Speaker 1: Welcome to zero. I am Akshatrati. This week climate migrants.
Speaker 1: As the fires in Los Angeles continue to burn, displaced
Speaker 1: residents are trying to pick up the pieces of their
Speaker 1: lives in an evacuations shelter in Westwood, Bloomberg reporter Michelle
Speaker 1: Ma spoke with a seventy two year old man named
Speaker 1: Paul letter.
Speaker 2: Where and can I ask where you live? Well?
Speaker 3: I used to live in the Palaceades.
Speaker 4: Okay?
Speaker 2: And do you know what the state of.
Speaker 3: Your home is? Ninety nine percent.
Speaker 2: Correct? I'm so sorry.
Speaker 3: I mean they called it a war zone, app apocalyptic,
Speaker 3: it's you've seen the pictures. It's it's unbelievable. And when
Speaker 3: did you leave?
Speaker 1: Paul had just enough time to grab his two cats,
Speaker 1: a few sentimental items before he left, but not much else.
Speaker 3: I and two jackets, my jacket my father used to
Speaker 3: wear a sports jacket and a fifty year old leather
Speaker 3: jacket that I get complimented on.
Speaker 1: Where will he go next? He does not know. Each year,
Speaker 1: the number of people making decisions like the ones he's
Speaker 1: facing grows. In the US alone, a Census Bureau survey
Speaker 1: found that at least a million people were displaced by
Speaker 1: climate catastrophes in twenty twenty two, and the International Organization
Speaker 1: for Migration estimates that there might be as many as
Speaker 1: a billion environmental migrants around the world within the next
Speaker 1: thirty years. It's something Gaya Vince has written about in
Speaker 1: two superb books. In her twenty fourteen book Adventures in
Speaker 1: the Anthroposcene, she traveled the world to document what people
Speaker 1: in places like Nepal and Bolivia are doing to deal
Speaker 1: with a warming climate, and then in her twenty twenty
Speaker 1: book No Matt Century, that thesis forward by talking about
Speaker 1: places where people cannot adapt and will need to move
Speaker 1: as these fires rage on. I wanted to talk to
Speaker 1: her about what it will take for us to adjust
Speaker 1: to this new reality.
Speaker 2: This is just more evidence that we are now living
Speaker 2: in a different world. We're living in the post climate
Speaker 2: change world.
Speaker 1: Gaya, as you'll hear, thinks about global solutions to these
Speaker 1: kinds of problems, but local solutions are needed to The
Speaker 1: geography and politics of the Los Angeles area poses its
Speaker 1: own challenges. So I also spoke with climate reporter Jake
Speaker 1: Bittle about what California's government is doing when it comes
Speaker 1: to the challenges of rebuilding. He's a staff writer for
Speaker 1: Christ and the author of The Great Displacement about migration
Speaker 1: in the uas Cheke, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 4: Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: We're speaking as fires continue to burn in Los Angeles,
Speaker 1: and one of the many questions that is on a
Speaker 1: lot of people's mind is what happens after the disaster,
Speaker 1: what gets rebuilt and what is not going to be built.
Speaker 1: And you had a very interesting thread on X about
Speaker 1: the economics of which neighborhoods get built after a fire
Speaker 1: and why they might sometimes be surprising. So, given what
Speaker 1: we know of LA right now, how do you think
Speaker 1: this plays out.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's difficult to tell for sure, because you know,
Speaker 4: the housing market that burned, you know, in the Palisades
Speaker 4: fire especially, is just one of the most valuable and
Speaker 4: desirable in the world arguably. But I think that what
Speaker 4: we've seen in the past in California is that some
Speaker 4: of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the most complex terrain, not
Speaker 4: only do they tend to be under insured because they're
Speaker 4: so high value. Also, you know, the permitting and construction
Speaker 4: process can be really difficult and take a really long
Speaker 4: time because you're building just on really really difficult ground. Right, Like,
Speaker 4: there's really steep slopes. Developing those canyons is really hard
Speaker 4: to begin with, so redeveloping them is also going to
Speaker 4: be hard and expensive.
