Race for Tomorrow: Survival, Innovation and Profit on the Front Lines of the Climate Crisis

By Simon Mundy

As featured on CNN’s Amanpour & Company and BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week with Andrew Marr One of the Financial Times’ best books of 2021

In this extraordinary journey through twenty-six countries, Simon Mundy meets the people on the front lines of the climate crisis, showing how the struggle to respond is already reshaping the modern world – shattering communities, shaking up global business, and propelling a groundbreaking wave of cutting-edge innovation.

HOW is China’s green energy push driving a hazardous mining rush in Congo?

WHY is a maverick scientist building a home for engineered mammoths in northeast Siberia?

CAN an Israeli fake meat startup make a fortune while helping to save the Amazon?

WILL Greenland’s melting sea ice put its people at the centre of a global power struggle?

WHO are the entrepreneurs chasing breakthroughs in fusion power, electric cars, and technology to suck carbon from the atmosphere?

As the impacts of climate change cascade across the planet and the global economy, who is battling to survive the worst impacts – and who is chasing the most lucrative rewards?

Telling unforgettable human stories from six continents, this is an account of disaster, of promise, of frantic adaptation and relentless innovation, of hope, of survival, and of the forces that will define our future.

More praise

‘Vivid and informed’ ADAM NICOLSON

‘I took a great sense of hope’ RICHARD POWERS

‘Reads like a thriller’ MARK LYNAS

‘An inspiring piece of work that deserves a broad audience’ MICHAEL E. MANN

‘Utterly unlike any book yet written in this field’ ANAND MAHINDRA

‘Gripping … A must-read for every concerned global citizen’ NANDAN NILEKANI

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins UK
• Release date: Oct 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9780008394318

Simon Mundy

Simon Mundy covers environmental and sustainability issues for the Financial Times. He began his reporting career in Johannesburg, where he covered Southern Africa for the FT before a period writing on the London financial sector. He then spent seven years in Asia, heading the FT bureaux in Seoul and Mumbai – before two years travelling across six continents to research Race for Tomorrow, his first book. He was born in the UK.

Book preview

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RACE FOR TOMORROW

A Journey Through the Front Lines of the Climate Fight

Simon Mundy

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Copyright

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

WilliamCollinsBooks.com

HarperCollinsPublishers

1st Floor, Watermarque Building, Ringsend Road

Dublin 4, Ireland

This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2021

Copyright © Simon Mundy 2021

Simon Mundy asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Cover design by Emma Pidsley

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008394332

Ebook Edition © September 2021 ISBN: 9780008394318

Version: 2022-08-31

Praise

‘Simon Mundy, a Financial Times reporter, has travelled from the Arctic to the Amazon, China to Africa, looking for what he calls the scramble for riches and survival on a changing planet. Contains a lot of really, really interesting hard science and market-based solutions, [and] some extraordinary examples of technology … Very useful indeed’

Andrew Marr, Radio 4, Start the Week

‘One of the best things about the book is he takes it down from this 30,000-foot view to people on the ground … I took a great sense of hope’

Richard Powers, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Overstory

‘Urgent reading, told with journalistic rigour and at a riveting pace. I loved this book: a truly global journey, from Siberia to Central Africa, by an author who is as curious as he is incisive and brave’

Sophy Roberts, author of The Lost Pianos of Siberia

‘In Race for Tomorrow, journalist Simon Mundy takes us on a trip around the world, from the southern end of South America to the northern reaches of Greenland, telling the extraordinary tales of ordinary people of all stripes who are already finding themselves on the frontlines of the climate crisis. Read this book both to understand the urgency of climate action, and to recognise, too, the agency we still have in averting a catastrophic climate future. It’s an inspiring piece of work that deserves a broad audience’

Michael E. Mann, author of The New Climate War

‘Simon Mundy’s vivid and informed despatches from the frontline of climate change reveal not only the catastrophes imposed by global warming (which are hidden from most of us) but the best and brightest of responses to them. The title puts the question: which of these human qualities will win, a general destructive indifference or the commitment of a few courageous individuals to the grand challenge of the age? Mundy has sought out the first small gestures towards rebalancing the earth and Race for Tomorrow is the manifesto we all need. The question is urgent. Don’t wait. Read it now before the race is lost’

