The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future

will lie there, useless and undrivable, until the deep freeze of winter returns so they can be graded again. Giant north-flowing rivers like the Ob’, Yenisei, and Lena in Russia, and Mackenzie River in Canada become ice highways in winter. In High Level, Alberta, I visited Tolko Industries—a major softwood producer for the U.S. building industry—and learned that their wood harvest relies on a fourteen- to sixteen-week winter road season. To the consternation of the company, that season has been gradually shortening over time. “We will lose our shirt” if the roads go away, their forester told me.³⁸⁴

Most resource extraction operations in the North already face tight profit margins from chronic labor shortages, long distances to market, and an environment that is both too harsh and too delicate. For industries where an entire year’s worth of profit must be made in a matter of weeks, even a few days lost is a serious blow. Because northern climate warming is greatest in winter, it uniquely targets this sector. Warm winters mean shorter winter road seasons and/or lighter allowable loads. Deeper snow means more insulation of the ground, further reducing the depth and hardness of its freezing. For all but the most lucrative operations, many industries will become increasingly uneconomic and finally abandoned.

The significance of this goes beyond the major Ice Road Trucker-type ice highways that are rebuilt in the same place each year. It means reduced access everywhere. Take, for example, off-road oil and gas exploration on the North Slope of Alaska. To avoid damaging thin tundra soil and vegetation,³⁸⁵ this can be done only in winter, when its soft, moist surface freezes hard. There’s simply no other way to drive on this environmentally sensitive ecosystem without tearing it apart. But since the 1970s the North Slope’s permissible off-road travel season has declined from over two hundred days per year to just over one hundred days,³⁸⁶ effectively cutting the energy exploration season in half.

Put simply, this is not a good century to be out working the land in remote interiors of the North. In permafrost, permanent structures will become even trickier to build and maintain than they are now. Despite ways of prolonging the life of winter roads,³⁸⁷ there’s no getting around the fact that milder winters and deeper winter snow will shorten their seasons, making many of them pointless to build for all but the most lucrative projects—the NWT diamonds,³⁸⁸ for example, or natural gas pipelines. Already we see delayed openings and earlier closures harming smaller outfits operating on tight margins.

Extraction industries will favor projects nearer the water. Looking ahead, our northern future is one of diminishing access by land, but rising access by sea. For many remote interior landscapes, the perhaps surprising prospect I see is reduced human presence and their return to a wilder state.

CHAPTER 7 The Third Wave

“Canada: A few acres of snow.”

—Voltaire (1694-1778)

Number One ($596 billion per year)

—Rank of Canada among U.S. trading partners (2008)

The preceding chapters imagine a 2050 world in which global population has grown by nearly half, forming crowded urban clots around the hot lower latitudes of our planet. Mighty new poles of economic power and resource consumption have risen in China, India, and Brazil. People are urban, grayer, and richer. Many places are water-stressed, uninsurable, or battling the sea. Some have abandoned irrigated farming altogether; their cities rely totally on global trade flows of energy and virtual water to even exist.

We have a diverse basket of new energy sources but still rely heavily upon fossil fuels. Natural gas is especially lucrative and under aggressive development in all corners of the world. Among these is the Arctic Ocean, where investment capital is flowing north as the peaceful settlement of seafloor claims, diminished sea ice, new maritime port facilities, and specialized LNG tankers have made offshore gas extraction increasingly economic. The NORCs’ relative water riches are envied by all. Milder winters have encouraged billions of southern organisms to press northward, including us. But in remote continental interiors, many small villages and extraction industries have been abandoned, even as new ones flourish along the coast.

These broad pressures and trends portend great changes to the northern quarter of our planet, making it a place of higher human activity and strategic value than today. But history tells us that the pace and pattern of human expansion will not be uniform. There are many differences among the NORC countries, like steep temperature contrasts and an uneven geography of natural resources. Disparities abound in their historical patterns of settlement and infrastructure. Demographic trajectories, and national views on foreigners and aboriginal rights, vary greatly. The decisions of past political leaders on how to develop their frontiers still carry legacy today, as do current attitudes toward economic globalization and trade.

How much do these different preexisting conditions across northern countries matter? Many of the global and regional forces described thus far will be shaped by them. Their contrasts bring finer detail to the broad outlines of the 2050 thought experiment drawn thus far, and are the subject of this chapter and the next.

Quick! Hazard a guess: Of the following six countries, which has the fastest population growth rate out to 2050—China, Brazil, Canada, Iceland, Mexico, or Norway?

If you picked China, Brazil, or Mexico you guessed wrong. In terms of percent growth (not sheer numbers) you may be surprised to learn that none even makes the top three. Canada, Iceland, and Norway are all growing faster with population increases of 20% or more expected by 2050 (see table on page 173). Their base populations are much smaller of course—the sum total of people living in these three countries today is half that of Germany— but there is no disputing their extraordinary rate of growth.

The model projections tell us that by 2050 human populations will be larger in all of the NORC countries except one. The glaring exception is Russia, where falling births, rising deaths, and an aging population promise a precipitous decline of nearly one in five people. Of the NORCs, Russia alone joins Japan, Germany, South Korea, and Italy as a population loser by 2050. But even with 24 million fewer Russians, the total population of the eight NORC countries is still projected to rise by 76 million people (+15%). Most of this will be driven by growth in the United States (+86 million, with perhaps +15 million in northern states³⁸⁹) and Canada (+11 million), with nearly +3 million more arriving in Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, and Iceland.

Some Population Densities and Trajectories 2010-2050

(Source: United Nations Population Division)

Where will all these new people live? Outside of Europe, the NORCs control most of the land areas lying north of the forty-fifth parallel. Excluding the Greenland Ice Sheet, this is over forty million square kilometers of land, more than quadruple the area of the lower forty-eight U.S. states. By my calculations³⁹⁰ roughly fourteen million square kilometers—about one and one-half times the size of the United States or China— are quite livable. Might these be the lands into which new settlements will spread?

The First Waves

Actually, they already have. The forty-fifth parallel does miss Toronto, Canada’s largest city, but captures virtually all of the rest of Canada, plus a row of northern U.S. states from Minnesota to Washington. The cities of Portland, Seattle, Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Winnipeg, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Ottawa, and Montreal are all contained within the planet’s northern quarter of latitude. Tracing the forty-fifth parallel farther east, we see it