Earth is moving pastpeak habitability right now. Unless dramatic action is taken—far more dramatic than anything attempted to-date, and at an unprecedented extent and scale—planetary habitability will decline very significantly over the next years for humans, as it has already done for most other species. Human civilization has driven it to this very point. Its prospects are made worse by the fact that global negotiations over climate aims and means operate in a state of pragmatic illusion. The politically determined targets of 1.5 or 2.0°, lacking a solid scientific basis, were set too high, despite the excessive atmospheric greenhouse gas (GHG) concentration levels when compared to historical trajectories [4,5,6]. Established tools and measures such as net zero emission targets serve to slow progress, or even mislead into certain failure [7,8].

If bold and focused measures such as those outlined in the ten-point plan recommended below under section “Policies for Climate Stabilization”, are not introduced instead, ours will be a very different planet, climatically more extreme and hotter, with an as yet unkown final temperature regime, and a dramatically altered oceanic and atmospheric chemical and physical composition. Earth’s future air supply is likely to contain higher levels of CO₂, NO_x and CH₄—and, unhappily for all oxygen-breathing organisms, decreasing levels of O₂. It may also become toxic due to runaway dinoflagellate growth spawned by ocean acidification. Toxic forms of these single-cell eukaryote algae and other harmful microplankton and pelagophytes not only thrive under decreasing pH levels, but can even reinforce lower pH and oxygen, and higher CO₂ levels [9,10].

Near-future temperature scenarios range widely. At the extreme and high end of the scale we may face a 10 °C rise and the extinction of life as we know it, possibly within a few decades [11,12]—and at the presently most optimistic, ie at the very lowest end of the scale of a 1.5, more likely 2–4° increase by 2080 [13,14]. While the extreme-scale predictions are typically dismissed by those pointing to past and long-cherished climate models, these are the very same models that ignored or missed feedback cycles and many other features of a disturbed Earth system [15,16]. As a consequence many scientists find themselves join in a rising chorus of amazement [2]. Either scenario, high or low, and all those in between, will mean a dramatic transformation of the terrestrial ecological system and its habitability for humans and most other species that have evolved here before us.

This planet has had relatively stable climate conditions for more than 10,000 years [17,18]. Now the very real prospects of an uncontrollable GHG concentration and temperature rise has been triggered by dominant consumption, production, energy and land management practices, threatening a shift from Holocene Earth’s paradisal bliss via a precumbrian Hothouse state to Venus-like conditions, as astrophysicists Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan have both warned. As the temperature rises, the planet travels through altering states, with the worst case ending with the extinction of most life on Earth. This paper is built on the hope that this prospect and its catastrophic features can still be avoided. Below I discuss the drivers and dynamics of past, current and future climate instabilities, technological fixes pursued today, the logic of regenerating biospheric capacities for climate stabilization—and ten measures needed to support this.

“In the 3.2 billion years that life has existed on Earth, the physical and chemical conditions on most of the planetary surface have never strayed from those most favorable for life” Lovelock and Margulis [19].^Footnote1

‘Climate engineering’ aims at changing the planet’s climate. This function has been performed by Earth’s biosphere for many millions of years—from the eons before the Paleocene to the recent end of the Holocene. Photosynthesising organisms have performed exactly the ‘engineering’ services for Earth that some science fiction writers [21] and Elon Musk have dreamed of for Mars: creating a stable, oxygen-rich and breathable atmosphere. Here on Earth this was essential for the development of species and ecosystem complexity, beginning with the emergence of cyanobacteria 2.4 billion years ago [22].

Figure 1 charts how biological systems have kept planetary temperature and CO₂ levels within a widely fluctuating but ultimately life-preserving range for over half a billion years, counteracting cyclical dynamics and cataclysmic biological, chemical, geological and astrophysical events, including those that caused life on Earth to become nearly extinguished five times. Various near-total extinctions—such as the Paleocene-Eocene Temperature Maximum (PETM)—serve as one of the prehistorical warnings about the effect of the current Anthropocenic Greenhouse Gas Spike (AGS). In a sense the AGS is the second planetary cataclysm prompted by a single species, this time by humans—potentially counteracting that of the first, the Great Oxidation Event created by cyanobacteria more than two billion years earlier, only much faster.

Temperature evolution of the planet in the Phanerozoic to present [23]. CC—4.0 Deed | Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International

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Roughly with the onset of the Pleistocene—and in particular the extraordinary climate stabilization period over the last 10–12,000 years that we call the Holocene—newcomer and apex predatorHomo sapiens has sought to manipulate the realities of natural climate conditions in her favour, through various, sometimes disastrous transformations. At first this manifested itself in the microclimate engineering of close living conditions: from cave shelters of the Paleolithic climatic niches, to the agricultural innovations of the Neolithic period’s early settlements, and later the Bronze Age’s city foundations [24]. In more recent times, many microclimatic manipulations have been applied in a vast array of fossil-fuel powered activities and systems, resulting in the instantaneous release of carbon that had been sequestered over eons. Examples range from forest clearing and settlement building to an oil-combustion based automobility system supporting the global spread of air-conditioned suburban homes, to heated airport terminals in the Arctic, onto diesel-powered oceanliners, and now even artificial snowmaking systems deployed to temporarily simulate a fast-disappearing season: winter.

Habitable space expanded into climatically unsuitable zones, also supported by agricultural irrigation and fertilization, and a wide and ubiquitous array of petroleum-powered mechanized transport. All fossil-fuel powered, they took on planet-wide proportions, enabling the vast resource consumption that became further amplified by automation and a myriad of other and rapidly evolving, quasi-autonomous information technology systems [25] and mushrooming artificial intelligence innovations. Over the past two generations our very evolutionary quest ironically has emerged also as our main existential threat. The collective, planet-scale climate engineering outcome of anthropogenic global warming has become a single, monumental and yet unintended consquence of human evolution. Forest clearing, wetland draining, pollution and other damaging local and regional land-cover and ecosystem changes were widespread already before the industrial age, but became most rampant and planet-wide since the 1970s: the sharpest increase in fossil, industrial and land-use change based greenhouse gas emissions (Figs. 2 and10).