Speaker 1: But is there an assumption that given how wealthy the
Speaker 1: people were who could afford to live in the palisades
Speaker 1: versus say, the people in the eating fire in places
Speaker 1: like Alteradina aren't as wealthy. That is, the palaces that
Speaker 1: get rebuilt and Alternina not.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah, you might think right that, oh, well, the
Speaker 4: rich people have more money, so they're going to be
Speaker 4: able to rebuild faster. But very few people have enough
Speaker 4: money on hand to just rebuild a home out of pocket.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 4: You're talking about almost a million dollars of rebuilding costs
Speaker 4: in some of these cases, right, So you know, it
Speaker 4: really comes down to how much insurance you have, and
Speaker 4: in particular, I think how much of the proportion of
Speaker 4: the value of your home is insured. Right, So if
Speaker 4: you're in a home that's maybe six hundred and seven
Speaker 4: hundred thousand dollars, you can probably cover that with a
Speaker 4: typical insurance policy. And the insurance situation in Altadena actually
Speaker 4: turns out to have been better than in a lot
Speaker 4: of other places in California, in part because the insurance
Speaker 4: hadn't gotten around to dropping these people yet, because they
Speaker 4: hadn't had a fire in a while, and the homes
Speaker 4: weren't you know, super super high value. But then in
Speaker 4: a place like the Palisades, right, Okay, these homes are
Speaker 4: worth millions and millions of dollars, it's hard to find
Speaker 4: market insurance coverage that covers that. So if you lose
Speaker 4: your home and you didn't have insured the full value, okay,
Speaker 4: what are you going to do? Either you dip into
Speaker 4: your savings to just rebuild it out of pocket, which
Speaker 4: I'm sure some people would do, right, like the wealthiest.
Speaker 4: But if you are wealthy and you had a big home,
Speaker 4: but not that wealthy to where you can just sport
Speaker 4: you just build a new one with the money you
Speaker 4: have in your you know, Merrilynch account, then you're really
Speaker 4: in a pickle. And I saw this happen in Santa
Speaker 4: Rosa after the twenty seventeen Tubs fire. There was a
Speaker 4: hillside neighborhood with relatively wealthy homeowners and on complex terrain,
Speaker 4: and they really struggled to rebuild.
Speaker 1: The other thing that is a wider problem, which is
Speaker 1: just housing in general, and building new housing is now
Speaker 1: competing with sort of rebuilding after a disaster. We heard
Speaker 1: from Governor Gavin Newsom that he wants to see if
Speaker 1: the legislature will suspend some of the Environmental Assessment Act
Speaker 1: and the Coastal Planning Act. What do you think happens
Speaker 1: in these situations where a government goes beyond in a
Speaker 1: desire to want to rebuild, but in the process perhaps
Speaker 1: encourage is building in the very same places that are
Speaker 1: risky and vulnerable to these disasters in the future. Again.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, it's really really hard. In the past couple
Speaker 4: of years before this fire, California and Gavinism, they've been
Speaker 4: trying to suspend SECO and the coastal like just to
Speaker 4: build regular housing, right, just to build multi family housing.
Speaker 4: And they've they've made some progress in getting some of
Speaker 4: that permitting streamlined. I think it's a little rich for
Speaker 4: the governor to say, oh, I'm going to suspend this stuff.
Speaker 4: It turns out we can just do this the whole time.
Speaker 4: You know, rebuilding after disasters is really complicated, and permitting
Speaker 4: is one part of it. But the truth is it
Speaker 4: takes a couple of years even in the best case scenario, right,
Speaker 4: But I think that the conversation about whether to rebuild
Speaker 4: or where we're going to rebuild is one that the
Speaker 4: governor seems, you know, intent on sort of trying to
Speaker 4: move past that as fast as possible, which is pretty typical.
Speaker 4: But you know, in his defense, I guess it's a
Speaker 4: pretty hard conversation to have, right, Like, the land is
Speaker 4: still owned by the people who live on it. They
Speaker 4: technically have a right to come back, right since they
Speaker 4: own the property, And you know, saying let's not do
Speaker 4: this is really tough, and very few places really try
Speaker 4: to do it, especially in California where property values are
Speaker 4: so high.
Speaker 1: And we should talk about insurance because there are two
Speaker 1: layers to this, which is one, you cannot really rebuild
Speaker 1: without insurance, but also the way insurance is playing out,
Speaker 1: especially in California but a few other states in the US,
Speaker 1: there is perhaps misbuilding happening because the insurance that is
Speaker 1: being provided is not private, it's not really taking risk
Speaker 1: into consideration, it's being backed by the state, and so
Speaker 1: you're building in the very places that will burn again.
