The world is heading toward a kind of warm iceberg — and fast. The average global temperature is rising, and is expected to rise a lot more in the coming decades —even under the best of emission reduction scenarios — implying increasingly significant and often catastrophic impacts. Our leaders are not talking seriously about this and the implications, especially not about the unthinkable impacts and the unthinkable solutions. Reducing emissions is key, but it alone is no longer sufficient to keep our climate objectives. This is happening at a time when other geopolitical, geoeconomic and geoenvironmental challenges are interacting with the climate system. The many positive developments (e.g., solar PVs, EVs) blind us to some of the potential bad news, and especially to the category of high-impact, low-probability events, even when those probabilities are increasing. Are we prepared for the expected and increasingly likely physical and the consequent social tipping points? Some actors in the private sector space (for- and non-profit) are beginning to step in, and do R&D on technologies where there is no public oversight (governance), such as solar geoengineering, which some believe are ungovernable, and are therefore unthinkable.

The Deitz Family Initiative will host a discussion on these topics with Janos Pasztor, a retired Hungarian diplomat who served as Assistant Secretary-General in the Executive Office of the Secretary-General of the United Nations and senior adviser to the Secretary-General on Climate Change that will explore these issues, particularly focusing on steps to be taken to be better prepared for what’s coming, looking at institutional needs, and timing and sequencing. Erin Sikorsky, director of the Center for Climate and Security and the author of Climate Change on the Battlefield, will then offer her additional thoughts and remarks. Jessica Seddon, senior lecturer at the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs and director of the Deitz Initiative, will moderate. 

Learn more about the Deitz Initiative at jackson.yale.edu/environment.  
SIgn up for Environment@Jackson Substack