The world’s leading scientific voices are urging greater international collaboration to prepare for an “unprecedented and prolonged era” of climate overshoot, when warming will temporarily breach global targets before being reversed.
Overshoot “has shifted from theoretical models to an urgent reality,” warns a recent editorial published in the journal Nature Climate Change. The legally binding, 1.5°C temperature threshold set out in the 2015 Paris Agreement may have already been crossed in 2024, signalling that overshoot “is closer than anticipated.”
This shift requires us to transform mitigation, adaptation, and climate governance. Negative emissions and carbon removal strategies will become a “central theme in the age of overshoot” though the implications of those options remain understudied, the Nature team writes. At the same time, carbon dioxide removal technologies are being developed to sell carbon credits, whereas those emissions could have been reduced with feasible options.
“How fast and how far temperatures can be brought back down again is an open question,” the authors write. “Thus, we need to prepare society for climate risks in an overshoot era that are unavoidable.”
That means more research into climate adaptation planning, while acknowledging that today’s planning may not be relevant in unpredictable future overshoot scenarios. Fairness and equity policies will need more supportive research to be feasibly and effectively implemented.
“The complex nature of overshoot, which consists of dynamic feedback between physical and socioeconomic systems, requires climate research communities to rethink scientific priorities and methodological innovations that could help society deal with the unprecedented and prolonged era,” the editorial states.
The different ways overshoot is perceived and experienced by various communities will add complexity, requiring stakeholders across all levels of government and the private sector to foster deeper collaboration.
Read the full editorial published in Nature Climate Change.