Speaker 1: So talk goes through what the changes in the California
Speaker 1: insurance system have been and whether you think they are
Speaker 1: actually going to work in this hot world that we
Speaker 1: are creating and caninue to heat up.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's a really interesting situation in California and sort
Speaker 4: of like a far more acute version of what other
Speaker 4: states have experienced, where I think as the fire damage
Speaker 4: has gotten worse, they've sort of encountered this trade off
Speaker 4: between you know, price pressure and consumers and the availability
Speaker 4: of coverage. And for a long time, California basically chose
Speaker 4: to limit price pressure and consumers and then they're paying
Speaker 4: the price with affordability where you know, tens or hundreds
Speaker 4: of thousands of people have lost their coverage and the
Speaker 4: state basically like two weeks before these fires finally finish
Speaker 4: this failuatory process that Okay, insurers, you can charge more money,
Speaker 4: you can you can account for the risk of climate change,
Speaker 4: you can pass on your costs in an exchange, Please
Speaker 4: stay in these areas. And so I think that you know,
Speaker 4: it remains to be seen. And the big question I
Speaker 4: think for the post La fires world is whether you know,
Speaker 4: if insurers feel like they can set an adequate price,
Speaker 4: whether that acts as an effective signal to the homeowners
Speaker 4: that you know, from the perspective of fire risk. There
Speaker 4: really shouldn't be living in these homes in these places
Speaker 4: unless they take substantial mitigation action, right, because that's what
Speaker 4: insurance is supposed to do. It's supposed to be a
Speaker 4: signal about climate risk in the rational way of viewing it,
Speaker 4: and it hasn't been in California effectively. And the question now,
Speaker 4: I think is if you have people paying, you know,
Speaker 4: upwards of five, six, seven, ten thousand dollars a year
Speaker 4: for insurance and it won't go down unless they mitigate
Speaker 4: or get out of the way, does that start to
Speaker 4: change the building patterns? I'm not sure what the answer
Speaker 4: would be, but that's sort of the big, big question
Speaker 4: I think.
Speaker 1: So now we take a step back and just look
Speaker 1: at the book that you've written on the Great Displacement.
Speaker 1: You make the case that you're already starting to see
Speaker 1: in some pockets real climate change driven migration within the US,
Speaker 1: and that'll get super charged as extreme weather events get worse.
Speaker 1: Could you talk us through what kind of notable stories
Speaker 1: have stuck with you?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think on the fires specifically, there's sort of
Speaker 4: two big things that stuck with me.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 4: One is that for people at the lower end of
Speaker 4: the income scale in really tough rental and housing markets.
Speaker 4: A lot of times what happened is they either got
Speaker 4: pushed out of home ownership and into a really chaotic
Speaker 4: rental market where they're being price gouged, or they just
Speaker 4: sort of bounced from apartment to apartment. You know, this
Speaker 4: happened in Santa Rosa. It was almost impossible to get
Speaker 4: an affordable apartment even before the fire. But then you
Speaker 4: lose five thousand housing units in the night, and it's
Speaker 4: just really really hard to find a place to settle.
Speaker 4: The other thing that's really interesting, I think, and you
Speaker 4: may see this happen too in La but maybe to
Speaker 4: a lesser extent, just given the political geography of the place.
Speaker 4: Because a lot of people in Northern California, in places
Speaker 4: like Paradise, which are relatively conservative and compared to the
Speaker 4: state as a whole, which is trending left, they took
Speaker 4: them insurance payout that they got from the fire, and
Speaker 4: they just made an elective move to a different part
Speaker 4: of the country.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 4: So I think most notably, like a lot of people
Speaker 4: from Paradise, I want to say it's in the dozens
Speaker 4: ended up moving to Boise, Idaho, which is obviously more
Speaker 4: conservative state. These people were not on the wealthy end
Speaker 4: of the income scale in California, but in the Boise
Speaker 4: housing market they were like titans. You know, they could
Speaker 4: get huge houses in the suburbs of Boise, and you
Speaker 4: know that they went through a lot. I'm not trying
Speaker 4: to say that they made out great, but like you
Speaker 4: can either for people who are maybe have less equity
Speaker 4: in their home or they're renting to begin with, it
Speaker 4: just ends up being this sort of scramble. You know,
Speaker 4: a disaster could honestly be a sort of unsticking point
Speaker 4: where it, you know, induces a move that they maybe
Speaker 4: otherwise wouldn't have made.
