How to Prevent Catastrophic Climate Change
Part 2 of our series on global catastrophic risks
There are certain events or scenarios that, should they unfold, would threaten large swaths of humanity across multiple continents. These are often referred to as Global Catastrophic Risks for their potential to disrupt lives and livelihoods on a massive — even planetary — scale.
The consequences of these risks are terrible, involving unimaginable levels of death and destruction. But while these dangers are very real, they are not inevitable. They can be prevented.
Global Dispatches is partnering with the Global Challenges Foundation for a series of episodes examining how to guard against these catastrophic risks. The Foundation is dedicated to raising awareness of global catastrophic risks and strengthening global governance to address them. Global Challenges Foundation’s 2026 Global Catastrophic Risks report outlines five of the biggest risks facing humanity today, including catastrophic climate change, the topic of this episode. You can find this report here.
Two of the authors of the chapter on catastrophic climate change are my guests today. Manjana Milkoreit is a researcher of earth systems governance at the University of Oslo. Eva Mineur is head of climate and sustainability at Global Challenges Foundation.
We kick off by discussing what we mean by “catastrophic” climate change and examining examples of this phenomenon already underway around the world, before turning to a longer conversation about how to strengthen international cooperation and global governance to prevent catastrophic climate change—and the calamity it would entail.
The episode is freely available across all major podcast platforms, including Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can listen directly below.
Transcript edited for clarity
Mark Leon Goldberg: So, climate change is obviously part of our vernacular at this point, but catastrophic climate change has not yet been central to discussions more broadly of climate change. What is catastrophic climate change, and what distinguishes it from climate change as we know it today, Eva?
Eva Mineur: When we talk about climate change today, it’s part of everyday language. And we talk about, you know, hotter summers and stronger storms and rising seas and so. But it’s often framed as something gradual, something that we can manage and adopt to step by step. And I would say that catastrophic climate change is different. The key difference is about the scale and the reversibility. It’s not just more warming. It’s warming that pushes parts of the Earth system past the thresholds, what we call tipping points, where change becomes self-reinforcing and potentially irreversible on human timescales.
I mean, in the normal framing of climate change, we assume a more or less sort of linear relationship. You know, more emissions creates more warming, creates more damage. Catastrophic climate change breaks that logic. It happens when the warming triggers large-scale shifts in the system, and that can undermine food systems, water supplies, infrastructure, even political stability. The short version is that regular climate change means intensifying impact, but catastrophic climate change means systemic destabilization.
Mark Leon Goldberg: So this concept of tipping points is central to what distinguishes catastrophic climate change from climate change kind of as we know it conventionally. Manjana, what are some of those tipping points that might induce catastrophe?
Manjana Milkoreit: It might help to start with a bit of a definition of what climate tipping points refer to. They’re actually referring to large-scale systemic shifts in major components of the Earth system. A climate tipping point is usually a threshold in one of those large components of the Earth system where previously gradual change starts to trigger a self-reinforcing, accelerating shift towards a different state of that system. And states are very abstract terms, but you can think about this, for example, with an ice sheet, major ice sheets that have existed on the planet for millions of years could melt down and disappear for, again, millions of years into the future.
Or you could think of, for example, the Amazon rainforest as one of those examples that could currently exist and has existed for millions of years in the state of a highly biodiverse, self-sustaining rainforest system that could transition, even on a basin scale, to a savanna or kind of grasslands, so fundamentally different type of system that does very different things with huge implications for human well-being. These types of changes can accelerate existing change because of these self-amplifying feedbacks that I mentioned, so things would happen faster.
They exist and they happen at really large scale, sometimes crossing multiple continents, which means they can affect lots of people and lots of regions around the world at the same time. They create systemic changes, so reorganizations of the earth system and consequently the human systems that depend on them. And that can mean that they overwhelm our adaptive abilities. Rather than just being trends towards making things harder, they really fundamentally change how we relate to nature and our stability goes with it. And they can be irreversible on timelines that matter for us humans.