Adam Nicolson, author of The Sea Is Not Made of Water

‘Simon Mundy’s book reads like a thriller – which is only appropriate for a reporter covering the front lines of the climate crisis, the biggest story of our generation. Superb … a must-read’

Mark Lynas, author of Six Degrees and Our Final Warning

‘Utterly unlike any book yet written in this field. Packed with vivid human stories, from the most desperately challenged communities to the highest levels of global business and politics, it’s an essential guide to how the climate crisis is transforming the modern world’

Anand Mahindra, chairman, Mahindra Group

‘As the planet comes to terms with the biggest existential crisis it has ever faced, Simon Mundy’s Race for Tomorrow is a gripping story of individuals, communities and societies who are grappling with the myriad challenges of climate change. A must read for every concerned global citizen!’

Nandan Nilekani, author of Imagining India

‘A pacy, riveting global tour of our fracturing planet; completely fascinating’

Ben Rawlence, author of The Treeline

‘Simon Mundy has crossed the world, putting a human face on the most important story of our times. This book is eloquent and humane – a vital work of storytelling’

Henry Mance, author of How to Love Animals in a Human-Shaped World

‘Simon Mundy has given us a non-technical must-read book for anyone anxious about the massive threat to our present economic and cultural survival’

Professor David Cabot

‘Simon Mundy’s is a brave, informed and rational voice in today’s frenzied media landscape. Grab a copy of his book, Race for Tomorrow – it promises to be a vital read’

Diana Neille, journalist and documentary film director

‘Cannot recommend highly enough. The pace of a thriller, a whole bunch of amazing geeky stuff about climate change I didn’t know AND an uplifting message. Genuinely smartifying’

Alex Andreou, actor, writer & presenter of The Bunker podcast

‘I absolutely loved Race for Tomorrow. Well written, incredibly well researched, it’s a book that connects the climate crisis to the life of people most impacted by it. I devoured it in two sittings’

Laura Danks, author of Almost Forever

‘A must-read collection of intensely human climate-change stories … What I appreciate most about this remarkable book is that Simon at no time judges, hectors or patronises through his opinion. He recognises a deeply complex problem for what it is and seeks to stimulate in the reader sufficient curiosity and empathy to find out more’

Richard Hill, chief executive, Ocean Generation

‘[There are] many extraordinary tales in Mundy’s book … While Race for Tomorrow charts the inequality, exploitation and violence caused by climate change, it is charged with a sense of hope too … Mundy’s book attests to the fact that humans find opportunity in difficult circumstances’

GQ

‘Engrossing and revelatory … Mundy is an exuberant, precise stylist who renders every chapter an investigative triumph, and his special talent is for finding people-oriented stories that not only enthrall or appall but are very, very human. Race for Tomorrow is spellbinding, essential reading’

Read Listen Watch

‘If there is one book to pick up that will get you interested in what is happening to our climate, this is it’

The Arts Fuse

‘It’s a brilliant book! An optimistic, unpatronising account of what humankind CAN do to address climate change. Practical positive activism at its best’

Robert Rinder, Talk Radio

‘A work of hugely impressive breadth … An excellent compendium of climate change in the world today, providing more than enough answers for anyone who knows full well that climate change is real but lacks concrete examples of its impacts’

Geographical Magazine, Book of the Month

‘A formidable piece of work … In terms of its scope, its ambition and its commitment to tell all sides of the grand story of the climate crisis, I can’t think of a climate book that’s in quite the same league as this one’

The Earthbound Report

Dedication

For the many people who contributed to this project in countless ways, and who are acknowledged more fully at the end of the book