Speaker 1: But there's also a sort of stunning admission in the
Speaker 1: book where if you look at current migration patterns, yes,
Speaker 1: California and perhaps Louisiana the two states from where people
Speaker 1: are leaving, and some of that might be climate links,
Speaker 1: some of that might be just affordability link, but more
Speaker 1: to the migration is actually happening towards stages that are
Speaker 1: being affected by climate change. So Florida is seeing a
Speaker 1: lot of migration. State that gets hit by hurricanes all
Speaker 1: the time. Arizona another state which gets hit by droughts
Speaker 1: and heat. Is that just us seeing an old pattern
Speaker 1: of economic migration, or are we going to start to
Speaker 1: finally see a reversal because of climate change? Like how
Speaker 1: do you square the circle here?
Speaker 4: Yeah, this was the most deviling question that still remains
Speaker 4: with me from the book. You know, it's climate migration.
Speaker 4: It's just people not liking the climate in Michigan and
Speaker 4: deciding to move to Fort Lauderdale, you know. And that's
Speaker 4: the median form of climate migration, even in just in
Speaker 4: the twenty first century so far. I don't know at
Speaker 4: what point that trend reverses itself, but I do think
Speaker 4: a lot of the places that the post war housing
Speaker 4: boom took place in the United States, where there was
Speaker 4: a ton of cheap land, I think we've sort of
Speaker 4: gotten to a point. This is true in Colorado too,
Speaker 4: like at the Front Range. You've gut to a point
Speaker 4: where we're just pushing out from what was the sort
Speaker 4: of central cities at those times into really really risky land.
Speaker 4: And in Arizona, of course, it's just very hot there.
Speaker 4: I think insurance, you know, probably is the mechanism, at
Speaker 4: least in the case of Florida, right, that would sort
Speaker 4: of force like a slow down or a cessation of
Speaker 4: this dynamic. I think like Florida is probably the place
Speaker 4: to look for this, right because you also have to
Speaker 4: pay for flood insurance and wind insurance there. And I've
Speaker 4: spoken to people and these these rapidly developing metroplexes right
Speaker 4: like Fort Myers or Tampa where I'm from, sometimes they
Speaker 4: can pay upwards of twenty thousand dollars a year and
Speaker 4: insurance costs combined between the two formats, and that is
Speaker 4: just not sustainable for almost anybody. And then you know,
Speaker 4: the rebuilding rules are really tough too. So I think
Speaker 4: that it's possible that in the next couple of decades,
Speaker 4: in a geographically specific way, you might sort of start
Speaker 4: to see the housing market be unable to tolerate further
Speaker 4: expansion into these areas. And then what comes out to
Speaker 4: that is another big question.
Speaker 1: So most climate change link migration, as we know, happens
Speaker 1: within countries. Obviously, you focused on the US with your book,
Speaker 1: but are there lessons that the rest of the world
Speaker 1: can take from it? Noting that, of course the US
Speaker 1: is is, you know, the world's largest economy, one of
Speaker 1: the richest countries in the world has a much more
Speaker 1: developed and widespread insurance market. But still are there lessons
Speaker 1: that others can take.
Speaker 4: Yeah? Absolutely. I think that the main lesson is that
Speaker 4: for a lot of disasters, climate displacement just kind of
Speaker 4: looks a lot like regular housing displacement does, right, And
Speaker 4: so I think like La is a good example. Right,
Speaker 4: this is like a giant housing market, and it's a
Speaker 4: giant rental market. It's like one of the biggest in
Speaker 4: the country. So you're not likely to see people get
Speaker 4: up out of their house in Altadena and walk up
Speaker 4: to North Dakota, right, or to Canada.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 4: They can go to the suburb or the next suburb of,
Speaker 4: or the next suburb of. And that's the way that
Speaker 4: housing displacement works in LA generally, Like if you get evicted,
Speaker 4: you're not going to go to North Dakota, right, So,
Speaker 4: and I think that's probably true in other countries too, right,
Speaker 4: Like people sort of move in ways that are typical
Speaker 4: of those places. I think that the typical image in
Speaker 4: the United States and other places of a climate migrant
Speaker 4: is someone who you know, flees from one climate to another, right,
Speaker 4: Like they want to make an elective move away from,
Speaker 4: you know, one type of weather event, and I think
Speaker 4: that it's probably better from a policymaking standpoint if we
Speaker 4: just think about climate change as being kind of a
Speaker 4: factor that exacerbates all the other weaknesses in the way
Speaker 4: that we house people. In the United States, we have
Speaker 4: specific weaknesses, as you know, and then in other countries
