much already here. And, of course, we need to cut our carbon emissions. And that mitigation discussion is, I'm glad to say, very much understood and part of the global conversation now.

There is also some conversation happening about adaptation. And I have no illusions, Laurie. Everywhere on Earth is going to have to adapt to these very changed conditions.

But nobody is talking about the large numbers of people living in places where they simply will not be able to adapt to house that many people under those extreme conditions. Those people will have to move. And we need to talk about that now. So that was really what I wanted to do with this book.

Laurie: So that's really helpful. You sort of talk about climate change in the book as being sort of everything change, and maybe because of-- you've sort of talked about climate change, the consequence of climate change today, or some of them. But maybe if you could sort of paint us a picture of what the world might look like with, say, a 3 to 4 degrees Celsius increase in temperatures, which I think is what some projections are sort of showing by the end of the century.

Gaia: Yeah. So, I mean, at the moment, we are somewhere between 1.2 and 1.3 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average. And what we're seeing already is huge numbers-- an increase in the severity and the frequency of extreme conditions, whether it's a heat dome sitting on top of Europe, as we had last year, which thousands of people, actually, in random ways, many from the heat or from fires.

Some were killed because of extreme temperature rise caused glaciers to collapse, and people died in the Alps in Italy from that. And it caused tens to hundreds of thousands of people to be displaced in Europe. I had to take my kids out of school in London because the temperatures were at least mid-40s.

And in his classroom, I think it was a lot hotter there because he's in a sort of top classroom in the roof. And there's no air conditioning, of course, because we're not adapted in London for these conditions. We're adapted to keep the heat in rather than the opposite.

So we're seeing that. We're seeing the West Coast of America up in flames a lot of the time. We're seeing huge amounts of flooding and displacement on the East Coast of the States. In the tropics, it's continual. You know, 33 million people were displaced in Pakistan in just a week or two because of flash floods which came, actually, after months of unbearable heat there.

So we're seeing everywhere these conditions. We're seeing people in low-lying islands having to leave. Bangladesh is already constantly dealing with these conditions.

Well, you know, we've all heard the keep 1.5 alive and keep below 1.5 rhetoric. We're going to exceed that, probably temporarily, this year. That's because of the Toba eruption, which emitted large amounts of water vapour, which are also a greenhouse gas. But that will be temporary. But certainly within the next six or seven years, we will exceed 1.5 degrees and from there go up.

So if we look at the projections towards the end of the century, we're going to exceed 2 degrees. We may exceed 3 and then claw ourselves down to, say, 3, somewhere between 3, maybe below, maybe 2.5 if we're really, really good at this. We're not doing very well at the moment.

And if we look at our planet, our spinning, lovely, livable blue Earth, at the moment, 1.1% of the Earth is classed as unlivable just because of heat. By 2070, that is expected to be around 20% of the land surface. And that's just heat. So I'm not talking about floods, fires, drought, all the other extreme conditions.

So that 20% of the Earth's surface is likely to be unlivable. And that's home at the moment to a third of the world's population. We're at 8 billion people now. By then, it will be somewhere between 9 and 10 billion. So, you know, we're talking about 3 billion people living in places that are unlivable simply because of heat.

And if you look at the projections, it's a tropical band that is hit with back-to-back extreme events, one after another, a combination of different events. Also, coastlines, river deltas, where many of our major cities are, and that extends south. It extends, actually, down through Australia, down through most of South America, much of Africa, this unlivability, much of Asia, and north into Southern Europe.

The South of Europe, that sort of Mediterranean climate of Southern Spain, well, that's gone, right? Southern Spain is basically a desert now. And they have artificially cooled spaces. They have desalinated water and so on for their agriculture. And that's very successful at the moment.

So there is adaptive potential in many of these places, but not for huge cities of tens or hundreds of millions of people as we're moving to at the moment. So the livable portions basically are the northern hemisphere, the northern latitudes.

Laurie: And it's interesting you mentioned schools. My daughter is there. When I was a kid in school, they had wet play. And she talked about having hot play in school. So they stay inside for that. So the school is already adapting.

Let's talk some numbers. So can you give us a sense of the scale of future migrations? Obviously, it's difficult to project these things. But you've talked about 3 billion people living in inhospitable environments. Are all of them are likely to move? Has anyone thought about that?

