The 5 Best Places to Live in 2100 (2024)

FUTURE HUMAN

It’s a Saturday night in August and another electric and endless Arctic sunset has cast the city of Iqaluit in gold. Downtown, on Niaqunngusiariaq Street, in an Inuit-themed bistro featuring tundra-fed musk ox and Arctic char, a host of young urban designers, dance choreographers, and writers, are discussing the plights of their parents, who immigrated to this northernmost province, Nunavut, in eastern Canada, in the 2070s. The smartly dressed friends, enjoying a flowery peach sauvignon blanc from China, are American and Spanish, Indian and African. Compared to their parents and grandparents, who fled deadly heat and droughts, endless forest fires and flash floods, the young artists, in the year 2100, can’t believe they have it so good. In this perennially growing city, spread out across a series of mountain valleys, with homes that overlook the dynamic color-sweep of Frobisher Bay, they are never short of things to do when they are not at work. Under the eternal summer sun, they hike, bird-watch, kayak (which the Inuit like to remind the newcomers they invented) — the outdoor opportunities are thrilling.

That, anyway, is how a travel magazine devoted to the best places to live in 2100 might read. In fact, with the effects of climate change becoming more apparent every day in 2018, it might not be a bad idea to start planning for where our children’s children might live. It’s no surprise that the collective advice of climate scientists today is Go North, Young Man. “If, as many climate models suggest, our planet becomes one of killer heat waves, fickle rain, and baked croplands, might new human societies emerge in places currently unappealing for settlement?” asks Laurence C. Smith, a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, in his book, The World in 2050 — Four Forces Shaping Civilization’s Northern Future. “Could the 21st century see the decline of the southwestern United States and European Mediterranean, but the ascent of the northern United States, Canada, Scandinavia, and Russia?” According to the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the international body that evaluates the science of climate change, the answer, for the year 2100, is “Yes.” At that…