Gaia Vince - Great Hall - 12.30pm

Gaia is an award-winning science journalist, author, broadcaster and speaker. She is particularly interested in how human systems and Earth’s planetary systems interact, and  has travelled the world extensively to research it.

Gaia writes books and articles, including for the BBC, The Guardian, New Scientist, Australian Geographic, Science. she makes and present science documentaries for radio and television, and she give talks around the world. Previously, she held senior editorial positions at the science journal Nature, Nature Climate Change, and New Scientist magazine. You can see a selection of her recent work under ‘News‘ (I try to update it…).

Gaia is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at UCL’s Anthropocene Institute.

This is a unique time in Earth’s history, in which climate change, globalisation, communications technology and increasing human population are changing our world – and us – as never before. She is documenting these changes, talking to ordinary people, scientists and heads of state as we enter into the Anthropocene.

After she been travelling around the world for 800 days, she wrote this, which gives a nice overview of a journey that ended up taking 2.5 years, and formed the basis of her book ADVENTURES IN THE ANTHROPOCENE, which won the Royal Society Prize for Science Books (the first woman to do so).

In her book, TRANSCENDENCE, explores how we got here: how a smart ape became a planet-dominating force. It rewrites the story of our ‘ascent’, describing the co-evolution of our biology, environment and, importantly, our culture. It’s the story of how we made ourselves and where we are headed.

In her latest book Nomad Century  Gaia 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 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.

GAIA VINCE DISCUSSES HER LATEST BOOK 'NOMAD CENTURY' WITH HELEN CZERSKI IN THE GREAT HALL, 12.30PM - 1.15PM. ADVANE TICKETS £7 ON THE DAY TICKETS £10 [SUBJECT TO AVAILABILTY]