Gaia: Well, so that's the hardest thing to calculate, if you like, because it depends on so many different things. Because climate change is a threat multiplier, it affects certain communities more than others-- people who are already in poverty, they're marginalised for one reason or another because of their skin colour or because of the ethnic group they're part of, people suffering conflict, deep poverty, food shortages. All of these things kind of combine, and climate is another factor that helps push those.

And we see that not just actually in the huge inequalities we have globally. So we're largely talking about poor countries. But we also see it in rich countries.

So in the US, people most likely to die of the floods that swept from Ida in New York City were poorest Black people living in basement apartments, for example. We see that in New Orleans, the people most likely to die. So the rich few can adapt and isolate themselves in various ways. But that adaptive potential could be broadened out to much more in society.

We can make the world livable for longer for many of these people, in which case-- we already have about 100 million people are sort of migrants at the moment. In terms of the numbers going up, the figures, the projections are anywhere from tens of millions by 2050 to 1 and 1/2 billion by 2050.

So there is this kind of very broad-- and it depends on how you classify these people. Do you call them climate migrants? Do you call them climate refugees? Do you call them economic migrants? There are so many different classifications.

But certainly we're talking about large numbers of people. We're talking about mass migration. You know, there are ways to lessen this. We could reduce the temperature of the planet artificially using geoengineering. That would mean fewer people would have to migrate.

We could put a lot more effort and funding into different types of adaptation that would reduce the numbers of people that would need to migrate. We could speed up our mitigation. I mean, that wouldn't have that much effect on temperature rise right now, but it would make it much more livable towards the end of the century.

I mean, there are so many variables, and we do have a lot of choices still. But we are nevertheless going to see an increase in migration. I think it's pretty much unavoidable. We're already seeing climate migration on quite a serious scale at the moment. And it is inevitable now.

Laurie: You talk about-- you mentioned geoengineering, which is, I suppose, my understanding is intentionally altering the climate to sort of cool it to counteract the effects of making the world hotter. What's your take on that as a tool to tackle climate change, as it's quite controversial?

Gaia: Yeah, so, I mean, I would say geoengineering is changing the planet of the Earth using human technologies. And we are actually doing that at the moment. We are injecting our atmosphere with greenhouse gases, which trap the sun's energy. And that extra energy is what is driving these much more extreme storms, coastal erosion, glacier melt, and heat domes that sit over somewhere, and drought periods and these monsoonal shifts. All of that, we are doing that through geoengineering.

There are ways that we could reduce the temperature of the atmosphere by injecting our stratosphere with sulphates. And these are particles that would reflect back the sun's energy, so reduce the amount of the sun's energy that is being trapped in our atmosphere.

At the moment, there are no trials on this. It's pretty much a taboo subject. We know it would work because we already do this, right? We emit sulphates in the lower atmosphere in shipping lanes in industrial pollution. It's extremely hazardous for health.

It does have a cooling effect. And one of the reasons that many places, for example, in Asia are experiencing much more extreme heating at the moment is because they've cleaned up this sulphate emission. But to geoengineer, these sulphates would be put in the stratosphere. So they wouldn't be a health hazard because we-- and in much, much more tiny amounts than industrial pollution.

We also know it works because that's how volcanic eruptions produce these kind of mini-ice ages. I think it's almost certainly going to be deployed in the next few decades for sure because what we face, looking ahead at the climate models at the moment, is so catastrophic and so dangerous to humanity that people will decide that geoengineering is the answer.

I do think that we should be talking about this. I think leaders should be talking about this, because they're not at the moment, and giving people an opportunity to have a conversation about, is this going to be acceptable? How would it be acceptable if we did do it? What would the parameters be? What would the compensation be for communities or whole nations that might be negatively affected?

How would we decide how long to proceed with it, what temperature to choose? Because we could effectively choose what temperature we had the planet at. Would it be 1 degree over pre-industrial temperatures? Would it be the pre-industrial average? Would it be 2 degrees? We could choose.

So without having that democratic decision and democratic discussion about how we go forward, I'm very worried that it will be deployed under sort of emergency legislation by a certain state in the same way that maybe lockdowns were deployed under emergency. There wasn't a discussion, really, about it before.

And that's fine because we faced this acute emergency, and it was for a brief amount of time in terms of the lockdown. But when we're talking about climate change, this is long-term. It's a much longer-- these sulphates would have to be deployed continuously because they don't last very long in the stratosphere at all. And if you stop deploying them, the temperature would just rise to the sort of unadulterated greenhouse gas emissions temperature.

