On Climate Migration and Thinking About the Future

Planners need to imagine a variety of future outcomes to make comprehensive recommendations for their clients’ full financial security
By
Mary Martin, Ph.D.

Journal of Financial Planning: June 2023

 

Mary Martin, Ph.D. (www.marymartinphd.com), is a Brown University-certified teacher of mindfulness-based stress reduction, a certified Mindful Schools instructor, and a certified trauma-sensitive mindfulness practitioner. She has a doctorate from New York University’s School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. She started teaching mindfulness practices to financial advisers in 2015 and launched her course, Mindfulness for Financial Advisors: Practicing a New Way of Being (7.5 CFP® CEs), in 2019. Her book by the same name was published in 2022.

 

“Here it’s critical to remember that almost all financial decisions—investment, credit, insurance, subsidies—are bets about the future. While they may be bets about the future, they take place now. Foreseeable future losses become present trouble.”1

                                      —Alex Steffen, Climate Futurist

 

I spent six weeks of 2023 living in 2033. I participated in three, two-week social simulations led by futurist Jane McGonigal, the director of game research and development at the Institute for the Future, the world’s leading futures organization, established in 1968. McGonigal’s past simulations include 2010’s EVOKE, in which 20,000 players imagined 2020 as a year with a global respiratory pandemic originating in China (including mask-wearing and social distancing), historic wildfires on the West Coast, the collapse of the power grid due to weather, and a disinformation and conspiracy theory campaign spread by a group known as Citizen X. Remember, this simulation was run in 2010.

The first simulation this year took place in a world of zero waste, the second centered on climate migration, and the third was a world where the sun was being dimmed to cool the Earth. The intention wasn’t to predict the future, but to identify current signals of possible futures and ask, “What if these particular signals were to grow in momentum and strength? What might it be like to live in that world?” It’s called futures thinking and not future thinking because there’s more than one answer to that question. If you watched Apple TV’s limited series Extrapolations, you got a feel for what futures including climate migration and geoengineering would be like.

I initially wanted to write this article about the second simulation, Welcome Party, because climate migration is relevant to retirement planning. But as I wrote, I found that idea incomplete; I was omitting something larger and more valuable. There’s no way we can undo the accumulating effects of climate change on the planet—not even with Solar Radiation Modification2 (i.e., the third simulation). We’ll experience them no matter what, unless some new technology is invented that saves the day. What we can do for sure, right now, is alter our thinking and behavior to mitigate the effects climate change will have on us, our families, our communities, and our clients. We might even invent something that alleviates the impact on housing or start a business that helps our community better handle what’s to come.

We can boost our ability to imagine different futures by playing games like social simulations. Humans are notoriously bad at identifying and acting on what would benefit our future selves, largely because when we think about our future selves it’s as if they’re strangers to us3 and we don’t have empathy for them. The degree of self-control we have now springs from the empathy we have for our future selves.4 Procrastination, inability to resist temptation, and difficulty saving for retirement all speak to a lack of connection to future selves.

Fortunately, we can train our imaginations and cultivate the connection and empathy required to act in the service of our future selves. Results of such training include increases in hope, optimism, and resilience; decreases in anxiety and depression; and an increase in our capacity to adapt faster to new challenges. As McGonigal writes in Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything—Even Things that Seem Impossible Today, “When we think about how the future might be different, we better understand how we might become different too.”5

The Welcome Party Scenario and Backstory

I was one of 175 members of the Institute for the Future’s 1,300-plus member Urgent Optimist community who lived in a world where one in nine people—one billion people—would choose to migrate due to the effects of climate change. We decided whether we would be hosting people migrating from areas within or outside of the United States (whom you may have heard called climate refugees), or whether we ourselves would need to move. Crossing borders wouldn’t be an issue in the simulation, as a global coalition of leaders had agreed this needed to happen and borders would be open. There was financial support involved, and the actual migration was scheduled to take a decade.

I know you have many questions about the process, the rules, how financial support is calculated, and whether it’s taxable. Plus, you’re thinking, “That’ll never happen.” And it probably won’t—at least not that way. But climate migration is already a reality for tens of millions of people worldwide.

The word “migration” conjures birds, wildebeests, humpback whales, and monarch butterflies. But humans, too, are a migratory species. We originated in Africa, began leaving there at least 100,000 years ago, and currently cover almost the whole planet. At this moment, more than half of all living species in the world are migrating, following changes in the climate and moving to where they’ve never lived before. Humans are included in this migration.

Over the coming decades, more than 160 million people in the United States—nearly one in two—will most likely experience a decline in the quality of their environment that puts their homes and lives at risk.6 There will be more heat and droughts; hurricanes are tracking north, getting stronger, carrying more rainfall,7 and hurricane-force winds are tracking more inland.8 Meanwhile, Americans have been moving to counties categorized as high risk for hurricane-force winds at six times the rate of other counties.9 Then there’s sea-level rise, which is undeniable, yet as the oceans rise, the number of people living near them is rising, as well.

