Note: Nick here. This post, penned by my boss at Advanced Research for Climate Emergencies (ARC), Joshua Elliott, originally ran on ARC’s substack here.

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Last week more than 250 people from six continents came to the Harpa Centre in Reykjavik for the first Global Risk & Stabilization Summit. I’m still very tired but more than tired I am extremely grateful to everyone who contributed their time and incredible energy. I think I personally heard a hundred interesting ideas come out of conversations in the hallways and at drinks, and many of them were new to me and really exciting. I also saw a lot of new people meet and find real common ground from very different starting places.

Several people have already written about the summit. Thank you to everyone who has shared reflections and photos, including these posts:

A quick note on language, since it’s come up in a few posts. People should define the goals in the way that makes the most sense to them and helps them frame their work. We’re not policing words here at CEF. But we call this Earth systems stabilization rather than climate stabilization or geoengineering. Earth systems stabilization is about the faster-acting things we may need to do now to stabilize specific systems that are showing signs of destabilization, like the Arctic, the ice sheets, parts of the biosphere, and Earth’s reflectivity. Systems with their own unique physics and timelines. It’s definitely not a perfect metaphor, but we use stabilize more like how an ER makes sure to stabilize a patient before treating their disease.

Stabilization is an umbrella term and a goal. People very reasonably use other terms like climate interventions or geoengineering. But those aren’t goals, those are terms describing a class of potential strategies and component technologies. The rapidly maturing field of pandemic preparedness is not the same thing as vaccine R&D, even though vaccines are obviously a critical tool. At CEF we believe that its critical that we focus on the risks and goals, not just the tools. There are no silver bullets in Earth systems stabilization just like there are no silver bullets in any part of climate action. We need a portfolio R&D approach that can work alongside the imperative to accelerate mitigation, carbon removals and adaptation to accomplish the goal of a safe and equitable climate future. Focusing only on one tool or a few strategies creates false dichotomies and often severely limits the scope of the discussion, particularly around who is at risk and whether/how these strategies can safely reduce the risks in a fair way.

For people who weren’t in the room, here’s the short version of why I think this work matters. We’ll be posting the video of my framing talk soon.

It starts with the fact that we are not even close to being on track. Not for 1.5 and not even for 2°C. 1.5 is physically impossible at this point, particularly when we consider that sulfur aerosol pollution from fossil fuel emissions is masking about a half degree of warming that will be realized as we decarbonize. The fact is, we already live in a near 2 degree world. We’ve just been masking a quarter of climate change with the dirtiest and most inequitable climate intervention experiment you can imagine. The smart money is now assuming a 3°C world or worse. Banks are stress-testing for it, and investors are betting on booming demand for air conditioning. And if that wasn’t bad enough, there’s the evidence that warming may be accelerating because the Earth is getting darker. So there are increasingly plausible scenarios that make even this new baseline look optimistic.

And the longer and more severely we overshoot that 1.5 degree target, which is the limit of what scientists can possibly call “safe,” the bigger the risks are of destabilizing Earth systems, feedback loops, and cascading systemic risks that could be devastating. We have grown accustomed to calling climate change a “slow motion disaster,” but experts have been warning for decades that this will not always be the case.

These risks are also connected to each other. Arctic warming speeds ice loss, which accelerates warming-induced emissions in the permafrost and likely weakens the AMOC, and the AMOC shapes rainfall over the Amazon. And underneath all of it are the human systems that absorb the shocks. Our climate future is no longer linear. And so our climate response can’t be linear either.

So what are our options for reducing this risk? Well, we can, and must, invest in accelerated greenhouse gas mitigation and removals. But we’ve passed the point where that alone will reduce this risk to an acceptable level. Certainly to a level I’m willing to accept. We can also invest in adaptation and improved resilience. But severe and catastrophic risks still remain. This is acknowledged even within the UNFCCC framework, where it’s called “loss and damage.” Loss and damage represents any climate impacts we can’t adapt to. It’s currently estimated to cost about $400 billion per year over the next few decades, and possibly much more than that, though so far wealthy nations have only pledged a total of less than 1 billion. The loss and damage fund was added in 2022 after decades of advocacy by climate vulnerable nations. This was a win and we should celebrate wins.