So I would much prefer that we made these decisions democratically. If it's rejected, then it's rejected democratically. And we've had our say. But to sort of not discuss it, I think, is the worst of all options.

Laurie: And sticking on this topic of innovation and technology, because that's of great interest to Nesta, how can other innovations technologies be used to help us tackle the consequences of mass climate migration?

Gaia: Yeah, I mean, we have so many tools already. It's incredible to me that there is no kind of global database or management of the labour market and where people might find work, how they can navigate this huge need that certain countries have and the huge need that certain people have to get work.

As I said earlier, we're experiencing this ageing demographic in the far north. Well, in other places, in parts of Africa, for example, there is still population growth. And there are young people that will be entering the workforce, except there aren't enough jobs. And these people could be educated. They could be working. They could be furthering their aspirations in safer locations.

But there is no kind of global strategy to help manage this. And when it becomes much more serious, when people need to escape really terrible conditions, there is no pathway to that. So I think, certainly, technology could be used much more effectively there to help coordinate how that works.

But technology is already saving huge amounts of lives in places like Bangladesh where they have these early warning systems now which they didn't have before. So even though the typhoons and the number of extreme storms that they've faced in the Bay of Bengal have increased in severity, increased in frequency, the actual number of deaths has gone down because of these early warning systems.

They've been extremely helpful. So villages have a [INAUDIBLE], and they get warned that something that is happening, go to a higher place, go to the security safety spots. And that's been really effective. Well, that should be rolled out much more widely.

We still don't have very high-resolution weather monitoring systems for large parts of the world that are very, very affected by extreme conditions. You know, in Britain, we have this-- you can get a weather forecast for, like, one mile to the next.

But in these large places, like Mozambique, or in large places around the world, we don't have that level of precision. And that could be really helpful.

But I think, yeah, we are going to need technology, of course, and innovation as we adapt because everything's going to have to adapt. We're going to have to adapt our food system, our energy system, our infrastructure, the way we live, where we live, the kind of buildings, the materials we use, production processes. Everything is going to have to change to become low-carbon or zero-carbon, effectively, to produce energy rather than just use it, to be more circular in terms of the way production processes run so we don't just take resources to create something and then it's gone to waste.

We make sure that that is much more circular. So everything is going to have to change. And that is going to need huge amounts of agricultural innovation, biotech, everything from making novel foods from bacteria, from fungi, from cells, to the way that we manage flash floods in cities that were formerly not used to them.

We're going to have to change that in London, for example, because we're going to move-- we're already moving much more into that kind of extreme weather thing where we have a drought, and then we have flash floods. And our systems are-- our infrastructure is built around a very boring-- even though we talk about the weather nonstop, our weather is actually extremely boring in this country. It's mainly drizzle. But that's changing. Yeah.

Laurie: And before I go to the audience, there's some questions there. And also, we've got some questions that were sent in advance. So the issue of climate change migration presents lots of interconnected challenges about climate change, migration, urban planning, economics, technology. When seeking solutions to such a complicated array of issues, where should policymakers start? Where would be a starting point for, say, a minister in the UK?

Gaia: Oh, my goodness, yeah. I mean, actually, Laurie, that is the nub of the issue. You know, so many of the global crises that we face, whether it's poverty, biodiversity loss, climate change, international global migration, all of these are extremely complex issues because they are part of a human system which is enmeshed in Earth systems.

So hydrology of the planet, the ocean circulation, the atmospheric circulations that affect the Gulf Stream, all of that also, of course, affects things like agricultural production, which affects food prices, which affects how much money people have, and so how much freedom they have, how much agency they have to determine their future and where they live and what jobs they have.

So these are-- first of all, we need to acknowledge the complexity of these problems and then not be afraid to project a vision. I think there is this lack of vision at the moment in leadership. There is sort of timidity to look very far ahead and imagine anything different.

We hear it from artists and creatives and science fiction writers about these dystopian futures, you know. And it's a very compelling narrative. It's very dramatic. It's exciting.

But it's just as easy, I think, to imagine a better future, because things aren't so great right now. We walk to school on the school run, and they're breathing in all these disgusting fumes. The rivers are too filthy to swim in.

Energy is extremely expensive and polluting. Cars are clogging up our streets. We can do better. We can do so much better than this.

And I think what we need is we need courageous leaders and policymakers that can imagine a vision of something better-- productive, denser cities that have clean air, clean water, enough food for everybody, but also purpose and opportunity for jobs and life satisfaction. We can imagine that and then take the pragmatic steps to get there.