So, they create a permanence in the kind of change that can fix these problems. What makes them probably even more challenging is that they exist in a connection that enables tipping point cascades. And that means that if one tipping point happens, that in some instances that can make additional future tipping points more likely. So, one tipping point can enable a tipping cascade. And that is what creates fundamental, large-scale, systemic, maybe catastrophic risks for humans in multiple dimensions.
Mark Leon Goldberg: Yeah, I’d love to learn a little bit to kind of ground the conversation in a way that I think makes me personally understand this better as well, presumably, as the audience. What are some examples of what a tipping point might be? Let’s just kind of walk through a few of them. Eva, why don’t you go first?
Eva Mineur: I can choose an example that I think is one of the clearest examples of this happening right now, and that is the coral reefs that we have. They are extremely sensitive to temperature. I mean, just a small increase, one or two degrees of the seawater temperature can actually trigger bleaching. And the corals expel the algae that give them energy. And if the heat continues, the coral will eventually die. And in the past, the reefs had actually decades to recover between the bleaching events. But now marine heat waves are so frequent that reefs don’t get the recovery time. And that’s a critical shift, you know, from temporary stress of a system to a chronic stress.
And climate change isn’t just harming the reefs. I mean, you could say it’s removing their ability to regenerate due to the process I just described. And when the reefs collapse, the consequences don’t stay underwater. Fish stocks decline and coastal protection weakens and tourism economies may suffer and eventually food security worsens, etc. And in some regions, that increases pressure to migrate even. So, you start to see how ecological change actually spills over or creates ripple effects into social and economic systems. And that is what makes it a catastrophic risk.
The coral reef issue is actually happening right now in front of our eyes. And it’s really, really worrying what we can see there.
Manjana Milkoreit: Over the last 20 years, science has identified an increasing number of those potential tipping systems or tipping elements, as they’re sometimes called. So, we started out in about 2008, I think, with a list of eight of those systems. And over time, like now, we think about 15 to 20 of those systems. In addition to the coral reefs, a number of the key systems identified include other major biomes, the Amazon rainforest, but also the boreal forests are potential tipping elements. Then we often include a number of the major ice sheets on the planet. The West Antarctic ice sheet, the Greenland ice sheet are key examples of tipping elements that might have a very approximate tipping point.
But then also systems like ocean currents, the Atlantic overturning circulation, or smaller ocean currents, or permafrost somewhat is another one. So, there’s tipping elements that are very diverse in their nature that exist in different parts of the Earth system, both terrestrial, marine, and atmospheric.
Mark Leon Goldberg: So, these are catastrophic events because they impact people and human survival, potentially at very large scales. Manjana, can you just describe a bit the human impact of some of these tipping points being crossed? What does it mean for people?
Manjana Milkoreit: Eva already explained why the coral reefs are so important and have such huge implications for a lot of people. Currently, about 500 million people in the world depend directly on coral reefs for their food, for their income, for coastal protection, and other things. So, there’s a huge amount of people distributed around the whole planet that depend on coral reefs for their well-being and are threatened by their loss. Maybe we can take another example, the Amazon rainforest. The rainforest itself, about 40 million people live within the rainforest. If the Amazon rainforest were to move across a tipping point, suffered quite immediate consequences from this in terms of forest loss and biodiversity loss, fire and health effects, the loss of their ways of life when it comes to indigenous peoples, maybe replacement and migration pressures.
But there would also then be a large set of more regional implications because the Amazon so strongly shapes water availability and water flow within or on the South American continent. So, you would have impacts on agriculture within all of South America. You would have impacts on water dependent energy systems. And in addition to these already additional 300, 400 million people affected by those impacts, you would also have feedback to global warming, a planetary impact, because once the Amazon dies back, you have additional CO2 emissions that would increase global warming and speed that up.
