Noah’s Ark for the global elite: Safe havens from climate change
Text: Samuel SchlaefliExclusive safari lodges in Namibia, luxury resorts in Antarctica or smart cities in Mauritius: Global elites are creating havens for a world shaped by climate change. A University of Basel research project examines how these places take shape and what they mean for local communities.
Key takeaways
- Wealthy investors can use claims that land is unused or becoming uninhabitable to justify acquiring and transforming it, sometimes displacing local families.
- Researchers are examining how these retreats allow elites to preserve their economic and social position as the climate changes.
- The project also raises questions relevant to Switzerland: Who decides which places remain inhabited and which are abandoned?
In a widely acclaimed article from 2009, Indian historian Dipesh Chakrabarty argued that in the climate crisis, even the rich and privileged won’t have lifeboats to save them. Luregn Lenggenhager, a historian and assistant professor at the Center for African Studies, University of Basel, has a counter argument: “Our hypothesis is that the rich elite will likely be able to save themselves for a long time to come because they have the means to build a proverbial Noah’s Ark.”
Lenggenhager and his team began to study these “lifeboats” in September 2025 in a project supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation. They can take various forms, and examples include exclusive safari lodges to protect wild animals in Namibia; comfortable, stylish, temperate capsules in the Antarctic; and “smart cities” in Mauritius.
Devaluing in order to acquire
Lenggenhager explains that most of these climate escapes started out with “uninhabitability debates” deliberately set in motion by elite groups. He gives an example from his many years of research on land issues in Namibia. “International investors purchase huge tracts of land and turn them into private conservation areas.” Instead of benefitting local people through much-needed land right reforms, more and more commercial farmland is ending up in the hands of ultrawealthy investors. One of the central arguments for acquiring and repurposing the land is that it is uninhabited, underused and will soon be unfit for agriculture anyway.
Lenggenhager has described this dynamic in detail in a book he wrote with his colleague Bernard C. Moore, who is now working on his project as a postdoc. The two historians use the example of a conservation project along the !Garib/Orange River in southern Namibia to show how local families, who have lived and kept livestock on the land for generations, are being systematically displaced by new landowners whose funds run into the billions. “We noticed back then that this wasn’t an isolated case and that similar processes are happening elsewhere,” says Lenggenhager. “In Mauritius, for example, for years the government has supported private landowners who sell or lease their ‘unusable’ land, previously used to grow sugarcane, to global investors.”
Fields are bulldozed to create space for “smart cities” and eco-resorts. In November, Lenggenhager will travel to the former “sugar island” to join researchers from the University of Mauritius in working with archive materials, interviewing local people about their life stories and meeting land rights activists.
This isn’t about preppers
The research project centers around the concepts of the neglect and dereliction of land, its deliberate gentrification and curation, and the creation of escapes. This allows the researchers to clearly set their academic interests apart from “prepper” movements and the idea that, one day, the financially able will flee the climate apocalypse and disappear into self-contained bunkers. “The projects that interest us create specific social and ecological systems in which elite groups can maintain their economic and societal position,” explains Lenggenhager.
The project’s geographical focus is southern Africa and the economic and cultural catchment area of South Africa. Lenggenhager, however, also intends to apply the knowledge gained here for research in Switzerland and to analyze local developments from a South Africa-inspired perspective. “Switzerland has been debating the uninhabitability of Alpine valleys since World War II at least.” When ETH Studio Basel presented the idea of “Alpine fallow lands” in 2005, it brought new energy to a long-running discussion on the upkeep of and withdrawal from Alpine settlements. More recently, 2024’s devastating storm in the Maggia Valley and last year’s landslide in Blatten have reignited debates on withdrawing.
“The question always arises of who should get to decide who is allowed to live where and until when.” Lenggenhager is all too familiar with questions like these from his work on settler colonialism and apartheid in southern Africa. In those cases, it was a white elite who determined where the Black population would live. It is this academic background that spurs Lenggenhager to pose new questions in the Swiss debates — not least about who should decide which spaces will be kept and which can be surrendered.
Crude oil profits for conservation
Whether in the Alps or southern Africa, as a historian, Lenggenhager believes it is important to investigate the biographies of key players as well as the histories and interconnections of the companies involved. This provides the basis for a better understanding of motivations and dynamics. “For example, it turns out that many people now investing in conservation in Africa originally made their money from oil or mining.”
Lenggenhager also wants to learn more about the history, memories and future visions of the people who live in the surrendered and derelict landscapes or in the newly curated escapes. By the time the project is completed in 2030, the findings from the various subprojects and regions will be combined into a monograph with several case studies.
More articles in this issue of UNI NOVA (November 2026).