But I want us to be honest about what’s in that term. When we say loss and damage, we’re not just talking about an economic cost. We’re talking about people’s lives, their livelihoods and homes, cultures, the places where ancestors are buried. Those things cannot simply be a line item on a ledger, particularly an unfunded one. If our plan has a column for catastrophic losses we’ve decided we can just pay after the fact, rather than work to prepare for and prevent them, that is the real moral hazard of climate action. It forecloses on research into strategies that could protect billions of vulnerable people, which I believe is the only moral choice we have at this point.

And this is why I’m working on this. Ten years ago, when I was still in academia, if you’d asked me about deliberately intervening in the climate system, I’d have had the knee-jerk reaction that it’s a distraction and we should focus on emissions and adaptation. Part of what changed my mind was simply changing where I sat. I had the good fortune of spending six years at DARPA, where the job was to think decades ahead about the threats and opportunities most people ignore. I became more concerned with how fast the physical climate was changing and how slow our institutions were responding. But what really struck me was how fragile our human systems already were. A drought in one breadbasket could spike global wheat prices and lead to unrest on the other side of the world. And that was at one degree of warming.

Today, I increasingly can’t see a reasonable pathway to a safe climate future without developing options for stabilizing critical systems, in case we need them. I don’t think mitigation has failed as an idea. But I think we’ve passed every reasonable threshold where traditional climate action alone is likely to be enough. Many of the Earth systems we depend on are showing signs of destabilizing, from oceans to clouds to forests to ice sheets to permafrost. Warming is pushing them out of equilibrium faster than they can recover, and the feedbacks that amplify warming are getting stronger. Some may even have irreversible tipping thresholds, though a system doesn’t need a tipping point to be in serious trouble.

I’d argue we’ve seen this movie before. In 1992, a young senator named Al Gore wrote that focusing on adaptation was “a kind of laziness, an arrogant faith in our ability to react in time.” He spoke for much of the climate community then. Adaptation was seen as giving up. By 2008 he’d changed his mind, and so had almost everyone else. In the 2000s, carbon removal got the same treatment. People called it a fringe idea and a fig leaf for polluters. By 2014, most IPCC scenarios below two degrees depended on it, and by 2018 every safe pathway required it. In both cases, there were communities ready when we needed them because people kept working on them, often unpopularly, before there was mainstream buy-in.

Stabilizing interventions raise different questions from either of those, about global effects, about governance, and about who gets a say and who pays. That’s why the work has to start now, before it’s needed.

Right now, fewer than a thousand people represent the core of this emerging field, and the whole area gets something like a few tens of millions of dollars a year. That’s not a field yet. Carbon removal looked a lot like this in 2015. No one can declare a field into existence. A funder can’t do it and a government can’t do it, and I certainly didn’t do it by standing on a stage in Reykjavík. But the process can be accelerated when people who should know each other finally meet, and when knowledge scattered across hundreds of papers is made legible, synthesized, debated, and shared. By 2030, we want to see a 10x increase in funding drive a 5–10x increase in the size of the field, and by 2035 another five- to tenfold increase, to fifty thousand people or more. That’s ambitious. But carbon removal grew about 20-25 times in people over the last decade, so I do think it’s feasible.

I want to be clear that this is my perspective. It’s what motivates me, and it’s what still gives me hope and allows me to keep working on climate at all. You don’t have to agree with any of it, and I was glad to have so many constructive disagreements last week.

Over the next few months we’ll be finalizing the synthesis report we’ve been working on for most of this year, and we’ll share drafts for comment. Attending the summit doesn’t mean endorsing the report, and we’ll make that very clear. We’ll also share videos from participants who volunteered to share their perspectives, along with more summaries and stories that came out of the week. And we want to do many more sessions like the one where scientists told their personal stories, both virtually and in person, including running it again at AGU in 2027.

Thank you

I especially want to thank the ARC team. Cynthia, Erik, Paul, Ben, Nick, and Max did an enormous amount of the organizing work. Thank you also to Renaissance Philanthropy and the many RenPhil colleagues who came to the summit to volunteer and help things run smoothly. Thank you to Varða, our local partner, for helping with some of the logistics on the ground, to the Harpa facility and staff, and to all of our sponsors and partners. And thank you to the amazing nation of Iceland for being our host.

— Joshua