Climate Change’s Mass Migration with David Houle
In Season Four, futurist David Houle joined the show to engage in a conversation about the future of humanity. David argued that humans today find themselves at a fork in the road. One path leads to utopia, while the other leads toward Armageddon. Through advancements in our understanding of climate change, artificial intelligence, quantum computing and biomechanics, we possess the ability to alter the course of human history for the better — before it’s too late.
In this episode, David and Don meet again to discuss aspects of climate change in more detail, specifically around the idea of strategic retreat. In David’s words, strategic retreat is “the planned and managed relocation of millions of people triggered by extreme weather, droughts, floods and sea level rise.” This critical concept, along with the migration of millions of people that goes along with it, is going to be a topic that politicians, business leaders and individuals will talk a lot about during the rest of this decade and beyond. David shares just how urgent it is for us to accept this fact and how we can begin planning now.
David Houle is the author of “The Shift Age,” “Shift Ed: A Call to Action for Transforming K-12 Education,” “Entering the Shift Age,” “Brand Shift: The Future of Brands and Marketing,” “This Spaceship Earth” and more. David is futurist in residence and guest lecturer at the Ringling College of Art + Design in Sarasota, Fla. He is honorary president and futurist of the Future Business School of China. David is also a founding member and managing partner of The Sarasota Institute - A 21st Century Think Tank.
Resources From This Episode
Connect with David on LinkedIn
Follow David on Twitter
Explore David’s work on his website
Connect with Don on LinkedIn
Follow Don on Twitter
Transcript
Don MacPherson:
Hi, this is Don MacPherson, your host of 12 Geniuses. When David Houle first joined the show, we had a heavy conversation about the future of humanity. In this episode, we discuss climate change. David is calling for a strategic retreat for many coastal areas, geographies threatened by ongoing wildfires, and places that have unsustainable water supplies. This idea of strategic retreat, and the migration of millions of people that goes along with it, is going to be a topic that politicians, business leaders and individuals are going to talk a lot about through the rest of this decade and beyond. This episode of 12 Geniuses is sponsored by the Think2Perform Research Institute, an organization committed to advancing moral, purposeful and emotionally intelligent leadership.
David, welcome back to 12 Geniuses. We talked about the future of humanity in our first podcast. Today, we're going to talk about strategic retreat, and it has climate change implications. Let's just start out by talking about what strategic retreat means.
David Houle:
I wrote about, in a book I published in 2019, “Moving to a Finite Earth Economy - Crew Manual” — so if I could just read this quote because it was edited — strategic retreat is the planned and managed relocation of millions of people triggered by extreme weather, droughts, floods and sea level rise. Mass migrations as a by-product of climate change are inevitable. To minimize social strife and human suffering, it must be thought through and planned for. Sometimes it is called managed retreat, but that implies having to manage it which is the second stage. The first stage is strategically plan as much as we can, starting now.
Don MacPherson:
So the implication there is millions of people, but that's just in the United States. We could be talking hundreds of millions of people, or even maybe billions of people globally, correct?
David Houle:
So that quote from that book was 2019. At that point in time, the range of estimates, by those that I trust in who are really ahead in the science, is that between 2019 and 2030, there'll be 50 to 100 million climate change refugees globally. And initially that's going to come from South Asia. Well, where are the tens of millions of people who live in Bangladesh, who are living 1 foot above sea level rise going to go to? And in the United States, it's a little longer out with some exceptions. Miami has 6 million people in the greater Metro area. That's not going to be an inhabitable place by 2040, both because of sea level rise and the incursion of saltwater into the groundwater. Yeah. I want to put this in historical perspective. Well, two things. One, there are three categories of sea level rise: catastrophic, risky and best probable.
By 2050, best probable is 1 foot, risky, 2 feet, catastrophic, 4 feet. By 2100 it's 3 feet, 5 feet, and 9 feet. What we did was we look historically, so there are the six greatest human migrations of all time — African slave trade 1400 to 1800, 12 million; Stalin's forced migrations, ‘29 to ‘52, 12 million; Nazi expulsion, 12 million; partition of India, 10 million; all countries to Israel, 1948 to 2000, 3.6; and Afghanistan to Pakistan, 1980s, 2.8. That adds up to 53 million, the six greatest of all time in human history. And we're going to do that in this decade with just climate change.
Don MacPherson:
We focused so far on rising sea levels. And that is going to be one of the causes of this mass migration or strategic retreat without a doubt. And we can talk about building sea walls and things like that, but that doesn't seem like it would solve the problem. Am I correct there?
David Houle:
Yeah. I mean, you may have seen some of these editorial cartoons where there's a husband and wife standing in the middle of the United States and from the Rockies west is all aflame. And from the low-key Adirondacks east, it's all flooded. He says, “honey, where do you want to go on your vacation?” Right. So, I mean, literally all the laws are going to change about flood insurance, and the insurance companies have now stated they may not offer fire insurance to the Western three Pacific states. And if they do, it's going to be astronomically expensive.
