Note: This piece originally ran on our ARC substack. Make sure to sign up for that newsletter as well to stay abreast re: all things stabilization and the work we do building climate stabilization-focused programs.

Four weeks ago, we gathered 250+ scientists, policymakers, technologists, entrepreneurs, financial services professionals—whether actuaries or philanthropic and private sector funders—youth activists, poets and other artists, and more from across six continents at the Harpa Centre and concert hall in Reykjavík, Iceland for the Global Risk and Stabilization Summit, a flagship event that we at ARC and the Climate Emergencies Forum (CEF) spent much of this year ideating, planning, organizing, and ultimately executing.

We’re thrilled to see the extent to which the Summit has helped accelerate momentum and enthusiasm for field-building and development in the Earth systems stabilization field. We’re also eager to share some of the insights and important ideas that surfaced at the event as we and others in this space think about the path ahead.

If this is one of your first touchpoints with the Summit (and/or with ARC in general), here’s some background. The Summit was hosted by the Climate Emergencies Forum (CEF), a dedicated field-building initiative at ARC for the Earth systems stabilization field, under which we have previously held several smaller workshop events and focused virtual learning sessions to bring together a community of expert practitioners across domains and disciplines related to catastrophic climate risks. CEF also provides grants to frontline community and youth-led organizations it believes should be engaged as partners in this growing field.

The Summit was supported by Renaissance Philanthropy (of which ARC is a program), including by Renaissance Philanthropy team members who volunteered to provide integral on-the-ground logistics and organization support.

Our vision for the Summit was multifold:

The Summit also served as a milestone toward achieving important field-building goals, especially the need to increase the level of funding for stabilization-focused science, research, and development initiatives by an order of magnitude from where it stands today. This is essential to meet the scale of the catastrophic climate risks we face; greatly expanding the community of scientists, researchers, policymakers, and others in the field over the coming decade is needed to rise to this occasion, the stakes of which are little less than the future of the planet. Perhaps as few as a thousand people currently comprise the core of this field, a far cry from the level of human capital and expertise that would be commensurate with the scope and scale of the challenge.

Iceland was a strategic location for the Summit. Iceland has led the charge on national policy pursuant to Earth systems destabilization risks; this time last year, it designated an AMOC collapse scenario a national security risk. And even though we asked several hundred folks to find their way to Iceland and could only offer need-based travel support to a small fraction, attendance was high with close to no attrition between those who signed up and those who signed in on day one, which we took as a signal that there is strong demand for opportunities to engage across disciplines and work towards shared stabilization agendas.

Our team was grateful to attendees for truly showing up to participate deeply – the strength, calibre, and detail of discussion and debate were high throughout the event, despite (or maybe because of) the weighty nature of many topics and the stakes in question – and the broader context that this field is now needed because achieving a safe climate future has fallen so severely off-course. We’ve even seen some follow-on events pop up, such as a local ‘Tipping Pints’ happy hour in New York, yet another signal that this field is eager to come together and keep growing.

Finally, we’re excited to share that the Summit has garnered external media attention as well. Earlier today, Katie Brigham, a climate tech reporter at Heatmap News, wrote a piece on the growing relevance and increased attention of the field as well as the Summit itself and attendees’ summaries of their experience.

Coming out of the event, there’s no shortage of questions facing the field as we look ahead to 2027. Our team collected, curated, and synthesized anonymized survey data and emergent themes from the Summit (which operated under the Chatham House Rule). This data provides a more detailed view into the discussions, debates, as well as open questions, needs, and potential actions that the field is surfacing. These materials were shared with Summit attendees first and we’re now happy to share them here too. A big shoutout to our two ARC Fellows Paul Gambill and Ben Lachman who pulled these insights together to share with the community (as well as being instrumental co-organizers for the event itself!). Check out the full insights below:

→ Our quantitative Summit Survey Insights (which includes many more statistics and charts such as the one shared above).

→ A more qualitative Summit Readout Report that dives deeper into opinions participants voiced at the summit, areas where there’s as much disagreement and ‘open ocean’ for deeper alignment in the future, as well as what attendees of the Summit shared with us afterward.

There’s a lot of good stuff in there – and even what to name the field is itself a yet-open question (for our part, we’ve leaned into “Earth systems stabilization” or “stabilization” for short, but expect thoughtful debate here will continue). On that question alone, the stats shown below show the different opinions from attendees.

