The reality we have yet to face.
Climate change has entered a new phase. The Earth system is not only rapidly warming — it is destabilising. Ocean circulation is shifting, natural carbon sinks are weakening, ecosystems are collapsing. Each change makes the next more severe.
The stakes are higher and the time to respond is short, but global cooperation has stalled. Together, the problem has moved beyond what the system was designed to handle.
AMOC collapse and these severe climate risk demand a coordinated response from governments.
The stakes are higher
The understanding of catastrophic tail risks – the possibility that parts of the Earth system will shift into a fundamentally different state – has advanced sharply over the past decade.
The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is the clearest present case.
A significant weakening – and, at the far end, potential collapse – could mean sharp cooling across northwest Europe, drier summers, a southward shift in tropical rainfall belts, and more than half a metre of additional sea-level rise. Shifts on that scale would threaten agricultural viability globally. Disturbance of that kind could land on an international order with limited spare capacity to absorb it. This has potential for truly catastrophic consequences.
We have less time
The rate at which the planet accumulates heat, the primary driver of global warming, has more than doubled in recent decades. Three things drive it: greenhouse gas emissions at an all-time high; the cleaning up of air pollution, which removes a cooling effect that had masked some warming; and a decline in the planet’s own reflectivity as sea ice and reflective cloud cover shrink. The rate is higher than expected – and not yet fully understood. Margins once treated as comfortably distant have narrowed.
This is especially true for AMOC risk, where the issue is compounded by increasing threats to the underlying ocean monitoring system.
The global response has stalled
The multilateral process still produces ambition, but has become less able to convert it into collective commitment.
Any emission reduction or global preparedness progress increasingly occurs outside the diplomatic channel, largely driven by cost, industrial policy, and energy security. That progress is real, but it is not aimed at the same target. It does little for hard-to-abate emissions, and it does not constrain fossil fuel production. If anything, energy security raises it: supply you own is supply nobody can cut off.
Meeting the 2°C threshold requires producing less coal, oil and gas. Current government plans would put 2030 production 77% above the level needed, up from 69% in the same assessment two years earlier. No producer will cut alone: whatever one leaves in the ground, another sells. Closing that gap requires precisely the coordination the multilateral process has stopped delivering.
Taken together, these three trends shift the ground beneath climate policy. The objectives have not moved. The Paris targets remain the shared reference every country measures against – they are perhaps the last common ground between nations. And those targets were set for a reason. Below that level, catastrophic risks stay remote; above it, they don't.
Falling short of the Paris targets isn’t simply underperforming on an ambition. It means crossing into a territory those targets were designed to keep us out of.