And I think if that narrative, if that vision was conveyed with as much passion and as much kind of descriptive rhetoric, perhaps, as this very insular, hostile, anti-immigration rhetoric has been, people would come on board with that. We want to breathe clean air. We want cheaper power. We want to live in homes that are draftproof but also keep us cool in the summer.

Our visions are kind of aligned, but we haven't got level of leadership. So, yeah, I would start there with thinking of-- projecting a vision of something better.

Laurie: And this actually links to our first question. There is a link. It doesn't explicitly use the term "imagination." It's a question from-- I hope I'm pronouncing this name correctly-- Tiaman Delangy-- who says, "We hear a lot of conversation about 'goldilocks states.' Is there consensus on which states that will be the goldilocks states in the future?" So this is touching on utopias, possibly. "Anywhere we can find a list? What responsibilities do you regard these states have for climate refugees?"

Gaia: Yeah, well, there are some places that will undoubtedly do much better. So everywhere will be affected by climate change. I mean, there's already huge impacts everywhere on Earth. But certainly there are winners-- Canada, for example. And Canada, incidentally, has a programme to triple its population over the next few decades, and it's doing that through immigration. It has very well-thought-out immigration policies, inclusion policies, and so on.

But other places as well-- I mean, look at Scotland. So Scotland is not going to be affected by sea level rise, for example, because it's still rebounding after the last Ice Age, geologically speaking. The climate will be less cold in winter. So they won't have to spend as much energy on keeping warm.

The growing seasons across the north-- I mean, all across Scandinavia and even Greenland, you can see the greening of the Arctic from satellite images. It's really noticeable. And agricultural seasons and productivity yields have gone up by a factor over the last few years.

And the number of different crops that can be grown has gone up as well. So there are certainly net winners. At the same time, these places are also suffering from some of the fastest climate changes, so-- climate impacts. So they're experiencing, for example, permafrost melting, which is really problematic.

But they are also places that are the climate impacts will be much more manageable, and much more adaptation will be much more possible in these places, partly because of the wealth than the smaller populations and the government structures and so on there, but also because the temperatures won't be as extreme-- the conditions won't be as extreme there as they will be in the tropics.

So these are the sort of net safer places. And, yeah, absolutely, I think they have a responsibility. We have this one planet. We are an African ape that originated in Africa, and we've dispersed over 100,000 to 200,000 years across the globe everywhere.

When we look at this world, I don't think-- myself, I don't see the moral-- I don't think that you can say that just because you were born in a certain place, you have much more right to safe land than somebody born somewhere else. For me, that moral argument doesn't make sense.

We are all migrants of one kind or another. Even if we haven't migrated ourselves, our ancestors certainly did, and often within one or two generations. And even if we don't migrate ourselves as people, we migrate our stuff, right?

So where I'm speaking to you now, nothing-- my clothes, my tea, my pencil, nothing I have-- comes from this square footage that I'm standing on, nothing. Everything is brought from everywhere, from-- the metals in the microphone come from the Congo or parts of Africa.

The potato I had for lunch has come from Peru. The tea bags come from-- everything is brought to me by this kind of network. The secondary migration of all of our stuff is brought by these global network of people who are all engaged in this mass movement of people, of stuff, of resources. And we are just as dependent on that as anyone else. So yeah.

Laurie: Well, I think that's a really interesting flipping of the concept of migration, of trade becoming migration. I mean, sticking to the soft theme, or the rough theme--

Gaia: Yeah, I mean, trade has basically allowed us to remain relatively still. If we didn't have trade in stuff, we would have to be chasing it all around, right? So it's this sophisticated trade, which, of course, relies on humans as well moving that allows us to relax nicely and have everything brought to us.

But it's an artifice. Effectively, our cells are made from bits that come from everywhere, so.

Laurie: Yeah, I think that's really fresh thinking. Just sort of sticking with the theme of visionary thinking, I've got a question from MHM here. And it says, "Many human beings know that our lives have to change and our way of living needs to evolve by 2030 for the sake of our children and their children in this century. Where's the vision, et cetera?"

So maybe they're sort of asking, who do you think have sort of more positive visions for the future?

Gaia: Well, absolutely. I mean, we are living in a world but was built by imagination, built by vision, built by people coming together. It's not an accident that we have democracies. That was invented by people that sort of had this vision and saw ahead that this might be a great way of deciding things.

