New research project, started April 2023

Status

Johan Rockström:

"The cumulate Earth risks are overwhelming and clear:

(1) Global warming is accelerating, pointing at higher climate sensitivity than what we have relied upon in all our efforts of addressing the climate crisis,

(2) Earth is showing first signs of losing resilience (carbon uptake going down, Earth getting darker absorbing more heat, the water cycle pumping up more clouds causing net warming),

(3) Oveshooting the 1.5°C limit is now inevitable, already within the coming 3-5 years,

(4) 7 of 9 planetary boundaries are breached, proof of a planet becoming weaker, and

(5) tipping points are approaching fast, among them the risk of weakening or even shutting down the Atlantic overturning circulation, collapse of tropical coral reef systems, irreversible loss of large parts of the Amazon rainforest, collapse of mountain glaciers, unstoppable melt of the Greenland icesheet."

(https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/warning-shot-from-inside-insurance-industry-making-should-rockstr%C3%B6m-w5lnf/)

Quotes

Short Quotes

Daniel Schmachtenberger

“If you’re scaling towards the power of gods, then you have to have the wisdom and the love of gods, or you’ll self destruct.”

“The real existential risk is a loss of the ability to make sense of the world around us: what is worth doing, and what the likely effects of things will be”

“We do have an innate impulse towards agency, towards self actualization. Within a win-lose game structure, that will look like a competitive impulse. But within a win-win structure, that will look like the desire to go beyond my previous capacity.”

– Daniel Schmachtenberger [1]

Long Quotes

"We address two distinct forms of existential risk:

The death of humanity and the death of our humanity.

1) The first form of existential risk is how the term is usually understood: existential risk as the death of the human species. And extinction or near-extinction event. Catastrophic risk refers to events that will cause the death or extreme suffering of large segments of humanity.

2) The second form of existential risk is equally threatening, but more insidious. The death of our humanity might be caused, for example, by a pervasive, digitally mediated environment, based on the lowest common denominator of the human experience, which effectively generates degraded humans without any genuine free will, personhood, or dignity. Protecting and preserving the value of personhood, therefore, must animate efforts to avert the death of our humanity."

- David J. Temple, CosmoErotic Humanism

Vocabulary

Glossary of Core Concepts from the Age of Transformation [2]:

"Planetary Phase Shift: A systemic civilizational transformation involving the collapse of the fossil-fueled industrial paradigm and the potential emergence of a regenerative, distributed, and post-extractive operating system. The latter is not guaranteed.

Control Room: The domain of worldviews, governance models, economic logics, and cultural values that shape collective decision-making and institutional behavior.

Engine Room: The material infrastructure of civilization—energy systems, food production, mobility networks, information flows, and materials—which reflect and reproduce the operating logic of the control room.

Polycrisis: The convergence and entanglement of multiple interrelated crises—climate, economic, geopolitical, cultural—into a self-reinforcing system of instability.

Tipping Point: A threshold at which a small additional stressor causes a system to shift irreversibly to a new state.

Feedback Loop: A process where a change in one part of a system either amplifies (positive feedback) or dampens (negative feedback) changes elsewhere in the system.

Degenerative System: An extractive, polluting, and inequitable system that undermines ecological integrity and human well-being over time.

Regenerative System: A system that restores ecosystems, builds social equity, and enhances systemic resilience by working with natural and social feedbacks.

Strategic Foresight: The disciplined exploration of plausible futures to inform decision-making in conditions of complexity and uncertainty.

Planetary Intelligence: The capacity to perceive, interpret and act upon systemic risks and opportunities in ways that align human activity with the Earth’s life-support systems."

(https://ageoftransformation.org/introducing-the-planetary-intelligence-bulletin/)

Key Resources

• Video: Indy Johar on Civilizational Optioneering: it's time "to reimagine civilization as a planetary project."

Key Articles

* Negotiating the Planetary Commons: A Biosocial Compact for the Governance of Earth Systems. By James Quilligan. Global Perspectives (2026) 7 (1): 163283. doi [3]

"As Earth’s polycrisis heightens, the public and its leaders need to discuss the organization of a new world order. Negotiating a biosocial compact for the governance of Earth systems will require the delegation of sovereign power and responsibility downward to citizens in communities, municipalities, and bioregions for the flourishing of resource democracy in their commons."

Key Reports

1. 2026 Planetary Health Check, https://www.planetaryhealthcheck.org/
2. the 10 New Insights In Climate Science, https://10insightsclimate.science/
3. the UNEP Overshoot report, https://www.unep.org/en/publications/report/limiting-overshoot-navigating-exceedance-15degc-and-pathways-towards-return
4. the synthesis of Tipping Point risks, https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2618666123 and
5. the 2026 State of the Climate report, https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/advance-article/doi/10.1093/biosci/biag125/8836482?