The current global temperature increase—here shown against the 1850–1900 annual average—can be traced most clearly over the past 50 years.‘Global surface air temperature increase, relative to the average for 1850–1900, the designated pre-industrial reference period, based on several global temperature datasets shown as 5-year averages since 1850 (left) and as annual averages since 1967 (right)’ [27]. As of June 2024 the entire preceding rolling year 2023–4 temperatures breached the 1.5 °C ceiling, while individual daily temperature spike events reached 2° during 2023. Graphic credit: C3S/ECMWF

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This ‘progress’, manifest also in the largely fossil-resource-based chemical and plastics revolutions of the 20th century, has triggered a precipitous decline in ecosystem viability, biodiversity and climate-active species: for instance the reported 50% loss in carbon-managing oceanic life over the past 50 years that in the case of microplankton continues along a trajectory of 1% per year [9,26]. This is particularly alarming because of the role of phyto- and zooplankton in respective CO₂ management, oxygen production and trophic support across the oceanic food chain.

Figure 2 shows the escalating spikes in global temperatures, most strongly ramping up only over the past 50 years. This escalation is driven by a combination of growth in fossil-energy GHG emissions, a decline in biological carbon assimilation capacity due to deforestation, grassland and wetland loss, pervasive chemical, runoff and plastic pollution, and increasing feedback mechanisms such as forest fires and permafrost thawing.

When judged in population growth, fossil-fuelled industrial progress powering culture, science and society has initially proven spectacularly successful. As one of its indirect results, the human population exploded from one billion in 1800 to over eight billion in 2023: a massive population bubble powered by the amenities fossil fuels have facilitated. This process of fossil-civilizational climate engineering was achieved at the expense of the overall balance of the biosphere, disrupting oceanic as well as terrestrial ecosystems to such a degree that the currently unfolding sixth mass species extinction event was triggered (Fig. 3a, b, c).

(a) Annual carbon dioxide emissions growth from fossil fuels and land use change including agriculture and forestry from 1850 to 2024. The largest share came from burning fossil energy resources: coal, natural gas and oil (73.2%), with the most dramatic increase since the 1950s), followed at a distance by land use (18.4%), industry including cement production (5.2%) and waste (3.2%) [28]. CC BY 4.0 Deed. (b) Annual world CO₂ emissions by region (fossil fuel, cement and industry only) [29]. CC BY. (c) Worldwide cumulative CO₂ emissions by source (fossil fuel, cement and industry only). While all policy attention is placed on annual emissions and imaginary ‘carbon budgets’: far more critical yet almost entirely ignored is how much has already been emitted and accumulated over time: most of it since the 1970s. CO₂ will remain in the atmosphere for hundreds of years unless drawn down systematically while emissions stop [30] CC BY

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The speed and extent of current emission, concentration and climate shift dynamics are unprecedented. They cannot be adequately framed in any presently available empirical context: all future modelling is fundamentally hypothetical and speculative. This is reflected in the fact that many current, i.e. generally accepted, models of future cryosphere or temperature developments have already been far surpassed by reality: many known feedback effects but also biological carbon functions have been ignored, marginalized or calculated inadequately. Hence, as an arguably reliable, ‘long empirical’ indication of likely futures the look at prehistory and its dynamics becomes compelling, even essential. Viewed in this way, according to Burke et al. [31], the fossil-fuelled Anthropocene foreshadows the conditions of the Pliocene, with its much higher-than-Pleistocene-to-Holocene CO₂ concentrations of 400 ppm (parts per million or 10⁻⁶) and temperatures of 1.8–3.6 °C above recent pre-industrial times, even at a more optimistic, International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)-adopted Representative Concentration Pathway RCP 4.5 [32]. The less optimistic scenario of RCP 8.5 could resurrect the climate of the Eocene. It ranged between 500 and 1500 ppm CO₂ concentrations and 11–16 °C above recent pre-industrial times. RCP 8.5 can, with some justification, be looked at as the ‘business as usual’ (BAU) scenario—i.e. the currently adopted and so far stubbornly pursued path to a very hot future (Figs. 4 and5).

Comparison of the RCP 8.5 scenario (in tan) with the temperature development of prehistory. Ice sheets existed in the Pleistocene and partly still during the Pliocene, and possibly extended back to the Eocene in the southern hemisphere. Both are currently in decisive retreat. Graphic: Burke et al. [31]

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Projection of the RCP8.5 scenario leads to a planetary ‘journey forward into the past’: through the climates of the Pliocene and Eocene. Graphic: Burke et al. [31]

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Many have thought of the planet’s ice caps as immutable ‘ice shields’, buffering speed and extent of climate shifts. This turned out to be wishful thinking. At the time of writing this paper the ice caps disappear six times faster than as recently as during the 1990s [33]. Since the speed and force of the atmospheric chemistry changes driving today’s climate dynamics is also unprecedented throughout the Earth’s known history, it is likely that without truly dramatic shifts in the very nature of the drivers of this sudden rise it will result in an accelerating feedback spiral, with the complete disappearance of the polar ice caps in a foreseeable period of time. The sheer shock of the near-instantaneous and massive CO₂ and other pollutant injections into the biospheric system could soon result in changes that go beyond the historical Dansgaard-Oeschger or, during the Holocene, Bond cycles—that 11,500 years ago, at the onset of the Holocene, saw average annual temperatures on the Greenland ice sheet rise by 8 °C over a time-period of only 40 years—see also Fig. 6 [34].