Speaker 4: there are other weaknesses.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Jake, No problem. After the break, Guy Evins
Speaker 1: on why climate upheaval is a global problem and needs
Speaker 1: global solutions. If you've been enjoying this episode, please take
Speaker 1: a moment to rate and review the show on Apple
Speaker 1: Podcasts and Spotify. It helps other listeners find the show. Kaya,
Speaker 1: Welcome to the show. Oh, it's such a pleasure to
Speaker 1: be here Atala now. Both of us have been watching
Speaker 1: the news from Los Angeles. The fires are still burning
Speaker 1: as we record this, and there's a lot that we
Speaker 1: aren't going to know about how communities in the Pacific
Speaker 1: Palisades or other areas will recover. In the intro, we
Speaker 1: heard from Paul who was living there. He has no
Speaker 1: idea whether he's going to get a chance to go
Speaker 1: back and move into the Pacific Palisades. What has surprised
Speaker 1: you or perhaps confirmed conclusions from your own reporting as
Speaker 1: you've watched the story.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, obviously I'm seeing it from London, so
Speaker 2: I don't have that very first hand view. But it's
Speaker 2: so photographed, isn't it. Because it is, and I think
Speaker 2: what we're seeing here is perhaps the first example of
Speaker 2: wealthy climate migration, right, because we're seeing some of the
Speaker 2: richest people in the world having to move. But I
Speaker 2: think it's a reminder that we are all at the
Speaker 2: bottom of everything, a puny mammal that has certain needs.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: We can't live under certain temperatures. We can't live where
Speaker 2: there's flames around our homes, you know, we can't breathe
Speaker 2: air that is infused with smoke. We have to move.
Speaker 2: And so for all our luxury mansions and our dreams
Speaker 2: of paradise, we are actually an animal that needs to
Speaker 2: find a safe home. And we are seeing the very
Speaker 2: real dangers from these huge, huge earth systems, and we
Speaker 2: can't just push them back, you know.
Speaker 1: So in the two books, out of the many books
Speaker 1: you've written, in the Adventure in the Anthroposy, you documented
Speaker 1: how people in different parts the world, especially in the
Speaker 1: Global South, are starting to adapt to the warming that
Speaker 1: exists already. But then in no matter century, you took
Speaker 1: this one step forward to think about places which are
Speaker 1: beyond adaptation. When did that hit you that these places
Speaker 1: are there and they're growing in size.
Speaker 2: I think I took a two and a half year
Speaker 2: journey around the world to research adventures in the anthroposcene,
Speaker 2: and it slowly sort of crept up on me that
Speaker 2: what I was seeing was enormous amounts of climate migration,
Speaker 2: even though people themselves didn't recognize themselves as climate migrants.
Speaker 2: They thought that they were perhaps you know, moving for
Speaker 2: a better job, leaving rural areas because the economy wasn't
Speaker 2: working there. But actually, when you dug into it, why
Speaker 2: wasn't it working? It was because of persistent chronic drought
Speaker 2: that had got worse over the last decade or so.
Speaker 2: It was because of the encroachment of salt water from
Speaker 2: rising sea levels into Agrica cultural fields. It was because
Speaker 2: the coastline had completely eroded through you know, more vicious storms,
Speaker 2: and that constant rising of sea levels, and all of
Speaker 2: these things made me recognize that we don't have an
Speaker 2: honest level of debate at all anywhere, certainly not from leadership.
Speaker 2: We're not talking about the climate change that has already occurred.
Speaker 2: We're not talking about what our cities will look like
Speaker 2: over the coming decades. You know, what will la look
Speaker 2: like in twenty forty, twenty sixty, What will London look like?
Speaker 2: What will New York? What will Miami? Because we need
Speaker 2: to adapt right now to those changes, and we need
Speaker 2: to recognize that some of those places are just not
Speaker 2: going to be livable. So we're not having that conversation
Speaker 2: and people are going to have to move.
Speaker 1: What is the scale of migration that we're talking about.
Speaker 2: It's impossible to put a figure on that because it
Speaker 2: depends on a lot of things. We've just had the
Speaker 2: first full year where the average temperature was one point
Speaker 2: six degrees above the pre and US average. You know,
Speaker 2: temperatures may go down slightly, but they are on an
Speaker 2: upward trajectory, and if we look ahead, it's quite likely
Speaker 2: that we will end up by the end of the
Speaker 2: century somewhere between three and four degrees above the pre
Speaker 2: industrial average. We already have people living in unlivable zones,
Speaker 2: some of them heavily adapted and some of them suffering horribly.
