Highly Commended for the Wainwright Prize 2023, and shortlisted for the Zócalo Book Prize and the Christopher Moore Prize For Human Rights Writing

'Gaia Vince's new book should be read not just by every politician, but by every person on the planet' Observer

An urgent investigation of the most underreported, seismic consequence of climate change: how it will force us to change where - and how - we live

We are facing a species emergency. With every degree of temperature rise, a billion people will be displaced from the zone in which humans have lived for thousands of years. While we must do everything we can to mitigate the impact of climate change, the brutal truth is that huge swathes of the world are becoming uninhabitable. From Bangladesh to Sudan to the western United States, and in cities from Cardiff to New Orleans to Shanghai, the quadruple threat of drought, heat, wildfires and flooding will utterly reshape Earth's human geography in the coming decades.

In this rousing call to arms, Royal Society Science Book Prize-winning author Gaia Vince describes how we can plan for and manage this unavoidable climate migration while we restore the planet to a fully habitable state. The vital message of this book is that migration is not the problem - it's the solution. Drawing on a wealth of eye-opening data and original reporting, Vince shows how migration brings benefits not only to migrants themselves, but to host countries, many of which face demographic crises and labour shortages. As Vince describes, we will need to move northwards as a species, into the habitable fringes of Europe, Asia and Canada and the greening Arctic circle.

While the climate catastrophe is finally getting the attention it deserves, the inevitability of mass migration has been largely ignored. In Nomad Century, Vince provides, for the first time, an examination of the most pressing question facing humanity.

Reviews

• With the government's migration policy in such appalling disarray, Gaia Vince's Nomad Century has to be the most timely book of the year. Vince's calm, compassionate and authoritative explanation of the inevitability of migration is essential reading... There should be a copy on every desk in Whitehall

• A tour de force... Nomad Century should be on the reading list of anyone and everyone in any position of power. It is not simply a future atlas of human geography showing where will be habitable and for how many, but a hard-hitting must-read on how we will need to live in the coming decades to secure the long-term survival of humankind

• Essential, bold and clear-sighted... I have yet to read a book that takes the question of how to survive the coming decades more seriously

• A powerful, provocative argument

• After a summer of climate catastrophes, not least the appalling floods that left a third of Pakistan under water at the end of August, now should be the moment to consider radical solutions

• Engaging and constructive... Vince leaves the reader with more than a few sparks of hope

• Gaia Vince's new book should be read not just by every politician, but by every person on the planet, because it lays out, much more clearly than any existing scientific assessment, the world we are creating through global heating... Passionate and powerful

• Powerful... It holds much wisdom with which to tackle the challenges of our turbulent century... Nomad Century is a visionary book, an attempt to imagine how climate change might reshape our notions of what is politically possible

• Nomad Century is a landmark work - terrifying in its message and urgency, but ultimately empowering in its conviction about a path forward. Gaia Vince lays bare the scale of the challenge before us, and the grand ideas that will be needed to meet it. We must be ready; this book shows us how

• Once again Gaia Vince demonstrates that she is one of the finest science writers at work today