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

Map

Preface

PART ONE: THAW

Chapter 1: Siberia

Chapter 2: Nepal

Chapter 3: Greenland

PART TWO: RISING TIDES

Chapter 4: Nigeria

Chapter 5: Maldives

Chapter 6: Solomon Islands

Chapter 7: Bangladesh

PART THREE: AN AGE OF STORMS

Chapter 8: Venice

Chapter 9: Philippines

Chapter 10: Munich / Bermuda / Nicaragua

PART FOUR: DRY LAND

Chapter 11: Chile

Chapter 12: Ethiopia

Chapter 13: India

PART FIVE: MEAT

Chapter 14: Mongolia

Chapter 15: Brazil

Chapter 16: Israel / California

PART SIX: FOSSILS

Chapter 17: Saudi Arabia

Chapter 18: Australia

Chapter 19: Iceland / Switzerland / Germany

PART SEVEN: POWER

Chapter 20: China

Chapter 21: United States

Chapter 22: Congo

List of Illustrations

Picture Section

Afterword

Notes and References

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

Map

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Preface

Sometimes a story can seem too big.

In the past few years, climate change has shot with stunning speed from the margins to the very centre of the global conversation. A surge of extreme weather events has crushed any lingering sense that this is some hypothetical challenge for unborn generations. While innovators seek ways to tackle the mounting hazards, people on every continent are fighting for the survival of entire communities. With a snowballing activist movement driving pressure for radical action, leaders from Washington to Brussels to Beijing are competing to position their economies for supremacy in a low-carbon world. A new generation of tycoons is chasing windfalls from clean power and electric cars, as the mighty fossil fuel industry lapses into existential crisis.

In its scale and breadth, the subject might look intimidating. Reading up on it can mean walking into a blizzard of abstract statistics: parts per million of carbon dioxide, thousands of square kilometres of deforestation, gigatonnes of melting ice, trillions of dollars of green energy investment. But it’s now so entangled with every major element of our present and future, from what we eat to how we travel, from mass migration to tensions between superpowers, that skipping over this one is not an option. To understand the unfolding twenty-first century, you need to understand the climate crisis, and the changes that it’s sent cascading through the modern world.

This book grew out of my own desire, as a journalist, to understand what I consider by far the biggest story of the century, and to help others to get to grips with it too. The toughest challenge, for anyone writing on this theme, is to avoid getting lost in the sprawling mass of information, with a subject that touches every part of the planet, every segment of the economy, and great swathes of science and technology. Yet beyond those statistics, one of the most compelling contests in history is under way, with a huge and diverse cast of characters from every walk of life and every corner of the globe. Whether they’re fighting to make their fortunes or avoid disaster, they are engaged in a struggle that will shape the future for all of us. To tell that story, I realised, to capture the human drama behind the models and data points, I’d need to get out and meet the people on the front lines.

So I set out on a journey that ended up lasting nearly two years, through twenty-six countries on six continents. It took me to the edge of a fast-shrinking glacier high in the Himalaya, and deep into one of the hand-dug pits where Congolese miners are risking their lives to profit from the green tech revolution. I visited Amazonian tribes fighting to save their rainforest from illegal cattle farming, and an Israeli startup growing eco-friendly beef in bioreactors. I walked the shores of disappearing islands in the South Pacific, and through the frenetic clamour of China’s biggest electric car factory.

Everywhere, I found people grappling with the unprecedented challenges that the climate crisis has thrust upon humanity. Some were at the base of the global wealth pyramid; some were billionaires. Climate change was opening tantalising new opportunities for some I encountered, while threatening to destroy the livelihoods of others. I met people rushing to build defences against catastrophe, and others jostling for leadership in the technologies that will power a transformed world economy. All of them are embroiled in a race that will set the course of our civilisation, and of the planet that houses it. These are their stories.

PART ONE

Thaw

CHAPTER 1

Thawing of permafrost is destabilising soils, human infrastructure, and Arctic coasts, and has the potential to release vast quantities of methane and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere …

– Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate (2019)

YAKUTIA, RUSSIAN FEDERATION

Ten, perhaps twenty or fifty thousand years ago, these mammoth bones bore the weight of some of the largest mammals ever to walk the earth. Now they lie in odd little piles, jumbled with the skeletons of horses and bison that roamed with them on the ice age steppe of Siberia.

