A Safe, Just and Holistic Plan for
Managing Climate Risks
The Climate Challenge
The speed and severity of climate impacts remain dangerously uncertain - and with every fraction of a degree of warming, the risks increase.
Navigating climate change is an exercise in risk management. The scientific consensus holds that the hotter the world gets, the greater the risks we face — particularly as we overshoot the Paris targets of 1.5C and 2C. These risks include triggering tipping points and feedback loops in the climate system that could lead to ecological disaster and catastrophic ‘social tipping points,’ such as forced mass migration, financial crises, and conflict.
Mitigation remains the only solution. But navigating our way out of the climate crisis also requires preparing to deal with the risks we know we face along the way.
The Path Forward
Climate Risk Preparedness
The only solution to climate change is to bring greenhouse gas concentrations down to safe levels — and we are making progress. But without a credible plan to manage the growing risks of the coming decades, we are in danger of being derailed by the impacts of an increasingly unstable climate.
This is why a comprehensive plan for climate change — one that is effective, safe, and just — needs to supplement accelerating decarbonization with ways to manage near-term risks.
Options exist, drawing on natural processes, hard science and traditional principles of stewardship. And research is underway. But this needs to be urgently and rapidly scaled up, with governance structures put in place, to enable informed and equitable decision-making.
Building this capacity now will equip us to act responsibly in the coming years to protect people and planet, not lurch for false solutions in moments of political panic.
In facing the prospect of catastrophic climate risk, the world has effective, safe, just, and sustainable contingency planning that is governed by a legitimate and effective intergovernmental mechanism with clear procedures that can be activated on an appropriately urgent timescale.
OUR MISSION
We bring strategic insight, scientific grounding, and convening power to strengthen the field — supporting existing efforts, welcoming new actors, and mobilizing the capabilities, connections, and capital required to rise to this challenge with the urgency it demands.
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