Due to a combination of legitimate social, economic, and cultural reasons, many people resist leaving until that’s the only remaining option. This is displacement. From 2008 to 2021, 10.5 million Americans were displaced because of climate change, largely due to either forest fires on the West Coast or hurricanes.10 Those people had no choice. Some of them were bought out by FEMA-funded and other buyout programs. Right now in the United States, 23.7 million properties are at risk from flooding, 71.8 million are at risk from wildfires, and 95 million are at risk from severe wind.11

How much do you know about the climate risks of your area, such as heat, air quality, drought, wind, wildfires, flood, and extreme events like hurricanes and tornadoes? Have you looked at the forecasts for those risks over the coming decades? Do you know that the 10 warmest years of the historical record occurred since 2010?12

Related to those risks, and a significant factor that will drive voluntary climate migration, is the cost of insurance. In areas where sea level is rising, many homeowners are moving not because they think their house will be underwater in a decade, but because it will be uninsurable or their flood insurance will be cost-prohibitive. Many coastal properties exposed to flood risk are overvalued, as there are no flood risk disclosure laws. Regardless, wealthy owners of pricey coastal properties who aren’t concerned about climate change can rebuild. Ultimately, though, it might not matter how intact and updated your house is if it’s not insurable and the person buying it needs it to be. As natural disasters become more frequent and costly, insurance companies face big challenges, which translate to challenges for the real estate market and the entire economy.13

As frightening as this all might sound, science journalist Sonia Shah writes in The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move, “We can turn migration from a crisis into its opposite: the solution.”14 We did just that during the Welcome Party simulation, treating it as a challenge instead of a threat.15 We used the impending migration of a billion people as an opportunity to craft a world where mass migration could happen in an equitable and safe way. We created new businesses, currencies, vocabulary, technologies, housing designs, and jobs, most of which could easily be imagined or are present in some form now. According to research by the Institute for the Future, 85 percent of the jobs of 2030 don’t yet exist.16 In the scenario, I created a business that prepares HNWH (high-net-worth hosts) to welcome guests. There will be three packages: Palladium, Iridium, and Rhodium (they will be most valuable in 2033), much of the work will be done in the Worldverse, and payment will be in WorldCoin. My haptic suit and travel glasses will allow me to feel what it’s like to be in anyone’s home, anywhere, so I can recommend the necessary modifications and instructions.

On Responsibility

In The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration, climate journalist Jake Bittle asks, “What do we owe to each other?” He writes that how we adapt to this era of displacement and voluntary migration is “a question of responsibility.”17 I’m not making a case related to being a fiduciary or about ethics. I’m framing this in terms of how we all think about what we do for a living, and how we relate with each other and with the various communities we traverse.

We can boost our own and each other’s well-being through connection, as Julie Fortin, CFP®, FBS, CeFT, and I wrote in February’s issue of the Journal of Financial Planning.18 We can also cultivate well-being through how we think, as well as by acknowledging our agency. So what does that look like?

I’m promoting a combination of radical awareness of the science and forecasts regarding climate change, combined with a growing capability to think differently about possible futures and act accordingly. Treat every morsel of information you learn as one part of a solution rather than as a problem. It’s only a problem if you think it is and you act like it is. This is about mindset.

If you or a loved one has their head in the sand about climate change, gently, lovingly pull it out, and don’t judge. Instead, be compassionate. The realities of what’s happening to our planet are difficult to hear, for some. But we can only skillfully move through the next few decades if we’ve armed ourselves with the best information we can get.

If you think this discussion doesn’t apply to you because you live in an area that’s called climate resilient, who’s calling it that and what do they mean? Do they mean they have intentions and plans to lessen the effects of what’s coming, or do they mean not much is coming due to the location? That’s a crucial distinction.

There were plenty of fellow Welcome-Party players located in parts of the world not likely to become uninhabitable, even over the coming century. But that didn’t mean they didn’t have anything to think about or plan for. They have families and friends who aren’t as geographically fortunate. In addition, hundreds of millions of people who are strangers to them will be displaced or voluntarily migrating. Climate change disproportionately affects people of color and low-income communities. This “climate gap”19 brings us back to that question of responsibility.         

Regardless of your current situation, what do you think you’re responsible for? To whom do you owe consideration? Who might you welcome into your home? Is your community welcoming,20 and do you know what plans are in place for future climate migrants? What does it mean to be welcoming, anyway? Be on the lookout for that to be added to deep listening and empathy on lists of soft skills.