I crouch to pick through some of the bones strewn across the floor of the giant hole in the ground that I’ve clambered into. On every side, high above me, walls of cold grey earth soar before curving to form a dangerous overhang. The walls are moving – crumbling and retreating loudly as the ice within them melts, exposing the stringy white roots of ancient plants. High up at the rim, spindly trees stand at curious angles, as though peering into the hungry void that will soon engulf them.

Local people, steeped in the animist traditions of northeastern Siberia, have dubbed this place the gateway to the underworld. Scientists know it as the Batagaika Megaslump, the biggest phenomenon of its kind in the world. It began to form half a century ago in an expanse of coarse shrubs and larch trees, on a section where a makeshift road had been cleared. The disturbance caused underground ice to melt, creating at first a modest, barely perceptible dip. Its growth was turbo-charged from the 1980s onward as global warming gathered pace, the rising temperatures eating their way through new layers of frozen ground each summer. By the time I enter the megaslump, it’s broad enough to hold 175 London buses laid end to end, deep enough to swallow the Sydney Opera House, and showing no sign of halting its expansion.

Vast as it looks, Batagaika is just a snip of a Russian permafrost zone that is the size of China, Afghanistan and Nigeria combined, and which has emerged as a potentially huge risk to the global climate. Beneath Siberia’s frozen soil lies billions of tonnes of organic matter, the remains of ice age plants and animals. As warming temperatures thaw the permafrost, microbes are feasting on this material, releasing both carbon dioxide and methane, a still more potent greenhouse gas. Already, the carbon emissions from the Arctic permafrost are at a similar level to those from all international passenger flights. And even if all humanity were to stop burning fossil fuels overnight, the gases already in the atmosphere would ensure the permafrost kept thawing, releasing still more gas – a hideous cycle that could keep feeding on itself for decades or centuries.

I turn to find my guide Erel gazing at one of the ugly mounds that ripple along the crater’s base, amid fast-flowing rivulets formed by melting ice. ‘Over there,’ he says, ‘is where I found my tusk.’

The thawing permafrost might be a problem for the planet, but the emergence of mammoth remains has been lucrative for some in the semi-autonomous Russian republic of Yakutia, a place that brings home Siberia’s staggering size. Yakutia’s capital, Yakutsk, is 3,000 miles east of Moscow – putting it as far as northern Ethiopia from the Russian capital. Roughly the size of India, it has just 900,000 inhabitants who brave its absurdly harsh winters – with lows of -64°C in Yakutsk and -68°C in Oymyakon, respectively the world’s coldest city and village. People with eyelashes frosted white shop at outdoor winter markets where fish, frozen rigid, are arranged upright like baguettes.

Yet Yakutia is now warming more quickly than almost anywhere on earth, with melting Arctic ice to its north creating an expanding blanket of dark seawater that absorbs ever more solar heat. The global average temperature rose by about 1°C in the past century, but parts of Yakutia are now warming at half a degree per decade. As the earth thaws and softens each summer, hundreds of Yakutian men head out to the wilderness in search of mammoth tusks. One of the prime sites is Batagaika, where those grim piles of bones have amassed as tusk hunters toss them aside.

Erel found his tusk in 2011 and sold it to a buyer from Yakutsk for $800, more than the average Russian monthly salary. But he was too early. In the years that followed, China cracked down on illegal elephant ivory from Africa – sparking a boom in Yakutian mammoth tusk hunting as prices soared. Engraved mammoth tusks can fetch more than $1 million on the Chinese market, after months of carving by artists in Hong Kong or Beijing. As they enter Macau’s gaudy Grand Lisboa casino, high rollers are greeted by a series of intricately carved mammoth tusks: one showing the Chinese legend of the monkey king, another the Great Wall of China. Secretive traders, flying in from Yakutsk or China, take hefty cuts, but local hunters can still expect to make more than $10,000 for large, well-preserved tusks. Growing numbers of them have started going to serious lengths to beat the competition – leaving their families for months to camp in insect-infested hideouts, illegally putting the permafrost melt into overdrive by blasting at the earth with water pumps.

It’s early evening when I jump into a small motorboat to travel 150 miles down the Adycha River. On both sides, trees are tilting and swooning where the river, swollen by melting ice, is fast eroding its banks. Around midnight the sun reaches its lowest point, still fully visible above the horizon but providing scant heat, and for five more hours I huddle shivering beneath a waterproof poncho.

At last I hear the crunch of the prow plunging into pebbles at the hunting site, hidden at a curve in the river amid hills dark with pine trees. A dog with thick white fur trots past rafts of yellow oil barrels, lashed together by the hunters to create platforms for their water pumps. Otherwise the site is deserted but for platoons of the mosquitoes that sweep the region in their billions each summer, in swarms so dense that I occasionally have to clear one from the back of my throat.

We notice an inflatable dinghy on the opposing shore, and cross to find a slim young man in a threadbare sky-blue jumper with cheeks dogged by acne. Aged 26, he’s an out-of-work biology graduate here for a few weeks with his uncle in the hope of fast money. Last season he made a lucrative find at Batagaika. In a picture on his Chinese smartphone, he hunches with the muddy tusk slung over his shoulders, thrilled and exhausted.

He takes me to meet a group camped out further down the river – four chubby shirtless men, playing cards and smoking in a wood-framed tent hidden behind a curtain of bushes. They’re still on edge after fleeing a police bust two days before, but one soon dons camouflage overalls and announces a visit to the hunting ground. A rival gang of five appears on that side of the river and watches us in silence as we cross.

We walk along a small valley filled with long beige hosepipes stretching from the water pumps at the river, and with the bones that the hunters have found and discarded. There’s no Chinese demand for those, even the monstrous piece of mammoth hip I struggle to lift, about half my size and weight. But the area has acquired a reputation for rich tusk pickings. In one recent year the tuskers here kept a collective log of all their finds. The season’s haul amounted to 2 tonnes of mammoth tusks, worth more than $1 million.

Months after I leave Siberia, I will have word from the young hunter, recounting how he left the crowded hunting site to wander alone in the tundra for forty-five days, betting that the warming earth would yield tusks without the need for pumping – or for sharing the bounty. The solo mission would yield enough ivory for him to clear his mortgage and buy a snowmobile.

‘You know the gold rush that happened in California?’ he tells me now with a grin in his riverside tent. ‘This is the tusk rush.’

*  *  *

A few days later, 600 miles to the south, I board a midnight ferry across the Lena River, on a journey from Yakutsk to the village of Churapcha. While the thawing earth spells rich pickings for the tusk hunters, for the villagers here it’s becoming a nightmare.

Semyon Nikitin is awake to greet me when I arrive at his home at five in the morning after a long drive through rutted roads, his eyes flinty but humorous above a thin white moustache. Semyon built the house of pale varnished planks three years earlier on retiring from the civil service. He chose this spot for the views, he says – and there is, at first glance, a fine vista of rolling green leading down to the woods a couple of miles away. But then I see them: the bouncing little hills like an endless series of burial mounds, extending from the edge of the forest right up to Semyon’s back yard.

It’s these weird shapes that have brought me to Churapcha, having intrigued me since I first saw them in satellite images on the computer screen of a scientist in Yakutsk. The land around the village seemed to have been overwhelmed by a rash of pustulous boils, rounded shapes bulging from the earth. The scientist − Alexander Fedorov, a chatty veteran at the famous Melnikov Permafrost Institute − told me that rising temperatures have caused a fourfold expansion of these so-called thermokarst landscapes in Yakutia since the 1980s. They’re formed by melting ice, which produces ever deeper dips in the ground, Alexander explained. Sections of earth with lower ice content hold firm for a while, creating the bumps – but ultimately they too succumb, creating a huge bowl-shaped depression.