Correlations between CO₂ concentrations and temperature over the last 720,000 years show that a CO₂ concentration variation of 100 ppm brought an increase of about 10 °C. Source: Kasang [38], after Uemura et al. [11]. CC BY

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The Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles were linked to shifts in the Atlantic Meriodonal Overturning Circulation (AMOC)—the prospect of a human-triggered collapse of the AMOC by mid-century, or 2057 [35], is widely regarded as the largest and most impactful of the climate tipping points [36]. A corollary effect is currently taking place near the planet’s opposite pole, in the abyssal waters around Antarctica, where meltwater swamps deep ocean currents, causing heat waves below and blocking vital flows of the oceanic overturning circulation. This is likely to fundamentally alter the oceans’ biochemistry, and distribution of oxygen, carbon, nutrients, heat, acidity and salinity, here in turn accelerating the melting of the Antarctic ice shelves [37]. This suggests that the anthropogenic—as well as anthropocenic—triggering of a large Dansgaard-Oeschger- or Bond-type event is in progress.

Looking at the last 720,000 years, we find far more extreme temperature variations than those currently portrayed as ‘worst case’ by climate policymakers: fluctuations of about 10 °C at CO₂ concentration variations of only 100 ppm (Fig. 6). The same range is also seen in other comparisons for CH₄ concentration variations of around 300 ppb (parts per billion or 10⁻⁹) that typically accompany these CO₂ variations [12]. This could mean that at the current increase of more than 140 ppm above the 280 ppm maximum across the Holocene, this temperature increase of 10 °C is likely to be exceeded, especially since methane concentrations are, at the time of writing this paper, already more than three times the long-term stable level: close to 2000 ppb, ie nearly 1400 ppb above the highest general level across the Holocene and much of the Pleistocene (see Figs. 7 and8).

CO₂ (shown here) and CH₄ concentrations in the atmosphere are presently at 165% and 325% of long-term stable values (NASA 2024 and Our World in Data 2024). NASA source: NOAA Creative Commons CC0 License. Our World in Data source: Creative Commons BY license

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CO₂ and CH₄ (shown here) concentrations in the atmosphere are presently at 165% and 325% of long-term stable values (NASA 2024 and Our World in Data 2024). NASA source: NOAA Creative Commons CC0 License. Our World in Data source Creative Commons BY license

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Due to system inertia a rapid rise in temperature does not follow overnight, but by a delayed time interval, in keeping with the observed and calculated paleoclimate history. The long-term stable atmospheric CO₂ level—during the 2.5 million year long Pleistocene—peaked at 280–300 millionths—molecular parts per million, or ppm [39] (Fig. 7). Current levels have well exceeded 420 ppm at the time of writing this paper, with an outsized jump in 2023: this is now 165% of the long-term stable concentrations. Humanity has only been living with the elevated concentrations of over 300 ppm CO₂ for about 70 years: since the 1950s [40]. The delayed temperature kick is now only beginning to be felt.

While long-term stable methane concentrations have peaked at 600 billionths—parts per billion (ppb)—in the last 800,000 years, current levels will soon exceed 2000 ppb, i.e. more than 325% of the proven stable level (EPA 2016 [41]) (Fig. 8)—in Arctic and other hotspots this is already much higher (Fig. 9a and b). Given these excessive GHG levels, ideas about ‘emission budgets’ are fallacious: such budgets have not actually existed any more for some fourty years—ever since humanity significantly overshot the 280–300 ppm upper concentration range [42]. Atmospheric CO₂ concentrations implied in calls for climate neutrality by 2050 are therefore not only far too high—they should lie wellbelow current levels. A sustainable actual ‘target’—the limit to a rise in global average temperatures—cannot be the Paris Climate Agreement’s politically arrived at aspirational goal of not exceeding a 1.5 °C rise: zero degrees above the 1750 value is more likely the climate-stable and hence worthwhile aim.

a andb Methane concentration forecasts at surface level (a) and at 5500 m above sea level (500 hPa—b) forecast of 26 January 2024. In Fig. 9a please note the extensive methane plumes over the southern Arctic Ocean extensions north of Scandinavia, Novaja Semlja to Siberia, from the Barents across the Kara to Laptev Seas to the Anjou Islands the melting of Arctic sea ice and the Greenland ice sheet. These readings are higher in winter due to lower microbial CH₄ consumption levels. These still pale in comparison to the extensive other methane hotspots across the globe, such as the industrial, agricultural and other North American, European, Persian Gulf, North Indian, East Chinese and Southeast Asian sources [45]. Open Copernicus Product License

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Immediate and extensive action in pursuit of this aim is also required to slow added fatal warming effects such as the melting of marine methane hydrates and the thawing of permafrost. These already began decades ago, further accelerating CH₄ volatilization in climate feedback, threatening to release potentially large flows of ancient thermogenic methane from deep basins beneath the Arctic seafloor [43,44] and both thermogenic and biogenic methane accumulating under and seeping through the Svalbard permafrost layer. Figure 9a and b show the accumulation of elevated methane concentrations over the southern reaches of the Arctic Ocean at surface, and above the entire Arctic at 5500 meters, ie mid-Tropopause elevation, as registered in late January 2024 [45]. To compound this emergency, wildfires made the Arctic tundra a net source of CO₂ in 2024 [46].

In light of these dynamics, and in the face of failing climate action negotiations, increasingly desperate concepts to slow global heating have arisen to deal with various symptoms of this historical crisis brought about by a combination of failures in the economic system, public policy and governance. Climate engineering, or geo-engineering, approaches have long been criticized as undertested, unregulated, dangerous and damaging [47,48,49,50,51]. Given the bias of the dominant economic logic towards immediate rewards and short-term solutions they are also increasingly pursued as quick fixes in five general planetary domains: in orbit; in the atmosphere; in geological formations; land-use and land-cover focused, such as carbon plantations; and as various oceanic projects [52] (Fig. 10).

The narrow focus of climate engineers at full display: the very complexity of the planet’s ecosystem is subjected to a plethora of isolated and simplistic technical projects. Ocean-based climate interventions and their deep-sea impacts are well described by Levin et al. [52]. These include attempts at artificially removing atmospheric CO₂ and transferring it into the ocean. Isolated measures such as alkalinity addition, CO₂ injection, surface seaweed carbon farming and crop waste dumping bring great risks of undesirable side effects and systemic disturbances. Image source Levin et al. [52]

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Many narrow and imaginary climate engineering methods hold sway over global negotiations already today, and have done so for some time. Popular examples include the disastrous illusions that the currently still globally subsidized burning of forest biomass is climate-neutral, or, equally falsely, the construction with mass timber even climate-positive [53,54]—or that Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) technologies are capable of removing affordably, effectively, safely and at a sufficiently large scale, the massive waste gas streams from fossil or biomass combustion, let alone the excessive emission bubble that has built up in atmosphere and oceans already [55,56].

