In 2021, the British government published a net zero policy, which set out the following:
“We are already seeing the effects [of climate change] here in the UK, with devastating floods … and torrential downpours … People are rightly concerned, with the latest IPCC report showing that if we fail to limit global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, the floods and fires we have seen around the world this year will get more frequent and more fierce, crops will be more likely to fail, and sea levels will rise driving mass migration as millions are forced from their homes. Above 1.5°C we risk reaching climatic tipping points like the melting of arctic permafrost – releasing millennia of stored greenhouse gases – meaning we could lose control of our climate for good.”
In April this year, as his popularity climbed in the polls, Nigel Farage proposed that, should his party Reform ever come to power, his chosen policies would emerge from his belief that the concept of net zero was “lunacy.”
A few months earlier, in February, Chris Wright, the energy secretary for the Trump government in the US, proposed that the UK’s net zero push was a “sinister tool to shrink human freedom”. In August, President Vladimir Putin of Russia announced that his nation would not meet its net zero policy until 2060.
Imagining a future world that doesn’t meet the net zero targets
In 2021, I set myself the challenge to create a novel around the concept of a near-future world that delays or cancels the net zero targets. The protagonist is 19-year-old gap-year student Dylan, who travels in time to experience a non-industrial, non-technological world, by spending a year in Wales during the sixth century.
Along the way, he also learns about ecological disasters in other times and places in history, including the volcanic winter of 535/36, described by the Roman chronicler Cassiodorus as being like a “hide stretched across the sky”. He visits and observes the ecological disaster created by the Nazca’s deforestation in what is now Peru, and the consequent fall of their civilisation.
Readers also get to see the near-future Britain in which Dylan lives, in scenes set between 2033 and 2059. In 2033, when the story opens, torrential rain and high winds are commonplace, and smog hangs over large cities for days. Coastal areas are slowly being reclaimed by the sea.
Climate protests are illegal, but Dylan goes to them anyway. He despairs of the over-40s of his time because they “meet to talk and talk and talk, only to agree to burn the world a little more slowly … but it wasn’t going to be their world for much longer; it was on the way to becoming the wreckage his generation was going to have to deal with”.
Global warming: a potential future for generation alpha
Dylan’s eventual role in the world of the mid-twenty first century is to join a worldwide initiative to clean and conserve the world’s water. When we meet him as a forty-one-year-old in 2054, we get a glimpse of the world he and his generation now inhabit.
The chapter opens with Dylan’s cousin Jack, in his flat in Leeds:
“Jack emerged from a cold shower, wrapping a towel around himself.
He strode into the living room and pulled back the curtains, looking at the ground far below. In a few years, maybe a decade, looking towards the east horizon on a clear day, he would probably be able to see the sea…
Jack had asked Dylan, the last time he saw him, when he thought the end of the constant societal upheaval would come.
‘Not for quite a while. In England, on the projections, we’d stand to lose Inner London before the end of this century. And a lot of the area around Norfolk, and South-East Kent. The Netherlands will be pretty much gone. But honestly, Jack, we’ll cope. We can build barriers in some places-the plans are on the drawing boards and will be finalised imminently; the populations of the areas that don’t get chosen will be moved elsewhere.’
‘That’ll be another period of rioting.’
‘Seems likely.’
‘Even more work for the security forces.’
Dylan nodded sadly. ‘Can you imagine what Gran’s generation would have had to say about the way this is being administered? The flakiness reminds me of the sixth century sometimes, but with hard core military tech.’”
As the chapter unfolds, we learn that Jack was a military pilot until recently, but he isn’t anymore, because he refused to open fire on a crowd of dustbowl refugees trying to tear down a border.
He says: ‘I’d refuse to do it again and again, whatever century you put me in. This whole world is an utter shit show at the moment… I didn’t want to turn into a lackey for international despots.’
A global warning: plummeting populations and shrinking landmass
Five years later, in 2059, as the book closes, Dylan reflects on successes and failures over the course of his career so far.
“The lines around his eyes were deepening, and his sun-weathered skin made him look a little older than his forty-six years… He spent so much of his time roving the dustbowls around the equator, painstakingly seeking out new sources of water that would give faltering communities another lifeline, to keep them going for another year, five years or rarely, ten.
The population had begun to fall in Northern Europe. The bulge (or, some said, “scourge”) of the Boomers was well and truly gone now, and most of the Gen Xers, too. Each succeeding generation for eighty years had not replaced their numbers; the optimism and material security needed for fecundity had steadily fallen over that period, with the graph taking a downward plunge from the mid-2020s onwards.
It was a sad state of affairs. But it did mean that if equatorial children could be kept alive for as long as possible in their region of birth, their chances to apply for the emigration quota had slightly increased. But still, the rule remained that only those aged eight to eighteen were eligible. Foster placements, education and training all had to be agreed prior to entry. Population vs food supplies dominated the calculation, and the Northern Hemisphere would always ruthlessly ensure that it didn’t compromise its standards of living…
Dylan walked to the window, staring down upon the canopy of light spread across the horizon. A warm summer breeze drifted in through the transparent insect nets. Even this high up, he imagined that he could just discern the susurration of insects. Equatorial species were quickly evolving into Northern Europe, their warm, wet new home. There was precious little left for them in their old habitat.
The streetlights embedded in the Thames barrier walls shone an eerie, yellow glow across the river. On a clear day, at this elevation, it was possible to see all the way to the rapidly encroaching sea on the Kent coastline; a distant sparkle of sun on the clear blue water that Dylan and so many others had relentlessly struggled to bring into being.
As a snapshot, it could seem idyllic. But never for this generation, carrying the scars of the brutal journey into this new world, still under construction. Barriers continued to rise against the tides in some selected locations, whilst others sank underneath, lulled into their watery graves by the angry shouts of the forcibly relocating former inhabitants”.
[Extracts from On Time for Eco, by Pam Jarvis, published by Burton-Meyers, 2025]
What do we want for our children and grandchildren?
When I started writing this book, the possibility of such a world lay in the realms of science-fiction dystopia. I hoped that the world’s governments would, by and large, do what they needed to do to avoid such an outcome. But now, as it is published, I am not as optimistic as I once was. And the stakes in this situation are the future lives of every young person on the planet.
All we can hope is that those adults who have a vote in future elections use this wisely, remembering that we do not just vote for now, but for the future of our children and grandchildren, to whom we bequeath the temporary tenancy of the world that all human beings call home.