And they did this in many places, from Iceland to the ancient Greeks. They came up with this idea. It's not an accident that we didn't have slavery, that we have the idea of public libraries and art galleries and so on. These didn't come by just chance.

They were a vision that people had, and they imagined them existing before they existed. They had to imagine them existing. Then they came together in various ways. Yes, leaders helped make it happen, but so did ordinary people, to campaign for them, to say that this was important, and to use them when they occurred.

So everything that we have is the product of vision, of imagination that has been made real over generations. The difference, really, now is that we have to make so many changes and in a short period of time. But, you know, our imaginations are still here. We can imagine that world.

We can really focus and think about what would it be like, what should it be like, and then discuss it together and having this long-term vision in a way that then we can make pragmatic steps to get there that are all manageable. This is all manageable. We do have choices.

The future is unwritten. It's whatever we make it. And it's certainly not hopeless. It is a case of taking it seriously, taking seriously the-- I don't feel that leaders are honest about the threats that we genuinely face.

It seems to come as a huge surprise every time we have some terrible storm that wipes out villages or big heat or whatever it is. We're currently in drought in the southeast of England, which nobody seems to have prepared for, no reservoir building project.

I mean, this is not a surprise. These climate models are very well understood. They're very well-- they've been running in more and more and more accuracy over the last 20, 30 years. So we know what we're facing.

In terms of leadership, there are leaders. There are people, but they are sadly far and few between. I feel like we are-- you know, I've been impressed with Biden, actually. Partly, of course, it's a huge, huge refreshment after Trump. But he genuinely does have more vision and more long-term planning than we've been used to.

Antonio Guterres as well, he centres climate change at the heart, as he should do, at the heart of all the global problems that we need to face because without our climate, we really don't have anything because, really, everything is built on this climate. It's part of the backdrop of all of our lives.

And then there are children like Greta-- well, she's not a child anymore, but when she started. This generation is going to be the one that lives with-- so are we, right? We're still going to be around. But they are the ones that have to live with all this. And they're the ones that are growing up under these huge crisis and seeing this mismatch between the urgency and the severity of the crisis and the response, which is so weak and so slow and so inadequate.

And that is a mental health crisis in itself. Rising levels of ecoanxiety is extremely worrying. And that's on us. We've allowed this to happen. And I worry for my own children. What the hell? How am I going to explain that?

Laurie: No, and I think lots of people certainly worry-- sorry, welcome hopeful words there. We'll move on from imagination in a moment-- might come back to it later.

We've got another question from Nicola Wheeler, who says, "Arguably, the UNFCCC COP," which monitors international governance processes, "has failed to address climate change. I'm interested in whether you have any suggestions for an alternative mechanism that you think would be more effective."

Gaia: Yeah, I mean, the COP process has been terrible, terribly slow. But on the other hand, with the time that we have to sort this out, it's what we have. And we have to make the best of it. I don't think we can completely rethink the process.

There are some really, really interesting and innovative parts of this. For example, no matter how big and powerful your nation is, no matter how small and insignificant your nation is, every nation has a leader sitting at that table.

And that is something worth keeping. I think it's a really important idea as well because it can be easy for leaders to trample all over the rights of other nations. And that idea that everybody has a seat at the table and that their viewpoints are important, I think, has been transformational.

We've also had-- I think things are moving. So, yes, it's been far too slow. And we won't keep below 1.5. We won't keep below 2. I mean, we are heading up in temperature-wise. And that is because of the failure of leadership to act.

But I think it's really interesting that last November in the COP, there was finally an admission and understanding, a commitment from rich countries to pay for the losses and damages that poor countries are experiencing as a result of climate impacts. It's not officially called compensation, but it's effectively that.

And I think that that is a huge, huge movement towards a different way of understanding our global responsibilities as we enter this crisis more fully. And this kind of undertaking to contribute, whether it's to adaptation or whether it's to actual payments for people who have lost houses or lives or livelihoods, even though it's inadequate, it's baby steps and so on. That's, I think, a really exciting moment of progress to build on.

And we had some-- we've also had some questions that were sent in advance, as well as the ones that have been sort of coming through the chat. And one of those was, "How should organisations prepare to support climate refugees?"

Yeah, I think we need to start talking about projections for demography changes, for a start. So having mass migration, having people, immigrants move somewhere means investment, right? How that is navigated globally, how that payment works out, there are many, many options.