Many direct climate modification schemes hope to gain momentum through emission offsets and trading, in pursuit of the widely promoted but fundamentally flawed target referred to above: climate neutrality by 2050 [57]. Most of these are by their very nature individual projects focused on narrow outcomes that are disconnected from the wider ecosystems into which they are introduced. Some risk ecological disturbances and other unintended consequences—under an absence of national or global coordination, control, governance or systematic scientific studies (Levin et al. 2023). It also raises the specter of georegional, or even global, conflict over such actions, in ways long that are long reflected in the concept ofclimate orweather warfare [58,59]. A good example for such risk in climate engineering is illustrated by findings that marine cloud brightening could bring temporary cooling benefits in one area, geography jurisdiction or nation—and as a consequence deliver heat waves in another, triggering defensive countermeasures [60]. The likelihood that many of these measures contribute positively to planetary habitability, international security and a stable climate is very low.

The basic principle of any promising climate stabilization effort must therefore not to serve as a token gesture, or policy band-aid on the deep and extensive damage wreaked by the conventional fossil-fuelled, short-term economy: this would amount to hopeless Sisyphusism. Rather, it must get to the roots of the problems and transform them systemically: a process that we call here Climate Regeneration, capable of restoring the integrity of the natural biosphere as the most promising ‘mechanism’ of climate regulation.

The evolution and presence of an infinitely complex living entity, Earth’s biosphere, and its weather, temperature, oxygen and water cycle regulating mechanisms alone provide self-evidence that only naturally evolved, living and thriving ecosystems can successfully stabilize a habitable planetary climate. By contrast the parade of isolated and often naive, quick-fix human climate engineering projects currently in discussion and practice is self-evidence that human engineers are not up to this task—unless they focus on healing Earth’s natural systems to recuperate and in this way become effective again—not on the object of a single technical adjustment. The rush to such isolated climate engineering methods that are too simple-minded for a highly complex and ill-understood set of ecosystemic relations gives rise to the reasonable concern that this kind of ‘climate tinkering’ is bound to do more harm than good [61,62]. Excluded from, and contrasted with, narrow technological fixes therefore are what are defined below as Real Renewables (in Point 1), and healthy efforts at embedding human activities in natural cycles, such as forest protection and improvements to the agricultural soil regime.

It is crucial to change the very internal logic of human intervention before additional climate engineering measures—i.e. various individual methods—are applied in the makeshift and risky manner many now are, or are proposed to be. Climate regeneration (CR) deals with root causes, uses existing levers and is all-encompassing in its strengthening of natural ecosystem health. By contrast, climate engineering (CE) deploys individual technologies in isolation, as ends in themselves. Both CR and CE methods are in use today, and this paper specifies ten of the most important CR enabling measures, including those of political, social and economic climate regeneration. Again, the emphasis is on defending, healing and nurturing of natural ecosystems.

Two examples highlight the vital importance of but also differences between crucial natural terrestrial and oceanic systems that have slowly evolved and maintained climate stability, and hence support human habitability: intact forests on land and plankton ecosystems in the sea. Both are in steep decline, and their loss rates both threaten general species viability and presage a global collapse of human civilization in the next 20–40 years [9,63]. However, removing the root causes of their decline will help protect both, and yield the most powerful GHG-concentrations reduction effect. Ceasing the logging of old forests [64] has strong, steady and slow carbon benefits towards regional climate-positive performance. Slowing the rate of heat uptake, and cutting chemical and plastic pollutants will help protect phytoplankton and zooplankton [65], including the most populous species on Earth, copepods, the tiny marine crustaceans whose collective digestive and life cycles act as the most powerful planetary carbon pump. Unlike the slow regeneration rates of forests, plankton species are capable of rapid recovery and expansion due to their innate, potential population-doubling rates of just a few days [9].

Rapid defossilization of the global economy is as essential as the reduction of an excess in atmospheric and oceanic carbon, by boosting the viability of healthy natural ecosystems. One cannot substitute or compensate for the other: GHG concentration levels are already far too high for that today, and rising fast. However, and seemingly contradicting this paper’s very warnings about isolated engineering measures: it may well turn out that rapid de-fossilization and the concomitant drop in atmospherically dimming pollutants would bring with it a need for limited atmospheric climate management. Recent evidence shows that atmospheric dust has had a climate cooling effect, but also that this dust fraction has been declining since the 1980s, with possibly stronger heating consequences [66]. A similar effect may also be caused by fewer aerosols being emitted due to declining fossil fuel combustion, and the successful avoidance of other air pollution sources. Recent empirical evidence indicates substantial radiative warming attributed to swift reductions in global shipping emissions—resulting in a climatic ‘geoengineeing termination shock’ [67].

Although this is not yet fully understood and described in partly contradictory studies [68,69], such mechanisms and principles show the need for precise and ongoing measurements. This will possibly show that initial particle substitution measures accompanying bold de-fossilization may be unavoidable. These would only make sense if they were accompanied by a serious biological regeneration strategy—as outlined here below. Fossil particle substitution can be understood as a therapeutic aid towards planetary system recovery, not unlike prescribing methadone to recovering heroin addicts. They must then not only be technically effective and controllable, but also accompanied by continuously monitored adjustments, for decades, centuries, and possibly millennia into the future.

This paper thus asks below: what are ten of the most important steps, the main components of climate regeneration, to eliminate such existential root problems? What arrangements and mechanisms will be helpful, or even needed, for the rapid transformation to a climate-positive, carbon-negative world?

