Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

by Thomas L. Friedman

I first met Monique Barbut, who heads the U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification, at the U.N. Paris climate meeting in late 2015. Her calling card was a presentation with three maps of Africa, each with an oblong outline around a bunch of dots clustered in the middle of the continent. Map number one: the most vulnerable regions of desertification in Africa in 2008. Map number two: conflicts and food riots in Africa, 2007–2008. Map number three: terrorist attacks in Africa in 2012. All three overlapped in the same sub-Saharan heart of Africa. “Desertification acts as the trigger,” explained Barbut, “and climate change acts as an amplifier of the political challenges we are witnessing today—economic migrants, interethnic conflicts, and extremism.”