But it does take investment. So it takes financial investment. You've got to make sure that there is enough housing, access to health care, to education, other infrastructure, for that to work, for that new population.

And at the moment, many governments, certainly this one, are not providing that for their existing populations. So that that's a policy choice. But that needs to change if migration is going to be successful.

But the other really, really key investment that needs to be made is the social investment. So there has to be inclusion. New people have to be included into the idea of citizenship. Their identity needs to be part of this new expanded city-- they will almost certainly be cities-- where people live.

And they have to feel that. And that means education for existing populations. It means-- genuinely, what we're talking about a lot of the time is-- let's not beat about the bush-- it's racism. So because it is going to be a large number of more melanated people moving to places that are much more homogeneous-- not so much London, but certainly in Siberia or Eastern Europe or whatever, some of these towns are very, very homogeneous and white.

And there needs to be-- we need to speed up that whole process of understanding because we don't need to repeat the mistakes that have been made elsewhere. If you look at the situation in Sweden, for example, a very generous refugee policy-- lots of people were settled in Sweden, and the financial investment was made. And that is to be applauded.

But the social investment was not made. So these groups were completely segregated. You know, Swedes don't think of these immigrants as Swedes. The immigrants don't think of themselves as Swedes.

There is this kind of black market economy, essentially, which then competes with the official economy, which isn't helpful for anybody. There is then deprivation. Crime rates go up, the rise of the far-right. We can do better. We can do much better than that.

And we need to rethink and make with our imaginations, with our vision, we need to create the idea of what it means to be a citizen, what the national identity becomes as we move forward and as people come from various groups and build these productive, cleaner, more sustainable societies for our children and their children and for us, of course, as well. And that needs to be an active, active process of inclusion.

Laurie: This sounds like we need a sort of social innovation alongside the technological innovation that you mentioned.

Gaia: Absolutely, yeah. Throughout history, what we've seen in terms of human societies and our species generally is that we are hypersocial. We are super cooperators. And all of our success, all of our human success, has been built on the fact that we don't operate alone as individuals.

We can't even give birth alone. We operate in groups, in societies, through networks. And it's building and creating those networks and communities that gives us the strength and resilience to adapt to the challenges that we face, to innovate new ideas, to bring the fusion of different technologies or ideas or beliefs together to create something new that then helps us with the next step on our journey.

And we will need that. We need to build more in terms of city planning, as well as the infrastructure changes to adapt to the extreme conditions of climate change. We need to adapt to the social conditions. We need more public spaces that genuinely are public spaces. They're not commercially owned, and they're not restricted in lots of ways.

We need places where young people can come together and form strong communities that can help them through hard times and the challenges of people coming from different places and different traumas that they will have experienced, often, in places of origin.

And so talking of solutions, we've got a question here. "Who is going to benefit from these solutions, and what cost some others?" Well, I think it's talking about the cost to others. What's the benefits and costs to the solutions? And "We need to continue the conversation as well as collaboration to implement solutions while keeping justice in mind."

Laurie: So I suppose it's about winners and losers of potential solutions. What are your thoughts on that?

Gaia: Yeah, well, you know, we live in an incredibly unjust society where some people are billionaires and they have more money than they could spend in a thousand lifetimes and other people don't have enough to eat, you know. So we live in a very unjust world. And, again, we can do better. We can make this better through policy choices, through acting.

And, of course, none of this is easy. The whole century is going to be a huge upheaval in various ways. But we do have choices.

So in terms of winners and losers, I'm very much pro-migration. I think that we should all move around more. Travel really does broaden the mind. You mix with different cultures, taste different foods, hear different music and points of view, perspectives, et cetera, which you can then bring back to your own country and your own work.

It enriches you in so many different ways. But the idea that large numbers of people will be forced to migrate because their homes, their traditional way of life, their ancestors' graves, their cherished places are completely unlivable, well, that is a huge tragedy. There's no getting around that. It's appalling.

And so we have a responsibility everywhere to make that transition easier, to find ways of managing it so that it's not a huge-- it's not an acute emergency, a disaster where people are dying needlessly in channel crossings or crossing from Mexico to the United States or wherever.

They shouldn't be held for generations in, effectively, prison detention camps for refugees. This, to me, is an absolutely broken system. And, yeah, the potential for improving it is huge, I say.

Laurie: You touched on earlier in our chat geoengineering. And we've got another question here from Yarri Kamara-- I think I'm pronouncing the name correctly, who asks about, "With regard to democratic decision-making on geoengineering, what democratic level are we referring to?" I suppose they're sort of thinking about this being a-- geoengineering is a global decision rather than a national decision. How would one manage that democratically?

Gaia: Yeah, I mean, there are lots of different options for how we change governance, global governance. We have very little of it at the moment. I would suggest that with the global nature of the crisis that we face that we need to structurally come up with some that are much more effective.

In terms of imposing it on poorer, I think actually it'd probably be the other way around because the poorer countries are the ones that are going to be experiencing the worst effects. I mean, these are countries that are already-- I mean, some of these states are perfectly capable of deploying things like this right now.

China already does quite a lot of cloud seeding and various amounts of geoengineering. India is sort of getting into that a little bit. But it doesn't matter which state deploys it. I mean, the poorer countries have more to gain from deploying it for sure.

And with my Mystic Meg hat on, which isn't great, I can imagine more a scenario where, say, India or Pakistan or Vietnam want to deploy geoengineering. And European countries that are experiencing much reduced effects and some, perhaps, positive effects of warmer temperatures might be resistant and might not want it.

Or maybe the migration load becomes too much for rich countries, and they don't want it. So I don't know how it might be deployed. But certainly we do need to come up with some sort of way, I would say, that we have some sort of conversation around it.

At the moment, we have the COP process as a mechanism to set emissions levels and temperature rise levels and so on. It's not great at doing that, but it's better than nothing. Something like that might be an idea. We do have some sort of negotiated things. But, yeah, globally, we're really at an absolute infancy in handling these difficult negotiations.

Laurie: And I said-- we're almost at time. But I said I'd come back to imagination. And you were talking about visionaries and leaders. And I'll use chair's prerogative here to ask this question. How do we provide space for leaders to take those sort of tough decisions when there's so much short-term pressure, when it's a very much a reactive state where politicians have to respond to the immediate? Well, lots of these problems you're talking about are really important, but really long-term.

Gaia: Yeah, I mean, it's difficult. I think, at the moment, we are in a particularly bad space in terms of the people that we actually have as leadership and the calibre of politicians that we have in power. Certainly, in this country, it is particularly poor. I mean, it is unusually poor.

If you take somebody like, say, Gordon Brown, he was able to project a vision on various things, whether it was child poverty or whether it was global hunger or whatever. And there is much more kind of visionary capacity there. So I think it partly depends on the leadership that you have.

But, yes, the way that our parliamentary system and our electoral-- the way our governance system is organised is not conducive to this at all. And I do think it needs it needs more space. And also, this is somewhere that the media can play a really important role in giving opportunities for those discussions in that space. And I think there has been a failure there as well to provide those spaces.

But also, civil society has a huge role to play. I think it's very important that while I've been trying to raise these issues-- and it's not just true for this book. It's true for past books of mine as well. There has been a huge amount of engagement from Christians, from the Church of England and from various other sects and so on, to talk about this and to have these discussions.

And that's great. That's part of their ethos, right? They're supposed to be thinking about these big moral issues and discussing how that affects people. Great.

But it should be part of our civic society, right? It shouldn't be left to the Christian church. I'm an atheist, right?

And, of course, we must all think about this. But there is this kind of vacancy at the heart of life when we're not talking about this. It should be in Parliament. It should be talked about in Parliament. It should be.

There should be huge discussions. These are the issues that are the most important, not just for now, but they absolutely define the coming decades. And we need to engage, we need to be opening up discussions, and we need to be involving not just young people but people from all sectors and ages. I really think that.

Laurie: So it sounds like a real opportunity for budding politicians, journalists, and civic leaders from churches and elsewhere. So we're almost at time. So I'd like to thank you. Well, thank you, Gaia, for a really interesting discussion. I really like your book, which I've got a copy of-- I don't know if my screen will let me share it.

But it's absolutely fantastic. I recommend it to all the people who are listening. We've reached the end of the event. So I'd be grateful if the audience-- so if the audience would mind completing a short survey, there's going to be a link that's going to be shared in the chat. It's also available in the event description.

Thank you very much for joining us. Thanks for filling in the survey. Audience members will be entered into a prize draw to win a 50-pound voucher for bookshop.org. And you might even get an opportunity to get Gaia's book if you haven't got it already.

So also, you can sign up to Nesta's newsletter to find out more about these events. And it just leaves me to thank Gaia. Thank you so much for sparing the time to chat with us.