So, everybody on the planet would be affected by that. So, I think the Amazon is a really interesting second example for what makes these tipping dynamics so challenging and potentially catastrophic. So, we could also talk about the Atlantic Overturning Circulation, also called the AMOC. So, that is an ocean circulation that spans both hemispheres and transports heat from the global south to the global north. It’s responsible for keeping Europe, for example, and it’s nice moderate climate that we have today. And the AMOC has, in the planet’s history, collapsed a number of times, broken down. And scientists are currently concerned that this could happen again.
So, we see, we observe signs that indicate that the circulation might be slowing down and weakening. And there’s a potential that over 50 to 100 years, it might come to a standstill. And that would have major consequences, different ones in all parts of the world. It would start with significant cooling, especially in Northern Europe, an opposing impact compared to expectations of warming right now. It also would mean that more heat would remain in the Southern Hemisphere, making warming there even worse than it is at the moment.
It would also have significant implications for the distribution of rain and water around the world because the AMOC connects or controls rainfall systems and the monsoon. So, it might introduce interruptions to global important monsoon systems in West Africa, the Indian monsoon or the Southeast Asian monsoon. And that, of course, is immediately important for agriculture and food production, and therefore for food security across multiple continents, possibly at the same time.
So, if that were to happen, that you have these interruptions to rainfall, more volatility, or even rain moving to different locations than it was before, you could see major interruptions of global food security, which is, of course, linked through trade, which is why lots of people are really concerned about that particular tipping element.
Mark Leon Goldberg: So, there has been for many years, at this point, systems of climate governance at the global level. We do have like global governance on climate issues between the COP process, the IPCC, and other mechanisms of international cooperation to confront climate change. Yet these structures are obviously insufficient to confront, at least now, the kind of catastrophic climate change that you’ve just described. I’d love to learn, Eva, from you, your diagnosis of why that is, why are our systems of global governance insufficient to confront the potential catastrophic climate change that you’ve both just described?
Eva Mineur: Yes, here’s the frustrating part, because as you say, we do have climate governance. We have the UN Climate Framework. We have the Paris Agreement from 2015. We have national climate plans. We have scientific bodies, etc. But it’s obvious that these institutions, they were largely built for gradual change and not for preventing tipping points. And there are several problems of why they are not delivering at the moment. Not speaking about, you know, the whole what is happening on the geopolitical level at the moment, but of course, first, the commitments within the global climate architecture are mostly voluntary.
So, countries set their own targets. Unfortunately, we have seen that enforcement is very weak. So, this is a huge problem. On the other hand, that was how it had to be set up when the Paris Agreement was set up, because if you wouldn’t have had this voluntary mechanism, there wouldn’t have been an agreement at all. But here we are. The enforcement is very weak. Second, governance is fragmented. I mean, climate, biodiversity, land use, oceans, etc. are negotiated separately and dealt with separately, even though the tipping points connect them, as Manjana illustrated.
And a third reason is that the political time horizons are really short. Election cycles last, you know, it’s just a few years in between. However, the ice sheets, they destabilize over centuries. And here’s a very, very big mismatch in terms of time horizons. And fourth, climate risks is not treated as a systemic stability issue at all. I mean, there are no binding ecological red lines and no global institutions is tasked specifically with safeguarding Earth system resilience. So, I mean, we are governing a non-linear planet with institutions designed for linear change. I think that is the major reason for a governance failure. But then we also, of course, have what is happening around the world at the moment.
Manjana Milkoreit: Of course, the existing and rather complex infrastructure for climate change governance in the world wasn’t designed for non-linear change or large scale disruptions like tipping points. And so therefore, some of these problems that we’re describing right now are just fundamental and pre-existing troubles and challenges for the climate governance system, independent of this new set of maybe catastrophic climate risks. So, collective action problems, the time horizons don’t match. It’s built for linearity and it’s fragmented, not looking at systems, but looking at kind of silos.