In the weeks that have followed the Summit, there has been a wave of recap content from Summit attendees, including collaborations, such as this podcast featuring Paul Gambill (introduced earlier) and Susan Su, a climate tech venture capitalist who’s now increasingly engaged on the stabilization front.

Further, here’s a short list of reading, published by Summit attendees and organizations helping to grow the nascent stabilization field, building on the list ARC Director and Renaissance Philanthropy Chief Scientist, Joshua Elliott, already shared in his first post recapping the Summit. We especially welcome the thoughtful thinking in these posts, all of which continues to press into urgent questions and challenges inherent to the field’s development and necessary to move from theoretical discussion into practice and action.

From our vantage point, this all serves as another strong signal that the Summit accelerated development, momentum, and cohesion in the burgeoning stabilization field. Coupled with the urgency and need for orders of magnitude more progress on stabilization, we’re as convicted as ever that 2027 will be another breakout year for the field and that our work at ARC and CEF has never been as important. Speaking of the need and urgency, here’s a quick refresher on where we’re at at the end of 2026: alongside acknowledgement from all relevant multilaterals that we’re entering the overshoot era, there’s an ever-growing body of scientific literature that underscores how global warming is accelerating, which exacerbates many of the Earth systems risks and tipping points that warming exacerbates the risks of.

Looking Looking ahead, on the field-building front, ARC and CEF are keenly focused on finalizing a synthesis report on the state of the field (titled the “Global Risk and Stabilization Report,” in parallel to the title of the Summit, and henceforth simply referred to as “the Report”).

The Report is not an initiative we have discussed externally at length. But we see it as equally important to the Summit, as it will offer a first-of-its-kind descriptive, objective (i.e., not focused on advocacy) summary on the state of the stabilization field, synthesizing information on what work is already happening, where more work and resource allocation is most urgently needed, and on the central open questions and debates that many practitioners in the field spend much of their time thinking about (as we all did at the Summit itself). Given the extent to which all of this rhymes with the Summit, the Report is, in many ways, a natural follow-up that will help carry all the post-Summit momentum we’ve discussed so far forward into 2027 and invite a larger audience to track and contribute to ongoing stabilization field development.

Still, unlike the Summit, the Report will be intentionally public and widely disseminated. Akin to the Summit, however, it’s an effort we’re not working on in isolation. We’ve recruited a stellar set of lead authors to help us build the Report across four main focal areas, each of which constitutes a Report chapter:

Each lead author has also recruited up to five co-authors to help them execute their chapter. ARC/CEF are leading the writing on one chapter and recruiting co-authors both from ARC-led programs and partner organizations. The result of this multi-author approach is that dozens of organizations will ultimately contribute to the report, including many of the most notable organizations in the stabilization field. Examples include organizations like Reflective, the Arête Glacier Initiative, Ocean Visions, the Accelerator for Systemic Risk Assessment, the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, academic institutions, and many other organizations and institutions.

The Report will be published in early 2027. We will continue to share information in advance: subscribing to this Substack is the best way to stay up-to-date. Stay tuned!

Last but not least! At the Summit, the core ARC team as well as members of CEF sat down to describe ARC, its mission, the work we do, and why it excites us and gets us out of bed in the morning (and, in some cases, compels us to hop on planes and make our way to Iceland). We put together the video below to serve as an accessible overview of ARC. Whether you’re new to us or are quite familiar with us and have been in our network for a while, we hope this helps elucidate our raison d’etre and can serve as a readily shareable resource to send to others, whether funders, scientists, or otherwise. We always welcome introductions to anyone interested in our work.

In closing, massive thanks are in order to Cynthia Thomson, who, alongside Paul, Ben, and many others, was the driving force behind Summit planning and execution. None of this would have been possible without her, and the impact her efforts will have on the future of the world, while hard to quantify directly, could well end up being incalculable due to their size if stabilization continues to gain momentum.

P.S., in addition to signing up for this Substack, you can now follow ARC on LinkedIn, which will increasingly be a great place to stay abreast of our latest updates.

Thanks so much for reading, and we’re excited to share more soon on the continued and growing momentum behind our work and that of the stabilization field.

— Joshua, Erik, Nick, Max, the entire ARC team, as well as our broader network and the countless organizations who helped us pull the Summit together.