Climate change will displace millions of people – do we need to rethink attitudes to mass migration?

The planet could warm by more than four degrees Celsius by the end of the 21st century.

This will leave vast areas of land uninhabitable and force millions of people to find new homes, warns author and climate journalist Caia Vince.

“People will have to move (from) unliveable places,” she said at a Royal Society of Arts talk on Thursday.

“We need to manage migration so that it is not a catastrophe… but a safe, productive transition into a sustainable future.”

How many people will have to migrate because of the climate crisis?

The changing climate is already forcing people to abandon their homes.

The Institute for Economics and Peace – a London based think tank – estimates that around 1.2 billion people could be displaced by climate change over the next 30 years.

As floods, fires, and heatwaves become more common, some regions of the planet will become borderline uninhabitable.

Vince cites Mumbai – where 9 million people live in slum housing – as an example.

“There is no way that these 9 million people can have air conditioning in their slums,” she says, adding that they regularly face power outages during heatwaves.

“This is also the case large parts of Bangladesh, also the case for places across Africa, across the Americas, there are places that will not be able to adapt to these extreme temperatures.”