In the struggle to rescue and resuscitate the ailing ecosystem Earth’s flagging climate stabilization capacity ten measures are of paramount importance. Local, state, national, and international governments, businesses, community groups, military establishments and civic institutions are called on to sharply refocus global policies for local climate actions—and local actions for global impact.

1. Adequate climate targets

The only way to systematically reduce GHG concentrations in the atmosphere is to focus on reversing the flow of anthropogenic emissions naturally, by cutting energy and industrial emissions, and avoiding the pollution and destructive practices that weaken biological CO₂ uptake through oceanic and terrestrial ecosystems. The official focus worldwide has to be on net-negative, ie climate-positive targets, aiming at lowering atmospheric CO₂ (and other GHG) concentration levels, not just emissions. A negative emissions trajectory to 2100 was actually part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 1.5 Degree Report [13], but omitted from the general net-zero rallying cry that has ensued since. Net zero became a slogan to postpone concrete and specific action, ignoring the target, and at best hoping that excess emissions could be ‘removed’ by not fully available or even known artificial or natural means sometime in the future.

Net zero, or climate neutrality, is insufficient to safely avoid a collapse on the scale of prehistoric climate catastrophes. Relative zero-emission targets can be inadequate, too, in part because they are set too high when referenced to very recent baselines (say, 2006, 2000, or 1990) while the current, exponentially increasing greenhouse gas (GHG) concentration levels have been already too elevated for some time for even an absolute-zero emissions policy and practice to suffice any longer. Climate neutrality and net zero are not only inadequate, but also misleading slogans. They promote complacency because they are complex and vague in practice and open to interpretation and manipulation. Only slowly, and recently, such views are increasingly voiced and shared in the scientific community [8]—and even in the business world, where the Australian mining giant Fortescue Metals Group stands out in “walking away from” climate neutrality, or net zero, with its chairman, Dr. Andrew Forrest, describing it as an excuse to carry on business-as-usual. Fortescue pursues absolute zero fossil energy emissions by 2030, across the entire value chain of the world’s fourth-largest mining company [70].

For the world of spatial design, planning and development the Global Climate Geodesign Challenge (GC) has been initiated in 2022, within the International Geodesign Colloboration, a world-wide network of some 240 Universities. The University of Minnesota, Liechtenstein Institute for Strategic Development, and Environmental Systems Research Institute, Esri Inc., are among GC’s key drivers and initiators. This international initiative applies geographic information systems (GIS) and other digital tools to pursue local and regional spatial climate projects in a framework of global action, aims and impact.

Key action domains range from agriculture to oceans while aiming to lower atmospheric and oceanic CO₂-concentrations through GHG emission avoidance, natural sink support, pollution reduction and other means [71]. The project is also deployed as an offering to enhance and support the process of National Determined Contributions (NDCs—see Overholt et al. [72]). Here it aims to expand this nationally based, global process into the land use, land cover and marine spatial planning domains, while providing the opportunity to conceptualize going beyond the Paris Agreement’s 2050, net-zero and 1.5° aims. The ultimate focus of the GC program is on lowering emissions to absolute zero and below, and targeting a zero-degree Celsius temperature rise over pre-industrial times [73].

An effective policy and implementation push for broadly coordinated climate stabilization measures would also manifest itself in public, widely relayed, frequent and meticulously reported information: atmospheric, oceanic and terrestrial carbon stores and fluxes, graphic and dynamic biodiversity data and chemical pollution flows, all conveyed as part of a global reporting system. It would alert the global human civilization and local communities, and could help counter the emergency fatigue and climate threat complacency often encountered in the conventional media.

The current and long-held, seemingly pragmatic but deeply flawed emission goals and temperature targets have to be modified to pursue

• net anthropogenic carbon emission reductions to rise significantly above 100%;

• 280 ppm atmospheric CO₂ concentrations (during May 2024 at 426.9 ppm; [74]): this goes beyond but is broadly in line with James Hansen et al’s calculation of a 350 ppm concentration maximum to maintain climate stability at a minimum degree of likelihood [42];

• zero degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels: currently Earth from mid-2023 into 2024 has exceeded this level by 1.5 °C for the first time since 1850 for an entire year [75], reaching an average of 1.6 °C throughout 2024; and

• 100% renewable energy, as defined here as ‘Real Renewables’: this means (a) produced in the same time frame as their use; ie not reliant on future or past actions; (b) are carbon free, ie without biomass burning or deforestation for biofuel production; and (c) are delivered sustainably, ie in keeping with the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals [76].

In the currently dominant economic environment that is skewed towards incumbent and short-term return yielding wealth accumulation vehicles this will not take place without political action and legislative commitments to action. Voluntary action pledges, target setting and guidelines have not proven to be sufficient, or even substituted for actual change. To promise success, news and scientific media must be well funded to inform the global community about this threat in factual and accurate ways. Social and informal media are important where the ownership patterns of the mainstream channels cause them to fail in their duty. In this way, a collective cognitive barrier to action may be overcome as well: the stubborn ‘Holocenic Mind’ syndrome. This is the dominant and widespread illusion that humanity still exists in a stable climate.

2. Climate defense budgets

Proposed here is the new concept of ‘climate defense’: the recognition that a stable climate is a common good, and, indeed, our common home [77,78,79,80] that requires defense measures akin to mobilising a nation against an overwhelming and immediate threat. Here this very threat lies within: in the deleterious practices across a range of areas that all require supreme attention and central focus, from energy transition to ending the production and use of insect, bird and aquatic life killing glyphosate [81], of PFAS and mass plastic products; to the transformation of industrial agriculture.

The rapid termination of fossil resource use for energy production is among the top priorities, and the most urgent, long overdue step. Setting national climate defense budget frameworks for the rapid phase-out of fossil fuels and the switch to renewable energy and the other regenerative practices listed here have been ignored for too long. In the energy domain they are left to mere figleaf incentives in markets that are heavily tilted towards fossil fuels by annual subsidies to the tune of 7.1 trillion US dollars in 2023 [82].