What I've been saying here in the state of Florida, where I live in Sarasota since “Spaceship Earth” came out in 2015, is if you think about the most valuable real estate in the state of Florida, it's beachfront property. Well, what happens when there's no beaches? So the highest value of real estate it's going to be the most distressed because it's going to go down in value every single year. So they're already wealthy people who have big houses in Sarasota come to me and said, “I sold it. I sold it.” So in other words, get ahead before it becomes apparent, right? I mean, if you want beachfront property, the time to sell it is very soon.
Don MacPherson:
In 2013, so this is almost a decade ago, there were 12,000 $10 million properties or more in California, in the state of California. So just do the math. And let's say that they're only worth $10 million. And we know that they're worth more than that on average. That's $120 billion just from those 12,000 properties. So we're talking an incredible hit to the economy if those real estate markets collapse.
David Houle:
Where this gets me really annoyed is all the conversation about how expensive it will be to move to a non-carbon economy. Right. And the math that we did on that said basically to repair the damage done by sea level rise and extreme weather is about a trillion dollars a year globally. And it's going to go up to $10 trillion when you do the math 2025, 2030. So basically by 2030, the cost of climate crisis is roughly going to be 10% of the global GDP. So it's kind of like, invest now or pay the price, but we're not even planning for it. I don't think in the federal government or in the state governments, there's a department of strategic retreat. The last two years, it's the first time in my lifetime, and I'm an aging baby boomer, where the population of California has gone south for obvious reasons, right?
Take what happens with this. I mean, where are these people going to move? The United States, marketplace of real estate, won't be able to handle this. Prices are going up all over. Affordable housing is a big issue. Think about what's going to happen now when literally between now and 2035, maybe 15 million people will have to move in the United States alone. We're just talking United States. I think 90% of the population of Australia is within 15, 20 miles of the oceans, right? And of course, they have all the fires, in … the Outback. So where are they going to move? I mean, it is, can't think of a word that's too big to describe this problem.
Don MacPherson:
You mentioned insurance, and this is a key topic because eventually insurers will stop insuring for fires or for floods. So when do you anticipate that happening? I know it's already happening, but when will it reach critical mass?
David Houle:
I'm not sure if the current state of the federal flood insurance, but I do know as of two years ago, it was being looked at. And I give an example in this book where, basically, a house costing $100,000 on a riverbank in the Midwest flooded, gets rebuilt one, two, three times. They're going to put in stuff that if it ever was flooded once and you rebuild, you're not going to get flood insurance. It's almost like a compounding event that's about to happen. The leaders talk about real estate values, but talk about the relocation. We have a crumbling infrastructure now, and we're going to have to relocate tens of millions of people by 2050 in this country alone and hundreds of millions around the world.
And of course, I ended up talking about the immigration policy of the United States of America because to put it very simply, if you're up the far right, you don't want to have anybody, but white people come in. And if you're in the far left, oh, we're a nation of immigrants, everybody should be welcome. Well, when there are a few 100 million people largely from Asia and Africa, where do they want to go? They want to go to the EU and the United States and Canada, right? So we better have our immigration policies well-thought-out and well-structured in advance of this because that's going to happen, too.
Don MacPherson:
Central California produces an incredible amount of food, and if their climate no longer allows for that, that has to change. And access to food becomes very, very difficult for a lot of people in this country. So I would love to hear you comment on that.
David Houle:
One of the things that I've been preaching about food relative to the climate crisis is vertical gardens. There's probably 1,000 big box stores that are empty right now in the United States of America. And think of all the malls, what COVID is done. Take those anchor stores, the former Macy's, and take all the empty big box stores and make vertical gardens. Right now, the problem with food is, as you say, in the valley in California, I'm going to buy an avocado in Florida, but it's got the carbon cost of being flown here. So to make food local. It's cold where you live in the wintertime, but you might be able to have five to 10 crop cycles in Minnesota in vertical. But again, nobody's planning on scaling that up.
Don MacPherson:
The mall, certainly I think would be a great place for these vertical farms because you have plenty of places for solar panels, putting up windmills. It's a very easy transition. You alluded to this earlier, when you were talking about the great migrations in human history and talking about World War II and talking about other points in history. The one that you didn't talk about, because it wasn't as big, was Syria. Just a number of years ago within the last decade, about a million people were displaced from Syria and were spread across Europe. And we experienced incredible levels of nationalism in a lot of the countries where people were migrating to, and that's just a million people. And so we've seen a rise in nationalism over the last five years, 10 years. This is going to create an environment where nationalism will continue. And I wonder if you've thought about that and what comments you have on that.
David Houle:
Of course, I mean, the Syrian numbers actually, a million were relocated to Europe, but 6 million were displaced. So times that by 10 to 20 in the next 10 years. And if you think about the Middle East, thinking more, obviously, about the sea level rise, about South Asia and Indonesia. Jakarta's sinking, for example. And that's, I think, the third-most populous country in the world, right? Or fourth-most populous country in the world. And that's an island country. It's Islam. And then you're going to have Islam and Hindu, and that's not going to be assimilated into the Midwest of the United States very well. We've shown that. And the other part of strategic retreat is really just that, Don: It's recognizing it's going to happen, strategic planning for it, building the infrastructure and the housing base to deal with it.
