Get yourself to a temperate island
Climate change doesn’t affect all areas of the globe evenly. That’s evidenced by the smoke from wildfires on the West Coast making its way all the way to East Coast and by climate refugees leaving places such as Central America, where crops are failing and floods are prevalent. Some island communities have made plans to move to more hospitable areas. The best places to survive climate change, Global Sustainability Institute analysis found, are temperate islands.
A combination of isolation, weather, and ability to produce renewable energy are the leading factors that make these the best places to survive climate change, or “nodes of persisting complexity” as the analysis calls them.
New Zealand tops the list as a place well-suited to thriving under “de-complexification,” breakdown of the systems of and structures of modern society into a simpler, more subsistence-level organization. The island nation is already proved its popularity during troubled times when tech billionaires flocked to their bunkers in New Zealand early in the COVID-19 pandemic. The weather is temperate enough to be friendly to agriculture. Unlike more tropical islands, it won’t be too hot, and unlike low-lying islands, it’s not susceptible to slipping beneath the waves.
Rounding out the top five places to survive climate change are Iceland, the U.K., Australia (specifically Tasmania), and Ireland. “Nations and geographical regions with these climatic characteristics have a relatively low degree of temperature and precipitation variability currently and therefore would remain this way at the start of any ‘de-complexification’ process,” the report, published in the journal Sustainability, said. “These locations would therefore also have the greatest likelihood of relatively stable conditions being buffered and persisting in response to climate change scenarios for the 21st century.”
It should be noted that the analysis mainly considers physical attributes in determining the best places to survive climate change rather than prevailing political conditions, although these physical factors have contributed to these countries being relatively well off economically. With ample space and large areas of productive land, the U.S. and Canada are next on the list of best places to survive climate change, but as we have seen, not all parts of these vast countries are equal.
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