The size of such national climate defense budgets could amount to five to ten percent of the gross national product, or four to eight times the average national military household that should be reallocated to climate defense measures at least in part. This is only a conservative estimate: the share of the United States economy devoted to mobilization in World War II exceeded these levels soon after the war was entered into, and rose from 1.4% in 1939 to 45% in 1944, with unemployment dropping to 1.2% [83]. WW II is cited elsewhere as demanding between 50 and 70% of the major economies [84]. The latter study was written early in the coronavirus crisis; its both experienced and prescient introductory summary ends with the words: “… it seems that it might be useful to know a few things about what happened and how it worked out the last time our society was engulfed by an all-consuming emergency.”

Worldwide, communities and their economies must be prepared for this level of readiness, both in terms of effort and immediate commitment. Climate defense is not only a matter of de-fossilizing the energy system but also of mobilizing all possible ways of allowing the recovery of terrestrial and oceanic ecosystems and their climate-stabilizing carbon management capacity.

3. Climate peace diplomacy

An important and novel endeavour among the required emergency measures is what is proposed here originally as Climate Peace Diplomacy. Shockingly, it is so far entirely untried. The term Climate Diplomacy is often used as a euphemism for the largely ineffective international negotations that have taken place for nearly 30 years. The yet-untriedClimate Peace Diplomacy should seek the end of military conflict in the shared interest in survival, against the common enemy of global heating [85] that threatens to ravage the biosphere. Climate peace diplomacy also includes an unwavering focus on constructively managing climate migration, and lowering the risks of conflict—see also Point 10 below.

In order to reach global climate peace agreements, intensive exchanges are essential, and not only at the highest levels. Diplomatic channels for peaceful cooperation must be mobilized everywhere. To avert the ultimate catastrophe in humanity’s short history, peaceful agreement and unification for comprehensive climate stabilizing action are fundamental and indispensable. Common aims of significant climate defense budgets and comprehensive climate peace diplomacy strategies are the cessation of military conflict, in order to pursue without distraction the rapid shift to renewable energy, regeneration of agricultural soils and practices, ubiquitous renaturation and restoration of deforested areas and wetlands, and biodiversity support—to name some of the most important areas. This also requires a new and global monetary framework that places biosphere benefits above short-term individual gains.

4. Regenerative financing mechanisms for the planetary commons

Pledges and even binding commitments ‘to do better’ are being pursued regularly, such as the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) by the 196 Parties to the 2015 Paris Agreement [86]; or the inadequate and failing ‘30×30’ Global Biodiversity Framework [87]. The latter is, inexplicably from a climate viewpoint, separated from the main UNFCCC negotiations, despite it also being essential to climate stabilization. While these agreements are being negotiated systemic climate destructive practices—notably production and consumption of oil and gas; plastic, chemical and runoff pollution; commercial and energy timber production; palm oil, cattle and bioenergy crop expansion—continue largely unabated [88,89], often causing the most financially capable countries to fail most spectacularly in their pledges and commitments [90].

Money is so pervasive and universal that it was missed in defining the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. This paper introduces ‘SDG Zero’: to transform finance from a driver of unsustainable practices into a climate-stabilizing force - making long-term investments in defossilization, regenerative agriculture, ocean recovery and forest protection norm, not exception. A universe of demurrage driven, sustainable-investment tagged and tracked smart environmental instruments has to be activated to establish the vast financial transaction space required to shift the reward structure of investments from short- to long-term. This article proposes to systematically and globally build the transformation rate of the global climate shift into an expenditure currency demurrage rate: assuming a 2050 zero value (‘too late’, with unavoided climate damage costs racing towards infinite) of any climate stabilization aimed funds, these should be provided with an inbuilt value decline and half-life of 12 years (half the time between now and 2050) to encourage rapid expenditure - now.

The current short-term fiat money monoculture needs to be transformed into a rich ecosystem of rewards and investment instruments that are geared towards biospheric intactness, boosting shared ecosystem services: from atmospheric carbon sequestration to global support of biodiversity, dramatically declining without such effective mechanisms [91]. This new monetary framework is needed to prioritize planetary support effects over short-term individual gains. This may include carbon fintech solutions without the conventional pollution offsets, capable of creating a new market for regenerative goods and services that can be transparently and immutably registered. In this way a distributed and diverse ecosystem of global, national, regional and local currencies, fiscal tools and financial systems can be created to support a stable climate, healthy biomes, fresh water, regenerative agriculture and others [78,79], and the ‘Planetary Commons’ of “safeguarding Earth-regulating systems in the Anthropocene” [92]. For further reading please refer to Brunnhuber [93], Chen [94], Ruddick [95], or Litaer et al. [96].

5. Fossil fuel source taxation—and the end of its production for combustion

An essential measure is to finally and unequivocally classify fossil fuels and their combustion as toxic. At the very least their extraction and distribution must be heavily taxed at the source as a carbon fee—not after they already have been produced, distributed and combusted [97,98,99]. Given the planetary climate emergency any transition period should be limited before outright prohibition. The means to this end are based on precedents and pathways to success in other areas of emissions and waste regulation—although none, from carcinogenic tobacco to industrial air pollutants, have proven so universally life-threatening. Global systems to monitor and track fatal resources are needed to map and stop fossil fuel exploration, extraction and production. Fossil fuel content in global and local value chains should be traced back to their multitudinous sources. This requires decisive action to ensure that the essential shift away from the dependence of states and companies on fossil fuel revenues is achieved quickly. In its pursuit the shift to structuring energy supply as a public good, not a private commodity for profit is gaining momentum, for more focused, rapid and affordable shifts to renewable energy. Fair tariffs, re-municipalization, public-community cooperations and public-public partnerships are among the steps along the pathways to recapturing a public mandate for energy, and escaping its ‘profit trap’ [100].

