P I CT URE S R EU TER S
BY VIVIAN WARBY
Inside Coober Pedy, the underground town
Could subterranean cities that are built beneath those we live in help prevent mass climate migration and allow humans to adapt to the environment? Yes, say some experts.
THE UPSIDE TO
GOING UNDER BOBBY B takes his evening supper alone in his 42m² home.The temperature inside is a comfortable 23°C – the same as it is beyond his home’s walls. His dinner comes from the hydroponic plant close by, and he will later meet his friends for a drink in one of the town’s drinking pods. It’s been years since Bobby ventured out of his town to “that other place” – the one above ground where his grandparents were born. These days the temperature above ground is way in excess of 70°C and vast tracts of land are uninhabitable. The underground city – Rucidifus – in which Bobby lives is the norm in the year 2100. His story could well be part of a cli-fi book
– a new literary genre based on climate fiction – in which Bobby and billions of future climate refugees would live in underground cities as part of their attempt to find ways to adapt to dramatic climate change. Cli-fi is in part a dystopian (and if you’re keen on some hope – utopian) fiction take on what could happen if extreme weather conditions are not prevented. But it is also not as far-fetched as we might hope. Recently, the sixth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) highlighted that earth’s atmosphere and the seas are warming at rates unprecedented in
Coober Pedy - an underground town in the Australian outback built to avoid soaring temperatures looks like a martian wasteland when you approach it, but underground its alive with thousands of people.
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