Geographical www.geographical.co.uk December 2020 • £4.99 MAGAZINE OF THE ROYAL GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY (WITH IBG) CAN WE PREDICT CLIMATE MIGRATION? TIM MARSHALL ON BELARUS EARTH PHOTO: THE SHORTLIST WHY ENGLAND’S AGE OLD NORTH–SOUTH DIVIDE IS GETTING WORSE A COUNTRY DIVIDED Travel Insurance with you in mind Travel insurance designed by travellers Up to £10M medical expenses One Way cover at no extra cost Extend cover whilst away Extreme sports and activities covered, including trekking, volunteer work and scuba diving to 50M Get immediate cover truetraveller.com or call 0333 999 3140 RGS panel Contents December 2020 • Volume 92 • Issue 12 47 SPOTLIGHT ON: SABAH Pockets of abundance in the land around the Kinabatangan River in the state of Sabah hint at the destruction beyond CLIMBING FOR CHRISTMAS Every autumn in the Caucasus Mountains, men climb to the top of Nordmann firs to harvest pine cones MOVING STORIES Climate change is forecast to trigger mass migration, but are these predictions really accurate? EARTH PHOTO: SHORTLIST Shortlisted images from Earth Photo, the prestigious competition developed jointly by Forestry England and the RGS-IBG 18 28 63 WORLDWATCH 6 Mother’s microbes 8 Bushmeat 9 Climatewatch 10 Cartogram: space travel 12 I’m a geographer: Steven Amstrup 14 Zoos and conservation 15 Geopolitical hotspot: Belarus 16 WildEast programme 17 Fishing for the future REGULARS 54 Geo-graphic: energy inequality 56 Reviews 60 Geo-photographer: Matthew Maran 72 Where in the world? 73 Crossword 74 In Society; RGS–IBG events 78 Discovering Britain 82 Next month: ylang ylang; Readers’ corner DEPARTMENTS COVER STORY Find out more about the benefits of joining at www.rgs.org/joinus December 2020 • 3 36 THE NORTH/SOUTH DIVIDE England has long suffered from a North–South divide that plays out particularly starkly in education, transport and health. Despite numerous attempts to tackle it, the rift shows no sign of healing LOOKING FURTHER It’s hardly the usual build-up to Christmas. As the UK continues to tackle coronavirus, it’s uncertainty and silence that fills the air rather than joy, laughter and that more 21st century sound of Christmas: the babble of shoppers. But, with several companies offering online delivery, one aspect of the festive period may yet stay the same – the Christmas tree. After all, if we’re going to spend so long at home, why not fill it with the heartening scent of pine. Yet, how many of us really know much about these lifeforms from a forest far away, which come to briefly share our home? It’s easy enough to find out where your selected tree was grown – it might be Denmark or Norway or even the UK. But this is only the second half of the story. Before growing, someone has to pick the seeds and a huge number of these come from one small region in Georgia. Eighty per cent of Nordmann fir trees sold in Europe are thought to have started life in the Caucasian nation, which exports between 25 and 70 tonnes of Nordmann seeds annually. On page 22, Clément Girardot and Julien Pebrel travel to meet the men who pick these seeds. Unsatisfied at low prices and poor workers’ rights, they may well wish that Christmas tree consumers were willing to look a little further into their trees’ lifecycle. Looking further also lies at the heart of Chris Fitch’s investigation into the statistics frequently circulated about climate migration (page 28). Vast numbers of people have long been predicted to leave their homes due to the climate crisis, but where do these figures really come from? And how can they be verified? What Chris finds is a situation much more complex than simplistic headlines suggest, revealing that in the face of the challenges to come it’s important to be prepared, both to face the threats and to carefully question them. Katie Burton Editor Welcome Contributors ‘Very few people know much about their Christmas tree,’ says French freelance journalist Clément Girardot. ‘When you think about Christmas trees, you don’t think that it’s an industry with many similarities to the coffee or chocolate industries, where raw material is extracted in one country and processed in another with a lot of inequalities involved, but this is the case.’ ‘The creation of hundreds of millions of refugees has been an anticipated consequence of climate change for decades,’ says writer and author Chris Fitch. ‘But does it do a disservice to people in developing communities to suggest that, at the first sign of environmental change they’ll pack up and leave home? There are many reasons why such a mass movement of people might not unfold on a large scale.’ ‘The Thames plays a rich and vibrant part in our past as well as in the 21st century, for me this makes it one of the world’s most fascinating living monuments,’ says Ann Morris. ‘It’s home to me, and millions of others living within reach of its banks, as well as to an extraordinary collection of wildlife from Britain’s rarest bumblebee to some of the largest aggregations of wintering waders and wildfowl in the UK.’ Geographical December 2020 Volume 92 Issue 12 4 • Geographical Publisher Graeme Gourlay Editor Katie Burton Designer Gordon Beckett Staff writer Jacob Dykes Subeditor Geordie Torr Cartographer Ben Hennig Operations Director Simon Simmons Sales and Marketing Director Chloe Smith Editorial Advisory Board Chris Bonington, Ron Cooke, Nicholas Crane, Rita Gardner, Robin Hanbury-Tenison, Annabel Huxley, Vanessa Lawrence, Nick Middleton, David Rhind, Antony Sattin, Nigel Winser Address Geographical, Suite 3.16, QWest, Great West Road, Brentford, Middlesex TW8 0GP Telephone: 020 8332 8420 Email: