Paul Goble
Staunton, July 17 – There is broad agreement that global warming will help Russia in the short and medium term even though it will likely lead to the collapse of existing infrastructure in part of the North. But in the longer term, global warming may play an evil trick on the country when tens of millions of people from places so hot as to be unlivable seek to enter its territory.
That is the judgment of Yevgeny Kuznetsov, a futurologist who has founded the Orbita Capital Partners. Noting that in the next 50 years, one to three billion residents of the earth are likely to find themselves in places where global warming has made their lives impossible (profile.ru/economy/klimaticheskaya-krivaya-kak-severnoe-polozhenie-rossii-opredelit-ee-budushhee-1135641/).
Russia is one of the few places where the climate is likely to improve and where there is sufficient vacant land for people to move into. As a result, somewhere between 20 and 200 million of those displaced by global warming are likely to try to move to the Russian Federation, Kuznetsov says.
How the country will cope with this influx, he continues, is a question for which he has no answer. But one thing is clear: if Russia has a positive image by that time, it may attract the most highly skilled of those displaced by climate; if it doesn’t, it may see a concentration of unskilled or low skilled workers on its territory, a development that will hold back development.
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