Speaker 2: Places from Sudan to Malia have hunger because of drought
Speaker 2: or floods. We have people in Asia farm workers who
Speaker 2: are now working at night with head torches because it's
Speaker 2: simply too hot during the day. We already have these
Speaker 2: unlivable areas, but what will happen is they will increase
Speaker 2: in severity and intensity and last for many months of
Speaker 2: the year, if not throughout. Some studies have put the
Speaker 2: zone of unlivability this kind of climate niche of humanity
Speaker 2: sort of shifting up, and that area will encompass some
Speaker 2: three billion people by twenty seventy according to one study.
Speaker 2: That doesn't mean three billion people will have to move,
Speaker 2: but it means that vast areas will have to be
Speaker 2: adapted and people will have to be accommodated, either within
Speaker 2: their own nation or increasingly across borders. But you know,
Speaker 2: if we want fewer people to have to move to
Speaker 2: be forced to move, we can do a lot in
Speaker 2: terms of mitigating the temperature rise to come through decarbonization,
Speaker 2: but also through adapting and making some of these desperately
Speaker 2: difficult places more habitable longer term. But at the moment
Speaker 2: we're really not doing any of that. We're not even
Speaker 2: adapting places in the rich world, let alone the poor world.
Speaker 1: And these projections become more uncertain the further out in
Speaker 1: time you go. But are there specific countries or regions
Speaker 1: that you've looked at where we can definitively say that
Speaker 1: climate change has caused or has been the primary reason
Speaker 1: for people migrating away.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Absolutely, Like the majority of climate migration is occurring
Speaker 2: within countries, and we see that in a lot of
Speaker 2: the most hit places. Obviously, Bangladesh has huge amounts of
Speaker 2: climate migration from the Bay of Bengal to other areas.
Speaker 2: But you know, there was a really interesting study out
Speaker 2: recently that showed that drought in the growing season in
Speaker 2: meso America is directly correlated with the number of migrants
Speaker 2: at the US border. So when it's particularly dry during
Speaker 2: the growing season, it pushes up food prices across Central America,
Speaker 2: and then we get this wave of increased migration towards
Speaker 2: the US border. And that's perhaps the most kind of
Speaker 2: beautiful correlation that I've seen. But we also see in
Speaker 2: parts of Africa, we see a lot of climate migrants.
Speaker 2: We just had a really horrific flooding in East Africa,
Speaker 2: a place which is also suffering from chronic drought. What
Speaker 2: we're seeing is these cascading effects of one impact then
Speaker 2: leading to another impact. I mean, if we look back
Speaker 2: to Pakistan a couple of years ago, they had months
Speaker 2: of intense heat which was concurrent with extreme drought, which
Speaker 2: hit food prices and caused harvest losses. And then they
Speaker 2: got this terrible precipitation, this flash floods that caused thirty
Speaker 2: three million people to be displaced within a week. And
Speaker 2: then that's followed by landslides. Because the drought dries the
Speaker 2: soils and pulls it away from infrastructure, from houses and
Speaker 2: bridges and so on, making it much more susceptible. When
Speaker 2: those floods come, you get the loss of the top soil,
Speaker 2: which can take a decade sometimes to be replenished, so
Speaker 2: terrible harvest problems. But also you get that loss of
Speaker 2: huge amounts of erosion loss of the soil. And we
Speaker 2: see that everywhere.
Speaker 1: These impacts are being felt very widely, are being talked
Speaker 1: about at a level where there is awareness of the problem.
Speaker 1: We also know there are potential solutions, but there aren't
Speaker 1: that many places that are following through with those solutions.
Speaker 1: We know the amount of adaptation funding is vastly smaller
Speaker 1: than the funding that goes to reducing emissions. We need
Speaker 1: to do both, but definitely there's a huge gap and adaptation.
Speaker 1: So are there places that are starting to or perhaps
Speaker 1: are already doing a good job that others can look
Speaker 1: at and learn from.
