Systemic implications of exceeding 1.5°C
This project brings a systemic lens to one of the defining challenges of the coming decades: how to navigate a world that has moved beyond “safe” climate thresholds? With global warming already above 1.4°C and emissions still rising, exceeding the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C threshold is no longer a distant possibility but an emerging condition. This project, led by ASRA and funded by ClimateWorks Foundation, will examine the systemic risks, governance challenges, and response pathways associated with this new climate reality – and the critical choices that will shape what comes next. This is a first-of-its-kind project, using innovative systemic risk methodologies and taking a deliberately transdisciplinary approach to research and delivery.
Exceeding 1.5°C is not a single moment in time. It is a prolonged, uncertain, and politically charged period in which ecological instability, social stress, economic disruption, geopolitical tension, and technological responses interact in complex non-linear ways. How societies respond to risks that will increasingly cascade and compound will have profound consequences for human and more-than-human wellbeing, planetary stability, and global justice. Some responses may reduce harm and build resilience; others may risk entrenching inequality, legitimizing delay, or creating new forms of systemic risk. This is why systemic risk thinking is critical.
A core output will be the development of a set of plausible futures scenarios built through two global foresight workshops – one convened in the Global North, one in the Global South – with diverse participants spanning science, policy, civil society, business, and frontline communities. An additional online foresight process will broaden participation and surface additional considerations.
The project has five interlinked objectives:
- To deepen understanding of systemic risks associated with exceeding 1.5°C, including how risks cascade across ecological, social, economic, technological, and political systems
- To identify robust, ethical, and effective response pathways that can reduce harm and avoid maladaptation in conditions of deep uncertainty.
- To advance innovative methodologies and tools for systemic risk analysis and foresight, contributing to open-source approaches and cross-disciplinary learning.
- To empower decision-makers with actionable insights to prepare for and navigate the new climate reality.
- To contribute to global discourse and governance debates, calling for policies and interventions to be informed by systemic risk assessment, response and equity considerations.
This project directly advances ASRA’s mission to strengthen how systemic risks are understood and acted upon. In a world changing faster than our institutions and assumptions, it will build the insight and capacity needed for sectors to move beyond linear thinking and siloed responses, navigating “overshoot” towards choices that recognize the many futures that remain open to us.