Semyon insists that his home will stand firm. He takes me outside to show me the protection he’s put in place. The house is built on truck tyres and wooden beams, to insulate it from the ground. But his neighbours have already started to drift away. Snejana Titova, a 37-year-old accountant at the village administration office, despaired of the growing sums she was spending to address the large furrows appearing on her land. Now she’s moving back in with her parents, who own a flat in the centre of the village where the underground ice content is lower. Even there the future looks uncertain, she worries. A few years ago, a visiting team of scientists from Japan and South Korea told the villagers that the proliferating grooves and dips could eventually grow into a depression enveloping all of Churapcha.

I heard a similar prediction from Alexander, who has spent forty years studying his homeland’s frozen ground. If climate change continues unabated, he said, about half the population of Yakutia could ultimately need to move away from ice-rich areas that will turn into uninhabitable wastelands. ‘We’re trying to get people used to the idea that this landscape will change, becoming a swamp,’ he said. ‘And they will have to move, abandoning everything they have.’

Over lunch at Semyon’s home, I notice a large portrait of Stalin hanging high on the wall to my right. Semyon is head of the local Communist party; now 69, he proudly pulls out his old Soviet military uniform, festooned with medals. But when he gives me a tour of the village, Semyon includes a large monument to local people who were dispatched in 1942 to some of the furthest reaches of Siberia, in one of Stalin’s insane forced migration drives. The exiles struggled in their harsh new habitats, and two thousand died, according to an inscription on the memorial’s outer wall. Now, Semyon and his neighbours are in danger of being uprooted again – due this time not to the whims of a tyrant, but to the power of natural forces warped by the pollution of modern civilisation. But in the distant northeast of this huge territory, an eccentric scientist is waging a lonely struggle to prove that Siberia can be part of the solution.

*  *  *

Like an Old Testament prophet Sergey Zimov strides ahead, white-bearded, stabbing the ground rhythmically with a tall metal pole, a thick halo of mosquitoes hovering over him. I’m in Yakutia’s Kolyma region, an Arctic zone to the far north of Japan – a place seen even by Siberians as forbiddingly harsh and remote, whose biggest claim to fame was its brutal Soviet gulag system. Now, however, the area is starting to attract notice for a very different sort of initiative. It’s called Pleistocene Park, Sergey’s extraordinary project to fight climate change by slowing down the thaw of Siberia’s permafrost. He wants to turn this landscape back to ice age ‘mammoth steppe’, grassland populated by large mammals – perhaps one day including the mammoth itself.

Earlier in the day, as Sergey steered his boat upstream from his research station, I asked him what had first attracted him to this distant outpost. ‘Looking for freedom!’ he bellowed over the deep groan of his outboard motor, as flecks of ash from his cigarette blew onto me.

Sergey had risen quickly through the Soviet scientific system before being sent to Kolyma in 1984 to study the local ecology. Ordered to close the station and move out after the Soviet Union’s demise in 1991, he refused and turned it into a private research site. He’d been intrigued by the region’s abundance of bones from the Pleistocene – a 2.5-million-year period, including a succession of ice ages, that ended about 11,000 years ago. Studying the remains, he concluded that this area had once hosted a great density of mammoths, lions, wolves and other animals, looking like a chillier version of a Kenyan safari park – until humans arrived in the region and hunted them to oblivion.

As the 1990s progressed, Sergey became obsessed by a second startling discovery: Siberia’s thawing permafrost would release far greater volumes of greenhouse gases than other scientists had realised. His findings were overlooked for years before being published in Science, the world’s most prestigious scientific journal. They helped galvanise a wave of new research into what is now seen as a major climate threat.

I can see why Sergey might have had trouble gaining recognition from the academic establishment. He revels in his status as a maverick scientist, prowling the land around the station with his long grey ponytail tucked under a beret, like a shorter, paunchier Fidel Castro, a cigarette never far from his lips, swilling vodka with every meal.

At Pleistocene Park, Sergey is putting his hard-won credibility to the test. He wants to prove that grasslands, roamed and fertilised by animals, can protect Siberia’s permafrost from rising temperatures far better than the forest that now pervades the region. He hopes that if this initial project can prove his theory, he could secure funding from wealthy, green-minded donors to restore the mammoth steppe ecosystem across vast stretches of Siberia.

