keeping global warming below 2°C What’s next:

On March 20, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations body for assessing the science related to climate change, finalized the synthesis for its sixth Assessment Report. Among its headline statements was that warming will exceed 1.5°C this century in fact, it is possible that it will do so in the very near future. The news media broadcast the report as an “urgent wake-up call.”

The chance to limit global warming to a value below the 1.5°C mark was not missed last month it was missed years, possibly decades, ago. Some estimates say the world may exceed 1.5°C warming temporarily within the next five years.

The coming 10 years are frequently called the “decisive decade.” This denotion recognizes the fact that decisions made during this period will have substantial consequences for how the world will look like in the coming centuries and millennia. To avoid accelerating negative effects caused by human activities, we have to make fundamental and transformative decisions within the coming decade.

At this moment, 3.3 billion to 3.6 billion people are highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, according to the IPCC report. This number will increase if we continue on the present trajectory. Across the world, ways must be found to make dramatic shifts to hold global warming as close to 1.5°C as possible over pre-industrial levels. Hard decisions must be made with urgency to limit the amount of overshoot past 1.5°C. Adapting to the next 0.5°C interval is not an acceptable path forward.

The IPCC’s sixth Assessment Report amplifies two guiding principles that researchers, including those in the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory, must follow to support decisions by policymakers and the broader society. First is that mitigation alone is not enough. The IPCC report states there is a “substantial emissions gap” in what countries have committed to doing versus the deep cuts necessary to hold warming to close to 1.5°C. As decision-makers implement emission-reduction strategies, they must also look to support scaling carbon capture and storage opportunities, including direct air capture and nature-based solutions. Technologies, such as the Mechanical Tree,™ created in partnership between the ASU Center for Negative Carbon Emissions and Carbon Collect, are critical to minimizing the 1.5°C overshoot and all corresponding impacts and damages that come from unabated global warming.

The second principle that must guide researchers and decision-makers is that there are limits to adaptation. For example, consider low-lying island nations, such as Kiribati and the Maldives, which are being overtaken by the seas. Once underwater, adaptation is no longer a possibility. The inability to adapt will become more widespread, deepening the climate change-induced humanitarian crisis. Humankind is also in jeopardy from the pitfall of maladaptation, where natural or human-led changes inadvertently increase climate vulnerabilities.

Self-adaptation is still the planet’s dominant way to correct, and it can be unpredictable. Societies must redefine our sense of “adaptability” and re-prioritize our energy toward anticipatory innovation rather than reactionary, short-term adjustments.

Efforts and initiatives to limit our global warming have been established with the greatest of intentions, yet they have not resulted in sufficiently changing the trajectory of our global warming curve that has placed so many humans and their homelands in peril–or on a trajectory toward peril. We can no longer simply hope that adaptation will be enough.

Humans are unlike any other species on the planet in that we have manufactured the crisis we face but are also capable of finding our way out of it through our actions and innovations. For example, we have the knowledge to regulate the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which presently accounts for about two-thirds of global warming, but we are not moving quickly enough. We have to respond with urgency and act for the betterment of all. The Global Futures Laboratory is leading efforts to mitigate and adapt to our changing planet, as well as anticipating and exploring potential new pathways to resolve the crises.