Speaker 2: I think Bangladesh is a really great example actually of
Speaker 2: how adaptation can work well. So they have cyclones in
Speaker 2: the Bay of Bengal, and they have become progressively worse,
Speaker 2: more intense, more frequent, more severe, and yet they've put
Speaker 2: in place a brilliant adaptation strategy where everybody knows what
Speaker 2: to do in the case of a cyclone. There are
Speaker 2: early warning systems. People get alerts, they know where to go,
Speaker 2: they know where to bring their animals, they know that
Speaker 2: they will be allowed to return if they want. So
Speaker 2: there is a lot of trust there in the institutions,
Speaker 2: and that's one of the most fundamental things to adaptation. Now,
Speaker 2: what's happened is, even though the severity and the frequency
Speaker 2: of these cyclones have become far more intense in recent years,
Speaker 2: the death toll has absolutely plummeted. Very few people die
Speaker 2: comparatively to how many used to and we can all
Speaker 2: learn from that. I mean, we should all be preparing
Speaker 2: ourselves for an extreme event hitting us in our town.
Speaker 2: You know, is your bag packed? Where would you go?
Speaker 2: Where's the safe place that you would drive to or
Speaker 2: walk to? Do you have your friend's numbers written down?
Speaker 2: Do you have the numbers of relations? Do you have
Speaker 2: enough food and fresh water to survive for a few days?
Speaker 2: Do you have battery pack? All of these things are
Speaker 2: conversations that we should be having, especially if we live
Speaker 2: in places that are a bit further out, are a
Speaker 2: bit more rural, as people in la are realizing today.
Speaker 2: You never know when something can hit.
Speaker 1: There is this quote that crops up on social media
Speaker 1: every so often, especially when there's a disaster unfolding from
Speaker 1: scientists called John Holdron, who eventually became the science advisor
Speaker 1: to Barack Obama, the former US president, and the quote said,
Speaker 1: there are basically three choices, adaptation, mitigation, and suffering. We
Speaker 1: are going to do a mix of all of that.
Speaker 1: But the more we mitigate, the less we'll have to adapt,
Speaker 1: and the less there will be suffering. Now, what we
Speaker 1: are seeing in front of us is obviously a mix
Speaker 1: of all that, but we are seeing not enough mitigation.
Speaker 1: Definitely not enough adaptation and does more suffering, and that
Speaker 1: causes or will cause in much larger numbers, migration that's
Speaker 1: already become a hot button issue world over. Right, we've
Speaker 1: seen politics turn to the right, turn to be anti
Speaker 1: immigrant in most Western economies over the past few years.
Speaker 1: How are we going to deal with the challenge of
Speaker 1: migration if the politics is already so toxic.
Speaker 2: You know, we are living in this time when the
Speaker 2: narrative around migration is truly toxic. We have leaders that
Speaker 2: are far right, that are populists, that are slogan driven
Speaker 2: rather than vision led leadership to try and bring us
Speaker 2: together to solve these planetary scale crises. What we need
Speaker 2: is honesty. We need honesty over the scale of the
Speaker 2: climate disaster, but we also need honesty about migration. Right,
Speaker 2: it's completely normal and natural people move. We need to
Speaker 2: counter some of the toxic tropes that come out that
Speaker 2: immigrants increase on employment. The opposite is true, that they
Speaker 2: lower wages. Most economists would agree that immigration is absolutely
Speaker 2: essential in order to keep productivity, especially at a time
Speaker 2: when our birth rates are absolutely plummeting. You know, in
Speaker 2: a few decades, if not just one decade, nations will
Speaker 2: be competing for immigrants, and you know, those nations that
Speaker 2: manage to endear themselves to people who want to move
Speaker 2: there are going to be in the better position. But
Speaker 2: ultimately we have to be pragmatic. You know, migration is inevitable,
Speaker 2: it's already underway. It is only going to increase. What
Speaker 2: we need to do is engage with the reality that
Speaker 2: we have right in front of us and make it
Speaker 2: work for us, because there are so many benefits to
Speaker 2: it if we get it right.
Speaker 1: There are reason which you can get migration right, and
Speaker 1: there are clearly reason which you can get migration wrong.
Speaker 1: Are there any places where there are politicians that have
Speaker 1: successfully made the economic case for migration, pulled it off
Speaker 1: and actually won an election.
Speaker 2: Well, so it's a kind of sort of the dog
Speaker 2: chasing its tail in a way. So the reason quite
Speaker 2: often that leaders are chasing the anti migrant vote is
Speaker 2: because they themselves have made such an anti migrant case,
Speaker 2: and they're sort of supporting media that is also making
Speaker 2: the anti migrant case. So the public therefore think that
Speaker 2: they want no migrants, and nobody really is making a
Speaker 2: positive migrant case, so they're sort of like locked in
Speaker 2: this ridiculous vicious circle, which is completely unproductive for anybody.