One afternoon in Kolyma, Sergey’s son Nikita leads me through a field of sharp tree stumps, thinking out loud about setting fire to them. Forests in tropical regions are a crucial asset in the struggle against climate change. In contrast, Nikita says, the problem with the dark larch woods in the Arctic is that they absorb too much solar heat, warming the permafrost beneath them. Lighter, more reflective grasslands stay cooler – especially when blanketed in winter snow. If animals are plentiful, that snow is trampled into a thin layer that allows the bitter cold to permeate from the air, chilling the permafrost enough to protect it against thaw when summer returns. And so the Zimovs have set about their unique form of environmentalism, using chainsaws and a full-scale armoured tank to destroy their section of Siberia’s famous taiga. ‘I’m not a hippie,’ Nikita tells me accurately, his blue eyes sharp above a curved scar on his chin.

We enter the main section of the park over a wooden slat bridge. A bison eyeballs us over a muscular shoulder before treading heavily away from two Mongolian sheepdogs – deployed to keep the herbivores moving, in the absence of real predators like wolves and lions. The dogs scamper after the bison before breaking into a sprint to chase a reindeer. At a distance are two clusters of sheep and musk oxen, lounging quietly. Later we pass a group of white Yakutian horses, their peroxide blond manes falling untidily over their eyes.

Today there are about seventy large animals in the park’s 50 square miles of fenced territory. Funding and logistical challenges have meant that number has grown far more slowly than the Zimovs had hoped, and the project is still well short of the scale needed to prove their hypothesis. During my stay, Nikita is struggling with bureaucratic hurdles around the delivery of twelve bison from Alaska, bought with $150,000 from an online crowdfunding drive.

The bison quest looks straightforward compared with that for the Zimovs’ ultimate prize: a resurrected woolly mammoth, which could dramatically accelerate the return of the grassland, felling trees with contemptuous ease. At Harvard University, a team led by celebrated geneticist George Church is working to engineer a mammoth, by selectively altering parts of the Asian elephant genome. Church claims he could start populating Pleistocene Park with mammoths within a decade. He has competition from South Korea’s Sooam Biotech, which has partnered with Yakutsk’s main university to search for mammoth DNA sufficiently well preserved to be cloned.

For now, the Zimovs continue their quest to repopulate their remote stretch of Arctic terrain with as many big beasts as they can get. It might seem laughably ambitious to turn millions of square miles from forest to steppe, but, they argue, it would cost a small fraction of the hundreds of billions that world leaders have committed to fighting climate change.

On my last day in Kolyma, I stand in a hollow recently created by the melting of a massive ice wedge, as Sergey looms lecturing above me. He’s convinced that he has found a crucial piece of the answer to the global climate dilemma. But he’s made sure to build his home on an ice-free patch of stony ground that will hold firm as the permafrost thaws. If the world decides to ignore his discovery, he’ll keep developing his scientific theories on a warming planet, safe in his sturdy refuge as the coastlines flood and the deserts grow – and as the Siberian permafrost unleashes its carbon bounty in a terrible vindication of his warnings. ‘I don’t afraid if permafrost will melt,’ Sergey mutters from the top of the newly formed hill, as the mosquitoes throng between us. ‘It’s not my problem. It’s your problem.’

CHAPTER 2

Glacier retreat and permafrost thaw are projected to decrease the stability of mountain slopes and increase the number and area of glacier lakes. Resulting landslides and floods, and cascading events, will also emerge where there is no record of previous events.

– Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate (2019)

NA GAUN, NEPAL

After a four-day trek up mountain paths filled with evil little leeches and lavishly expansive cowpats, my head feels like it’s being squeezed in a vice as I sit in Furdiki Sherpa’s kitchen hut, 30 miles west of Mount Everest in the Nepali Himalaya. Furdiki herself has never been troubled by anything so feeble as altitude sickness. At 74, she’s spent her entire life in the village of Na Gaun, 4,180 metres above sea level, making