And then also understanding what this is going to do culturally, in terms of nationalism. When one writes a book and one is in the final throes of the final draft, as I am of book No. 3 of the 2020s, it's called “The 2020s, The Golden Age of Design and Redesign.” The concept is everything on this planet has to be redesigned. How we relate to the planet has to be redesigned. Democracy has to be redesigned. Capitalism has to be redesigned. Cities have to be redesigned. In other words, the last 200 years of the Industrial Age and the Information Age has pretty much shaped our thinking, our install base, our systems — and all of it has to be redesigned.
So strategic retreat is just a part of that. How do we redesign migration in an institutionalized humanity-first way for what is ahead? We talked about the vertical gardens, that's a redesign of an already installed base. We talk about the future of housing as being small and migratory. In other words, I did a scenario from 2035, and all the people living in motorhomes, in vans, in tiny homes that can be transported. There is no place on Earth that's not going to be affected by the climate crisis. So, be mobile, don't own. Be able to move. That's what we see is going to be a certainty. And that's part of the solution to strategic retreat.
Don MacPherson:
I'm wondering if there are countries around the world — and the Netherlands comes to mind — that are taking the lead on this. And the reason why I think of the Netherlands is because they've been underwater for a long time, and they're going to be severely impacted by this. But where can we look for examples of countries or cities that are redesigning in a way that is proactive?
David Houle:
I would agree that the first place to look is the Netherlands. You get off the plane in Schiphol and it says, “Welcome to Amsterdam.” And it has half of Amsterdam underwater. Welcome to below sea level. Right? Remember when the big ship got stuck in the Suez Canal, it was a Dutch company that undid it, right? So the Dutch are just ahead of the rest of the world relative to water. So look to them for sea level rise.
There were some architects, I covered this a couple of years ago, that were never going to design anything that wasn't floatable. In other words, you will build it near the canal, but it will be on poles. So it can rise up and down. One of the images I have of the landscape of Holland is these straight lines of canals. They fill it up, it's dispersed. So there really isn't any floods. I don't see that in the United States. I don't see rivers close to the ocean that are affected by tide, or sea level rise, or for storm surge, to have those runoffs. We see it everywhere in the Netherlands.
Don MacPherson:
What is filling you with a sense of optimism when you think about strategic retreat, when you think about rising sea levels, when you think about climate change?
David Houle:
As you may be vaguely aware of, I help on something called The Fork In The Road Project. We are at the fork in the road, as Fuller said, utopia or oblivion. I regard the rest of my life's work, Don, is to show how we can go down the path to the good future, how we can approach utopia, because it's almost like we passed the fork in the road. We're mindlessly going down Armageddon. So we need to do a detour to get back. So my optimism is that nobody wants to die. Nobody wants their grandchildren to spend the rest of their lives fighting for food and wondering whether they're going to survive the next year, based on where they live. My optimism is in the human spirit and the ability — and particularly, what has happened with COVID, because COVID has made everybody realize that reality can change.
And before COVID, it was much harder for me as a futurist to be able to explain to people how much stuff's going to change, because everyone thinks that reality is fixed. So now that everybody's reality — cognitive dissonance is what's the new reality — they're open to the need to change. And as I've said to CEOs, not only change, but get in front of the change because everyone's looking for the model of how to change. So my job and my optimism is, I think there's enough people, and enough intelligence, and enough foresight, and enough wealth and enough sense of family legacy to be coalesced.
As you know as a student of history, World War II was won on the factory floors of Detroit. It was the home front that got us. So I think America can do whatever it wants to do if it comes together. Unfortunately, we're at the nadir of that. In my lifetime, we've never been so polarized, we've never been so non-thinking, all this stuff that we hear too much of. But my optimism is to try and help. That's my job. My job is to create optimism and to infuse people with being conscious of what's ahead, and then letting the best and the brightest face it. That's the only tool we have.
Don MacPherson:
Love the conversation, David. Thanks for taking time with us again. And thank you again for being a genius.
David Houle:
Thank you for having me, really. I love talking to you anytime, Don.
Don MacPherson:
Thanks for listening to 12 Geniuses, this is the last episode of Season Five. I want to thank the 12 guests who return to the show, to give us these updates. It enabled me to continue my personal learning journey while sharing these episodes. Most importantly, it gave me time to spend a magical summer with my daughter before she started kindergarten. A special thank-you, goes out to Michael, Devon and the Reputation Capital team. They produce and promote the show. I'm beyond thrilled to be working with and learning from them. Finally, I want to acknowledge you, the listener. Without you, there's no point in creating the show. I love hearing from you. If you have feedback about how to make this show better, or if you have guest ideas, please share them at future@12geniuses.com. Thanks for listening, and thank you for being a genius.