Building a Coalition for a Nonlinear Climate: An Update on the Climate Emergencies Forum

A note from the ARC team: This blog is part of a series of ambitious ideas to address catastrophic climate risks we’re publishing in the runup to New York Climate Week – check out our articles from Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, and if you’ll be at NYCW, let us know!

We’re once again on the cusp of New York Climate Week, perhaps the largest recurring climate convening after COP, and certainly a consequential one as a nexus for discussion among decision makers, researchers, civil society groups, and others who all share a commitment and hope for a safer climate future. One key element of that conversation, however, has generally still remained peripheral or absent: given our current climate reality, how should society plan for the growing threat of catastrophic climate tipping points and system risks?

The Climate Emergencies Forum (CEF) is our contribution to the climate convenings landscape in an effort to start filling that gap by bringing together science, governance, finance, frontline communities, and philanthropy into the same room to move from foresight, as we see these threats looming, to action and readiness so society is not caught unprepared for any number of climate crises that now appear increasingly likely.

Over the past several months, the CEF has hosted a variety of learning sessions and events and made coalition-building grants to six frontline and youth-led organizations to ensure we connect local insights and efforts with global climate research and strategic discussion. These sessions have helped surface a variety of valuable insights for responding to these growing climate threats – and we’re very grateful to everyone who’s been showing up and contributing.

Ahead of next week and the broader climate discussions that will be taking place, we thought we’d share some of the concrete takeaways and insights from our CEF convenings thus far. This is a growing coalition, so we would very much welcome new organizations and individuals who are passionate about ensuring humanity is better equipped to deal with catastrophic climate risks proactively and responsibly.

Collectively, over the past few months, the CEF has dug into these six topics:

1) Early warnings are not enough: bridging the readiness gap

Prediction/detection is improving for climate tipping points, but any warnings we might create currently lack meaningful response capacity to those threats; e.g., authorizing environments for response, thresholds that unlock institutional action, and playbooks that would help anyone act in time. This gap is structural, not just technical.

Some key takeaways and learnings:

• Build the enabling infrastructure. We must invest more in enabling infrastructure to predict tipping points. The priority list includes targeted observatories, higher-resolution coupled models, and open, real-time data streams in under-monitored regions. Practice decisions through tabletop exercises and stress tests before the alarms sound.
• Pair warnings with pre-authorized responses. Systems like FEWS NET show how forecast thresholds can automatically unlock funding and logistics. Tipping-risk governance lacks this linkage, leaving even accurate signals inert.
• Treat prevention as a parallel pillar of climate action, like mitigation, adaptation, and carbon removals. This framing avoids false either–or debates and clarifies who does what when signals flash. Read more about the need to understand prevention as the “fourth leg” of climate action in our first blog post this week, here.

2) Defining the Arctic action space – a near-term tipping point nexus

As we discussed in our blog earlier this week, the Arctic is the near-term test of whether society can act before thresholds are crossed. The region is warming more than four times the global average; last summer posted the lowest sea-ice extent on record; Greenland continues to lose more than ~250 gigatons of ice each year, and Arctic wetlands contribute an estimated 5–10% of global methane. Yet there is no standing mandate or finance mechanism for legitimate early action.

Some key takeaways and learnings:

• Early warning is inert without an action space. We need to proactively design and stress-test an action space, the set of interventions, starting with accelerated carbon management, mapped against tipping-point dynamics and early-warning timescales, spanning four domains—risk reduction, risk deflection, impact mitigation, and enabling conditions—so that for each credible threat, there exists a structured portfolio of overlapping, time-matched, and institutionally legitimate options ready for deployment.
• The Arctic can be the proving ground. Near-term candidates for study include mixed-phase cloud thinning and glacier basal stabilization. These options share modeling and measurement needs, which argues for a shared, public-interest “commons” for observation, modeling, and intervention.
• Many concepts remain early-stage, but several cloud and atmosphere strategies are relatively tractable because they draw on existing weather-modification practices and can be regionally targeted and easily adjusted or reversed.
• The science says our timeline to act is tightening: accelerating Greenland melt and freshwater inputs weakening North Atlantic deepwater formation reinforce the need to decide what research and governance pathways to stand up now.

3) Derailment risk: how escalating impacts erode society’s capacity to respond

Beyond physical and transition risks lies a third category: derailment risk. It asks whether multiplying shocks will degrade our ability to deliver mitigation and adaptation at all. One participant described our current climate moment as a ship in a storm: we are not heading toward danger; we’re inside it, and much like how a storm tosses the ship and its crew, scattering attention, causing damage and fear, making it harder to steer anywhere safe – so too will nations increasingly experience the impacts of climate change as distractions from addressing the root causes and threats.

Some key takeaways and learnings:

• Overshoot complacency is risky. Breaching 1.5°C, if not 2°C, in the next decade is pretty much certain; overshoot-and-recover pathways that bank on later removal are not credible at required scales or timelines. Running past 2°C raises the chance of tipping point cascades, and we must acknowledge this reality now and change our approach.
• Social tipping points cut both ways. Social tipping domains amplify hazards on a massive scale. Unmanaged displacement exerts nonlinear pressure on receiving regions while trapping others in place; political backlash can shift real climate harm into fuel for anti-climate movements, e.g, the 2023 Valencia floods. Disasters also correlate with rising depression, anxiety, and suicide, which society is already under-equipped to manage.
• The “sovereign-debt doom loop” poses a real threat to any meaningful climate action. Rebuilding after repeated disasters increases debt burdens, constraining future resilience spending and leaving countries more exposed to the next shock. This vulnerability trap is already visible in several low-income countries, but we should expect it to become more widespread across nations and indeed regions.
• Mitigation must be resilient to shocks. We can look to the IPCC risk frame: reduce hazards; reduce exposure and vulnerability with tools like debt restructuring and anticipatory finance; and strengthen response capacity so acute crises do not derail long-term goals. We need societies to start thinking about this today.

