Lifeboats in a sea of despair

Is my place more resilient to climate change than yours?

I’m back!

I met an interesting guy at Olivers cafe in nearby Clyde last week. He’d recently invested in the area and the local mayor, Tim Cadogan, suggested I contact him because of our mutual interest in climate change. He’s director of an international corporate law firm that’s currently based in Auckland. Originally from Amsterdam, he’s now investing in a future in New Zealand for his family. He’s not alone. There are plenty of examples of mega-rich seeking boltholes in New Zealand. Unlike them though, he’s keen to help others improve their lives at the same time. He can see that we’re on the wrong trajectory to stay within the 1.5C limit of temperature increase, and fears that the ramifications will be disatrous for civilisation. His vision is to provide a toolbox for self-sufficiency that will help us and future generations adapt to the change.

He told me he’d been motivated by this thought-provoking paper from Nick King and Aled Jones at Cambridge’s Global Sustainability Institute. It includes gloomy predictions of the planet’s future, especially in highly ‘developed’ regions. I never would have come across the paper in my normal trollings. And even if I had, the title An Analysis of the Potential for the Formation of ‘Nodes of Persisting Complexity’ would probably have sent me to sleep. No pretty pictures either. But I’m glad I bit the bullet and read it.

Authors, Prof Aled Jones and Nick King

Here are a few quotes from it:

.. global civilisation is very likely to suffer a catastrophic collapse in future (within a few decades).

… climate change is likely to be the most pervasive of these risk multipliers.

. . . future environmental conditions will be far more dangerous than currently believed. The scale of the threats to the biosphere and all its lifeforms—including humanity—is in fact so great that it is difficult to grasp for even well informed experts.

That’s the bad news. But there is hope. Some areas are much better suited than others to survive the impending collapse. They’ve been called ‘Collapse Lifeboats’ in the past, but the authors prefer the less politically-charged, but much more obscure notion of ‘Nodes of Persisting Complexity’. Personally, I prefer ‘lifeboat’ rankings. They depend on:

• future climate conditions

• carrying capacity (population and area)

• energy supplies

• dependence on global supply chains

• reliance on high levels of complexity (infrastructure)

The good news is that, mainly because our starting conditions are more favourable, New Zealand - and especially its South Island - is found to be the ‘lifeboat’ or ‘node’ having the greatest potential for withstanding these threats to civilisation. If you want to have a good life for your descendants in the decades ahead, there’s no better place for them to live. But perhaps I shouldn’t have mentioned that. If we’re inundated by a tide of climate refugees, several of those bullets points above will no longer apply.

Norway and Finland also ranked highly in the paper, but I can think of at least two disadvantages for those. Which reminds me: whatever you do, please don’t pass this on to Donald Trump.