So, all of these problems exist independent of this novel set of catastrophic risks and tipping points. And maybe therefore I would add two things. One is that these tipping elements create a particular set of troubles or challenges because they require us to think over these long time horizons in a very anticipatory way. Because we have here this kind of change where you have a threshold, a particular moment of commitment to long-term future change, to system reorganizations, it is just of utmost importance to act before you reach that threshold, so to act in a precautionary, anticipatory, preparedness kind of way before you hit that threshold, not in a reacting kind of way.
Our CIS-governance systems are much better at reacting to observable change than to anticipate and act before something happens. I think that will be our core challenge in this situation where it really becomes about avoiding that moment of hitting the threshold and moving past it when that system reorganization on large scales becomes unstoppable. And so, these anticipatory and precautionary action logics do not actually work very well in our current system of governance, where national interests are kind of the core logic that structures everything.
Our international institutions are kind of collecting and bringing together multiple, often divergent national interests on short-term horizons and do not actually perform the function of taking care of the public good or creating system stability. Nobody is uniquely just in charge of that. And so, I think that’s where some of the real challenge sits here, in addition to the fact that we’re dealing with significant amounts of uncertainty, much larger uncertainty than with climate change as such when it comes to these tipping dynamics, where we, for example, cannot say specifically where, in time these, tipping points sit or what specifically will be their impacts over time. That creates particular action challenges in the institutions that we have.
Mark Leon Goldberg: What can be done and how can a system of global governance be constructed or reformed or introduced one way or another to have that kind of anticipatory function that you describe and confront catastrophic climate change?
Eva Mineur: I would just like to briefly talk about the thing that I don’t think that many people know about, but I think it’s really, really important because it has to do with this governance failure. I call it the legitimacy paradox. And it’s a deeper political problem that I think that we really, really need to know about. So, two years ago, the UNDP and the University of Oxford conducted the world’s largest public opinion survey on climate change, and it covered more than 70,000 people across nearly 80 countries, representing 87% percent of the world’s population. And the findings were striking.
I mean, 89% want stronger climate action from governments, 72% support a rapid transition away from fossil fuels, 81% support protection and restoring nature, and 79% supports climate justice, meaning richer countries should help poorer countries address climate impacts. So, it’s obviously clear that people are worried and they want action. And yet, politically, climate is often downplayed in favor of security concerns, a lot of that at the moment, but also the AI, economic competitiveness, short-term cost of living issues, etc. This is a paradox. We have a public concern worldwide which is high, we have scientific evidence which is very strong, but we have a political system that moves very, very slowly. And this gap between public concern and political responses create this legitimacy problem.
I think part of the reason is the framing. Climate policy is often framed as a cost or even a sacrifice rather than an investment in long-term stability. And political incentives remain skewed towards the present, as Manjana also pointed out. But I think that when citizens see that long-term risks are acknowledged but not addressed, that erodes the trust. And trust is the foundation of legitimacy. So, what can be done? And that is, of course, to accelerate the decarbonization and defend critical thresholds. We need to draw ecological red lines. And that means we have to protect the remaining primary forests.
We have to stop expanding fossil fuel production. We have to limit warmings as much as possible. It may sound radical, but it’s not radical. It’s pure risk management. And just to mention, the upcoming Colombia Santa Marta process in the end of April, which is linked to the COP30 process, this is a coalition of willing quite many countries that are committed to try to find a way or actually to, in the end, I believe, to sign or to create a treaty to actually phase out fossil fuels. And this is happening this year in the end of April. And there’s a lot of parties and states and civil society organizations, scientists, etc., that will join forces into this process. And I think it’s a good example of leadership when the consensus diplomacy at the COP process stalls.
If global agreements cannot move fast enough, maybe coalitions can. So, I think this is a really interesting example and a reason for hope. And the other strategy or what I would like to see more is, of course, to integrate the climate with finance and security. We just said that this is handled in silos, but it shouldn’t be. I mean, it’s obvious the climate is a financial stability issue, is also a national security issue, is a development priority. So, if you could embed climate risk into financial regulation or infrastructure planning, defense strategies, and development finance, etc., I believe that responses scale faster. Markets move trillions faster than environmental ministries move billions. So, I think that would be to actually see climate risk as a systemic risk and build it into the financial and security institutions. Maybe political momentum could change, or probably it would.