6. Targeted transformation of the fossil fuel industries

To enable and support an end to fossil fuel combustion the next most urgent emergency measures in the struggle to stabilize the Earth’s climate is the restructuring of the fossil fuel industries from production to distribution, to boost the emergence of a renewably powered economy and society, based on solar, wind and water energy sources only. The fossil fuel industries’ interests and spheres of influence control much of the national and international policy apparatus. These entrenched power structures are virtually hard-wired into the global economy by public subsidies that amounted to 5.9 trillion US dollars in 2020—calculated after taxes—[101] and rose to a staggering 7.1 trilion only two years later [102]. This results in the agonizingly slow transitions experienced, transformation that often even revert into the opposite, as shown by the slowdown and inversion of the once-leading German energy transition from 2012, when hundreds of thousands of jobs in the renewable energy sector were sacrificed to the re-emerging albeit outdated and climate-destabilizing energy model.

The systematic and targeted restructuring of fossil industries is necessary, in technical substitution programs, the ending of subsidies as well as structural measures of transformation support. This complex also includes the removal of regulatory barriers to renewable energy accommodating grids, energy storage and distribution systems, and red-tape free access to the unencumbered production, distribution and use of renewable energy. Smart innovation market levers are needed to trigger, coordinate and direct investment flows to achieve the highest and fastest transformative effect. Equally important are structural compensation measures for countries that now depend on fossil resource production revenues.

7. Natural CO₂removal

The lowering of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations requires the natural capacity of healthy land cover, soils, coastal ecosystems and marine life to be regenerated and safeguarded. The action spectrum is known, and ranges from intact forests to peatlands and grasslands; to improving global agricultural practices with a bold and decisive regenerative focus; and to protect oceanic ecosystems in their biological ability to remove, sequester and process atmospheric carbon. The potential for plant and soil CO₂ sequestration is well modelled and understood on land, but only very tenuous beginnings have been made for CH₄, ie methane. Jackson et al. [103], discussed the logic and potential for this and proposed a model comparison project for both global and local methane sequestration. In 2024 Gauci et al. [104] reported the global impact of microbial methane uptake via the bark of lowland trees. Research into deploying methanotrophic bacteria at low concentration levels is advancing. Generally speaking, however, methane cycles and absorptive processes are still under-understood and -developed.

The core focus here is to halt and reverse biodiversity deterioration. Since 1970 populations of studied animals have declined on the average by almost 70% [105]—this is also a coarse indicator of the reduction of broader ecosystem capacities to manage CO₂. This is the under-appreciated and dangerous side of the equation that explains the momentous carbon concentration pulse, unique in Earth’s history. By far the most significant GHG management domain on Earth is oceanic. It outstrips the store and cycle activities of terrestrial ecosystems and the atmosphere. As on land, virtually all of the oceans’ climate engineering ability is biological. Through their combined life and feeding cycles phyto- and zooplankton organisms are both sources of oxygen and net sink vectors for CO₂—but their numbers and vitality have declined by 50% over the last half century, due to a combination of chemical, black carbon and plastic pollution, and CO₂-induced acidification [9].

The sea-surface microlayer, the vast, millimeter-thin ‘ocean skin’ is a lipid ecosystem habitat that is important for thermal and chemical transmission buffering. It, too, is under assault by black carbon, chemical and microplastic pollution. This calls for an immediate end to large-scale wood and fossil fuel combustion; to pollutants such as the per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) or ‘forever’ chemicals; all sources of discarded plastic—the raw material of ubiquitously present and harmful micro- and nanoplastics; and the toxic stew of agricultural, industrial and urban runoff polluting our waters. This is needed to enable the speedy recovery of an already halved and presently rapidly declining biological capacity of the oceans, to help lower excessive carbon dioxide concentrations by allowing the intrinsically rapid rate of plankton and ocean fauna reproduction to return to healthy levels, and sufficient CO₂ management capacity (Fig.11).

‘Global map of PFAS concentration in water’. Concentrations shown may be skewed by sample selection, but show a pervasive picture across 45,000 surface and groundwater sites tested. They are highest around manufacturing, but also near high-use sites. An example for this fact is Australia: no PFAS production takes place here but contaminaton is pervasive as a result of firefighting activities.‘Sum of concentration of 20 PFAS subject to EU guidance in surface water, groundwater and drinking water samples. Those above the EU drinking water limit of 100 ng l − 1 (marked red on scale bar) are circled in red (for known contamination sources (for example, AFFF or non-AFFF)) or black [unknown sources).’ Cited from/Image source: Ackerman Grunfeld et al. [106]. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

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8. Industrial sequestration

The transformation of construction industries, and other material and equipment production and manufacturing operations, to carbon sequestration processes could be facilitated by the large-scale conversion of atmospheric CO₂ to carbon fiber and other solid and stable carbon products. By contrast, the use of forest harvested wood such as mass or cross-laminated timber in construction is widely and yet wrongly practiced, promoted and financed - contrary to scientific knowledge. Healthy, mature trees and preserved forests support vital, carbon managing biodiversity and soils. They also sequester more carbon in their wood than can ever be stored via plantations - or in wood products, due to the high losses in the harvesting and processing of timber, and large transport and processing energy requirements [54,64,82].

Reducing atmospheric carbon as concentrations of CO₂, CH₄, NO_X and other atmosphere-heating gases requires a revolution in the circular economy concept itself [107]. In a very rudimentary way it has already begun, with numerous government programs, corporate initiatives and university ventures focusing on ways to lower atmospheric GHG concentrations. Massive commitments across the entire economy are required to pursue these developments at scale. True carbon-cycle economies will benefit from reliable mapping and accounting of resource flows, and the transparent calculation of reliable, sustainable and permanent atmospheric GHG removal processes. This will, however, always pale in comparison to the action and importance of biological processes (Point 7) and the paramount need to end fossil fuel production and use for energy and mass plastic supply (Points 5 and 6).

9. Regenerative transition: employment transformation

The new industries offer entrepreneurial and employment programs. Technical and business retraining programs are needed to facilitate the move to renewable industries and resources. The transformation of the large fossil fuel dependent portions of the economy opens up new careers and business models for those who cannot continue to benefit from the subsidized extraction, processing, distribution and application of fossil energy resources. Replacing jobs in fossil industries with priority structural reforms towards renewable industries is not only crucial, it is also already pre-programmed, albeit held back by incumbent interests and their political influence, systemic inertia and inefficiencies.