Hope and Optimism: Byproducts of Futures Thinking

Probably the most meaningful aftereffect of immersing yourself in a future, assuming you’re detailed in the world-building of your imagination and you can vividly experience the future you’ve created, is you develop empathy for your future self. You feel your future struggles, and your heart breaks over your difficult decisions. You don’t see yourself in the third person, and you’re not a stranger. This is also a benefit of what are known as first-person shooter games, which frequently get a bad rap but have some powerful, positive neurological effects.21

When compared with a control group, the players of McGonigal’s EVOKE showed a statistically significant increase in their ability to think creatively, produce novel ideas, dream of ingenious ways to resolve a conflict, and initiate forward-looking solutions. That precisely describes my experience of Welcome Party.

Absent participating in a structured social simulation, what can you do to prepare yourself and those you care about for our changing climate? You can do some mental time travel to 2033. Here’s one way:

  1. Begin by putting on your problem-solving hat. Remember, this isn’t a crisis. Right now, it’s an opportunity. Get into that challenge state of mind.
  2. Gather the relevant forecasts for your own home for the next decade. There are links at the end of this article to help you create your home’s climate change profile. Don’t outsource your sensemaking to your political party—go directly to the scientists and NGOs that study the effects of climate change. Once you’ve created the profile for where you are now, it becomes easier to imagine where you might be in 2033.
  3. Armed with your data about your current home, find a quiet place where you won’t be disturbed, settle your body, close your eyes if that’s comfortable for you, and imagine. Imagine you’re in your home in 2033. Are you in your current home or someplace else? Just go with whatever initially popped into your head; there’s no correct answer, and you can imagine it differently next time.
    What’s around you? You’re not thinking about your home, you’re sensing it and feeling it. What’s the air like? What’s the weather like, right now? How about the temperature? What do you smell, feel, and hear? Get as vivid as you can and immerse yourself in your 2033 home for at least two minutes.
  4. Invite thoughts. What are you thinking about? Who’s in your life? Who might you need to see or speak with? What are you about to do? Get as detailed as possible for another two minutes, and then open your eyes if they were closed.
  5. Do some freewriting about where you imagined yourself and how that felt. Don’t worry about grammar or syntax. Just write for five minutes: Do you want to be in the home you just imagined in 10 years?

Some people can easily transport themselves through time in their imaginations, while others struggle. If you found the exercise difficult, know that you can train yourself to get better at it. For example, I improved my own ability for mental time travel with awareness practices shown to develop convergent and divergent thinking. The resulting creativity allows my mind to soar through time, building future worlds, pinpointing problems, and engineering solutions.

When you do this time travel for yourself first, you experience what it takes, and, real-time, you’ll identify the discussions you’ll need to have with others. Those discussions arise from your experience, if it was vivid and immersive. This kind of imagining equips you to help those in your life think and feel through what could be the most important financial decision of their future lives.

Finally, be mindful that there’s no magical location in the United States guaranteed to experience zero climate-related events (not to mention other types of disasters). We do the best we can with the information we have. So let’s get the best information we can get, and help those dear to us as lovingly and compassionately as possible. 

Endnotes

  1. See https://medium.com/@AlexSteffen/im-a-climate-futurist-here-s-what-s-next-4d7248c297ac.
  2. See https://www.unep.org/resources/report/Solar-Radiation-Modification-research-deployment.
  3. Hershfield, Hal E. 2011, October. “Future Self-Continuity: How Conceptions of the Future Self Transform Intertemporal Choice.” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1235 (1): 30–43. https://nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1749-6632.2011.06201.x.
  4. See www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/12/self-control-is-just-empathy-with-a-future-you/509726/.
  5. McGonigal, Jane. 2022. Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything—Even Things that Seem Impossible Today. New York: Spiegel & Grau: xxviii.
  6. See https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/how-climate-migration-will-reshape-america-1.
  7. See www.gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming-and-hurricanes/?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template.
  8. See https://report.firststreet.org/wind?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template.
  9. See www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/interactive/2023/hurricane-risk-map-us-climate/.
  10. See www.internal-displacement.org/countries/united-states.
  11. See https://riskfactor.com/about.
  12. See www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-global-temperature.
  13. See https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2022/11/03/with-climate-impacts-growing-insurance-companies-face-big-challenges/.
  14. Shah, Sonia. 2020. The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move. New York: Bloomsbury: 316.
  15. The discussion about threat versus challenge mindset can be found in many places. Jane McGonigal links it specifically to games and gaming in SuperBetter: The Power of Living Gamefully (2015. New York: Penguin).
  16. See www.delltechnologies.com/content/dam/delltechnologies/assets/perspectives/2030/pdf/Realizing-2030-A-Divided-Vision-of-the-Future-Summary.pdf.
  17. Bittle, Jake. 2023. The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration. New York: Simon & Schuster: 279.
  18. Fortin, Julie, and Mary Martin. 2023. “To Best Connect with Clients, Connect with Yourself.” Journal of Financial Planning. 36 (2): 42–45.
  19. See www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsb2213250.
  20. See https://welcomingamerica.org/what-is-welcoming/.
  21. See www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-video-games-change-brain/.

 

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