Manjana Milkoreit: One thing that is really important and maybe often gets a bit lost in these conversations about how hard it is to address tipping point risks and non-linear risks is that we actually have an existing architecture that might have its weaknesses, but we have governance tools. And when it comes to preventing tipping points, we have much of the solution potential already at our hands. So, we know that increasing global temperature is the key driver for almost all of these tipping dynamics.
And that limiting warming is our key solution. So, it comes back to being able to accelerate mitigation action decarbonization with a logic that tries to prevent these tipping points. So, we need to be able to accelerate these solutions. And we have many of these things in place through the Paris Agreement architecture, through the expanding availability of renewable energy, through all kinds of multi-scale processes that facilitate mitigation. It’s very clear that one thing that becomes important to minimize tipping risks is to limit the overshoot of 1.5 degrees Celsius. And we need to limit the time we spend above 1.5 because this is a very important temperature threshold that significantly increases the risks of passing a number of these tipping points that I mentioned before.
So, we want to come back below 1.5 as soon as possible. And that requires that, in addition to our emission mitigation toolkit, we rapidly engage in expansion of negative carbon or carbon removal technologies. This is a new set of technologies and tools that will be necessary to come back down from peak temperature. But just to say, a big set of solutions exists and we should not just fold our hands and say this is too big and too terrible and we can’t do anything unless we create new institutions. No, we have a set of governance institutions and responses that work, that need improvement, that need acceleration, but there is something there to work with. So, that’s not despair.
And then if you want me to address maybe also how can we think about governance institution reform to be better prepared or to be better able to respond to catastrophic risks like climate tipping points, I think there’s probably three things. We need to significantly increase our ability to act in an anticipatory fashion. So, our foresight, early warning capacities, and the precautionary logic need to come into our institutional architectures much more strongly so that we have the capacity to recognize and have shared understandings of the possible future risks that are coming and the kinds of futures that might be possible and the kinds of pathways that can avoid them.
So, this kind of ability to imagine futures is kind of core to these anticipatory modes of governance. So, that means we need institutions that can represent the future, maybe also in procedural or mechanistic terms because of this temporal mismatch that we’re meeting here, where these tipping processes occur over decades and centuries, but our decision-making cycles always move only in years or maybe five to ten-year cycles. So, how do we build in the representation of the interests of future generations in our decision making? That could be fiscal rules, that can be advisory bodies who represent future generations, other forms of deliberation or policymaking logics that bring much more extended time horizons into the policymaking process itself.
And third, governance probably has to become much more systemic or systems aware. We have to think about not just agriculture and finance, security in separate silos, but think about the integration between those. So, it’s not about the one single perfect treaty, but coordination, integration between different policy systems and domains, connecting them, connecting climate and biodiversity, water and agriculture, and so forth, so that we create a better patchwork and connectivity between multiple policy domains and institutions. So, I think a key capacity for addressing climate tipping points and other catastrophic risks is imagination and collective imagination.
And by that, I don’t mean creative capacity for fantasy, but the institutional and collective ability to anticipate futures that do not yet exist and to organize our responses and actions around those possible futures.
Mark Leon Goldberg: Manjana, Eva, thank you so much for your time. I learned a lot from this conversation. This was really helpful.
Eva Mineur: Thank you so much.
Manjana Milkoreit: Thanks, Mark, for inviting us to do this.
Mark Leon Goldberg: Thanks for listening to Global Dispatches. The show is produced by me, Mark Leon Goldberg. It is edited and mixed by Levi Sharpe. If you are listening on Apple Podcasts, make sure to follow the show and enable automatic downloads to get new episodes as soon as they’re released. On Spotify, tap the bell icon to get a notification when we publish new episodes. And of course, please visit globaldispatches.org to get on our free mailing list, get in touch with me, and access our full archive.
Thank you!