Opportunities in renewable energy sectors, as well as regeneration-oriented retraining, research, development, manufacturing, maintenance, investment and policy development, will not only ease the transition of workers and jobs, but also dramatically increase the overall number of jobs available. Employment creation measures are a consequence of any exceptional mobilization of the economy, such as in wartime preparations—and, similarly, in the race to climate stabilization. The goal of making them fair, and harmonizing them with other societal objectives, calls for programs of social integration and rapid education. Online courses and community-building support are also crucial for the age of climate migration. Substantial and cooperative global and geo-regional migration planning frameworks with a view to targeted employment programs are needed. See also Point 10 below.

10. Managing migration flow and integration

Enormous challenges but also some promising perspectives arise in a fundamental shift in the civilizational development of humankind: massive internal, continental and global migration movements. To fully enable the increased productivity and innovation in the new regenerative industrial reality demands a capable labour force, and this requires a massive expansion in the quality of employment opportunities for all citizens—and especially for existing and new migrants.

Over the next few decades billions of people will likely be forced to migrate under the business-as-usual scenario of the Representative Concentration Pathway RCP 8.5 [32], with an average global temperature increase of 3 °C by 2070. Since a three-degree increase implies up to 7.5 °C higher continental temperatures and concomitant habitability shifts, up to one-third of the world’s population could find its home increasingly uninhabitable over the next 50 years [108].

The modelling, analyzing, tracking, planning for and the constructive embrace of development requires similarly sophisticated tools as advanced climate and global weather analysis and prediction does, in order for bold and cooperative economic and political measures to be taken. Spatial and temporal models must also be able to show where employment opportunities will arise and take into account the policy and support frameworks in each country under rapidly shifting climate conditions.

The paper has shown the inherent failures and flaws of climate engineering and a range of other related governance, policy and practice approaches—and contrasted this with both traditional and innovative climate regeneration programs. These are focused on rescuing and restoring the planet’s innate ability to maintain climate stability. This likely is the only chance of still avoiding runaway climate change. In this age of an increasingly destabilizing climate a new approach to governance, social organization, international cooperation and economic logic has become overdue. The ten measures above are foremost aimed at—and urge—governments, their policy-makers and institutions at local, national and international level. In civil society by and large, the climate and cultural readiness for change is growing. Missing still is a clear and clearly facilitated understanding of the all-encompassing nature of the global and regional threat. Comprehensive, transformative change transcends the tendency to latch onto narrow and single answers, as epitomized by the narrowly focused efforts of climate engineers to profit from emission-trading—but also those who only pursue other isolated technical measures as exclusive solutions, or those aiming only at defossilizing the energy sector while ignoring the importance of, say, oceanic biodiversity.

The planetary threat is overwhelmingly documented in the various references made in this paper, in many other studies as well as ample and growing empirical and experiential evidence. And yet, the policy or action approaches taken by governments and industries so far do not match the enormity, immediacy and gravity of the daunting prospect of losing Earth as human habitat. These ten principles above are policy directives aimed at local, regional, national and international leaders to not only recognize the dire emergency humanity faces, but also confront it.

A challenge of focus

The threat is at once biological, chemical, climatic, military, political—and cultural. The necessary means exist to counter it—but the collective focus on the overriding challenge is still missing. To overcome this crisis of focus is the fundamental need. While the confronting of individual threat symptoms is structured along narrow fissures between, say, the staving off of further emission projects versus battling biodiversity collapse, the focus blurs when it comes to seeking and finding effectively targeted solutions. Incumbent interests, short-term economic drivers and ideological dynamics blunt the efforts to sharpen a wider interest in, or understanding—let alone combating—the underlying root causes. Nobel Prizes in what Thomas Carlyle had called ‘the dismal science’^Footnote2, economics, are still won in other domains than studying how to fundamentally transform its logic to reward long-term investments aimed at a stable climate and other global goods. The vast quilt of apocalyptic prospects ahead resembles a seemingly random and disjointed mosaic rather than a compellingly and coherently understood societal syndrome, a magnified mirror view exposing the systemic failures and flaws of short-term economic pursuits. And yet, the very climate prospects that have become increasingly manifest and self-evident, will facilitate the emergence of a policy future and societal practice that is focused on collective survival—hopefully still in time.

One example for such a focused call is a narrowly framed, mathematical and predictive analysis of deforestation trends. Its authors, Mauro Bologna and Gerardo Aquino [63] reasonably assumed the arrival of global civilizational collapse to occur with the advancing destruction of vital forest cover. They gave humanity a mere 20–40 years before facing this cataclysm with a 90% probability—unless a dramatic shift occurs to what they vaguely termed a “cultural society”. This transformation from an economical to a cultural society can be defined as the very nature of emergent governance structures, climate-focused social cooperation dynamics and the inverting of short-term financial reward principles that the present paper and its ten principles argue for.

The last sentences of Bologna and Aquino’s abstract and conclusion are equally instructive:“Based on the current resource consumption rates and best estimate of technological rate growth, our study shows that we have very low probability, less than 10% in most optimistic estimates, to survive without facing a catastrophic collapse“—and:“… giving a very broad meaning to the concept of cultural civilization as a civilization not strongly ruled by economy, we suggest that only civilizations capable of a switch from an economical society to a sort of “cultural” society in a timely manner may survive.”

This paper argues for the wide discussion and incorporation of its prospects in policy frameworks, structuring principles and action plans—in all governmental, private and civil-society institutions at local, national and international levels. The goal is to imbue public policy with paramount climate defense and peace diplomacy priorities, combining such seemingly diverse fields as migration planning, chemical and plastic pollution removal, ocean run-off prevention, energy industry restructuring, regenerative agriculture and forest protection into one central governance and economic focus. This is aimed at renurturing a species-rich biospheric capacity for attaining and maintaining climate stability as the centrally important, most potent, and likely only form of effective climate management, protection or engineering.