4) Finance and insurance in a non-linear and uncertain climate future

Financial risk systems are still operating on an outdated roadmap. Many assessments project small losses even in 3–4°C warmer worlds, which is inconsistent with plausible biophysical and social outcomes and now shows up in a widening protection gap.

Some key takeaways and learnings:

• Models are “precisely wrong.” Current systems are linear; risks are not. Finance and insurance markets are built on probabilistic models of incremental change, but catastrophic tipping points unfold as non-linear shocks that overwhelm existing instruments. A 2023 analysis found some UK local-authority pension funds estimating roughly 1% losses in a failed-transition path to 4°C. The UK Institute and Faculty of Actuaries has warned that many methods are “precisely wrong” because they omit tipping cascades and increasingly plausible worst cases.
• Real-world signals indicate that climate risks are far greater and more material in the near term than industry actors are willing to acknowledge. Major U.S. insurers stopped writing new homeowner policies in California due to wildfire risk, with similar retrenchment in Florida and Louisiana due to flood risk; withdrawals followed recent disasters in Australia, Canada, and Germany. Insured losses were about $108B in 2023, and the protection gap is growing.
• Why models miss the mark: Three barriers recur: misaligned incentives within firms; failure to translate climate science into insurer-relevant metrics like capital adequacy and reinsurance thresholds; and a time-horizon mismatch between annual decisions and multi-decadal climate risks. Heavy reliance on opaque, backward-looking catastrophe models compounds the problem.
• What to build next? We need exploratory ensemble scenarios that include tail risks; disclosure and governance that reduce first-mover penalties; and insurance designs that reward resilience rather than exposure. Instruments must be designed to operate under deep uncertainty, partial information, and compressed timelines—not contingent on perfect models or hindsight verification.

5) Connecting local insight to global decision-making

Catastrophic risk is lived. Without engagement with frontline actors, global models and early-warning systems risk repeating the blind spots that produce maladaptation and erode trust.

Some key takeaways and learnings:

• Equity and legitimacy are first-order requirements. Without procedural and distributive justice, emergency interventions will lack consent, exacerbate harm, and undermine global cooperation. Global–local trust building is not optional.
• Coalitions build that bridge. From nearly one hundred proposals, we selected six organizations for their ability to convene across divides and ground CEF strategy in lived realities. Together, they will help build a “risk-to-risk” frame that links planetary tipping risks with community-level risks and response. You can learn more about our CEF coalition-building partners here – we hope to make more of these grants in the future and would welcome philanthropic partners in doing so.
• Knowledge must be co-produced. Foresight is stronger and more legitimate when scientists, policymakers, and communities generate it together.
• Principles require investment. We have codified this commitment in ARC research principles that emphasize systems thinking, local engagement, and ethical responsibility from the outset – but it will take sustained effort and resources to fulfil that intention.

6) New institutions and governance for emergency response

Mitigation, adaptation, carbon management, and upstream interventions are usually managed in silos. We need institutions that can see and evaluate the whole portfolio and authorize action in compressed timeframes.

Some key takeaways and learnings:

• Systemic risks outrun institutions. Existing mitigation and adaptation frameworks assume incremental change and stable governance. Climate emergency governance must be designed for compressed timelines, partial information, and escalating cascades.
• Governance must be portfolio-based, rather than a fragmented landscape. Choices echo across distributional and geopolitical lines. Institutions need routines and mandates that can weigh these tradeoffs and authorize action before certainty is achieved. Responses interact and carry distributional and geopolitical consequences; decision structures should reflect that reality
• Narrative is part of the governance operating system. Without a shared story on why integration matters, policy defaults to targets and accounting that are brittle in the face of deep uncertainty.
• Shared infrastructure accelerates learning. Public-interest modeling and observation platforms that serve multiple options will reduce duplication and speed learning (for instance, research conducted in the Arctic would greatly benefit from better coordination and shared infrastructure).
• Field research can build legitimacy if co-designed with affected communities and embedded in clear governance pathways – community engagement should not be thought of as a nice-to-have, but understood as a precondition for any institutional action in this space.

What’s Next for the CEF

The next phase of CEF is about moving from learning to doing. Our six learning sessions and initial coalition-building grants have surfaced critical insights and momentum. Now we want to translate that energy into a set of shared priorities and activities that strengthen the ecosystem’s capacity to anticipate and respond to catastrophic climate risks.

Over the coming year, we will:

• Grow the coalition by bringing in more frontline and convening partners.
• Sharpen the agenda with synthesis outputs that make catastrophic risk legible to funders and policymakers.
• Prototype new activities identified by the community—such as thematic convenings, pooled funding mechanisms, or state-of-the-field assessments—testing which models deliver the greatest value.
• Build durable infrastructure that links early warning to action: governance playbooks, financing mechanisms, and shared knowledge platforms.

Our aim is to establish CEF as a standing capability: a coalition that not only diagnoses the risks but also develops, resources, and legitimises credible options for response.

We’re expanding the CEF coalition of researchers, frontline organizers, practitioners, funders, and policymakers. We welcome new organizations and individuals who want to help us build the community this moment demands.

If you’re working on these topics and would like to join the CEF, get in touch at cef@renphil.org