Speaker 2: But I mean, if you look at Australia, for example,
Speaker 2: I think it's like almost a third of Australians were
Speaker 2: born out of the country and about half of Australians
Speaker 2: have at least one parent that was born out of
Speaker 2: the country. Now, Australia is quite a weird example because
Speaker 2: on one side it's vehemently anti migrant and on the
Speaker 2: other side it's incredibly pro migro, so they haven't quite
Speaker 2: got that right. But there are definitely aspects which are
Speaker 2: very pro migrant. And again the same situation with Canada.
Speaker 2: I mean, you only have to spend two seconds in
Speaker 2: Toronto to realize that this is an immigrant city, as.
Speaker 1: All cities are.
Speaker 2: You.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean London has the same qualification of having
Speaker 1: half the population actually not being born in the UK,
Speaker 1: And yeah, that's true of most global cities around the world,
Speaker 1: but it still doesn't quite translate into the politics of.
Speaker 2: Actually but if you look at the politics of cities,
Speaker 2: you will find that they are very pro migration. The
Speaker 2: anti migrant sentiments are generally in the places which see
Speaker 2: very very few migrants. But that's the world we're living
Speaker 2: in now. And that's the great rift in the United States.
Speaker 2: It's the great rift that we saw with Brexit and
Speaker 2: that we're seeing actually across the European Union. And it
Speaker 2: is very, very worrying. And so these are the challenges
Speaker 2: that we need desperately, desperately to resolve and that takes
Speaker 2: leadership ACTA. And this is the big problem that we
Speaker 2: don't have the honesty from leadership. We don't have that
Speaker 2: courageous visionary person in leadership really that I can see
Speaker 2: Antonio Guterrez perhaps you know, but he's not the leader
Speaker 2: of a country who is speaking honestly about the crises
Speaker 2: we face in climate, in migration, in poverty. We don't
Speaker 2: hear it.
Speaker 1: Well, you've tried to make a case for a global
Speaker 1: body that oversees immigration worldwide. You brought up Antonio Gute
Speaker 1: as the Secretary General of the United Nations. Should the
Speaker 1: United Nations be doing this? And how in the hell
Speaker 1: isn't going to get the powers to actually do this
Speaker 1: across nation states sovereign states that so fight to keep
Speaker 1: that status of independence and spend so much money on
Speaker 1: defense to ensure that stays.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Now, the United Nations, these bodies were set up
Speaker 2: at a time of huge crisis, just after the Second
Speaker 2: World War, when nations had been ripped apart, when millions
Speaker 2: had been displaced, entire cities had been flattened. Leaders hated
Speaker 2: each other, they'd literally just been at war with each other,
Speaker 2: and yet they came together to produce these international bodies
Speaker 2: that would eradicate the curse of smallpox and polio, that
Speaker 2: would set out a declaration of human rights, all of
Speaker 2: these things. They came together to do that, and that
Speaker 2: was remarkable. And yes, you know that there are flaws
Speaker 2: with that system. But where we are now, this planetary
Speaker 2: scale of crises that cannot be solved by drawing imaginary
Speaker 2: lines on maps. It needs a response that is also planetary,
Speaker 2: and I think that we need a United Nations that
Speaker 2: is a stepped up version. We are now our population
Speaker 2: of more than eight billion people, resources are now more scarce,
Speaker 2: and we're living in this extreme dangerous world of climate change.
Speaker 2: And I think the only way we can deal with
Speaker 2: planetary scale human mobility and climate crisis that's helping to
Speaker 2: cause that is through a body that can help to
Speaker 2: manage that.
Speaker 1: Well, you joined the illustrious company of Kim Stanley Robinson,
Speaker 1: who would also very much like the members of say,
Speaker 1: the G twenty or the United Nations to actually act
Speaker 1: like members of a body that has deeth to make
Speaker 1: global policy work. Thank you, Gaya, Thank you, actually, it's
Speaker 1: been such a pleasure talking to you. Thank you for
Speaker 1: listening to Zero. And now for the sound of the week.
Speaker 1: That's the sound of a Canadian firefighting aircraft scooping water
Speaker 1: to fight the LA Fires. You can read more about
Speaker 1: how those water bombing planes were quickly put into production
Speaker 1: at bloomberg dot com slash Green. It's a fascinating piece.
Speaker 1: We'll also put a link in the show notes. There's
Speaker 1: also a lot more coverage of the LA Fires from
Speaker 1: my colleagues.
Speaker 4: At Bloomberg Green.
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