Alex Steffen - Foresight Courses

THE PLANETARY CRISIS HAS SHIFTED GEARS

Over the last few years, we’ve crossed many of the very thresholds climate advocates fought for decades to avoid: global heat records shattering, billion-dollar storms and floods and wildfires intensifying, ice sheets breaking up, crops failing, droughts spreading. Many climate impacts are arriving sooner than expected and combining to be worse than forecast.

Society, though, has failed to respond at the same pace. Emissions are still rising. Climate adaptation planning is slow and underfunded. Local governments are overwhelmed. Whole nations are rolling back their climate promises and cutting disaster aid. Economists and business leaders warn that continued delay brings financial instability and risks the economic futures of whole regions. Worse still, we see a swelling “brittleness bubble” of overvalued, climate-endangered homes and assets — a bubble that looks bound to burst.

We are living through the most rapid planetary destabilization humans have ever experienced. Even the best advice from ten or twenty years ago is now out of date.

YOUR LIFE IS HAPPENING IN THE EARLY DAYS OF A WORSENING CRISIS

If you’re like most informed, engaged, successful people, you know this crisis is real — but you’ve also seen it as something happening elsewhere, to other people. A cause to support, not a context to reckon with.

Now, the chaos is all around us. It’s the wildfire smoke turning your skies hazy orange, the sudden increase in your insurance premiums, the battered infrastructure and flooded roads that turn your commute into a gamble. It’s your retirement investments taking a climate hit. Your kids seeking reassurance. Your community struggling to recover after heavy weather. 

The crisis is not an issue, after all, but an era. 

And this is only the beginning. We thought we had time. We’re discovering we don’t, that later is too late.

YOUR FUTURE IS NOW YOUR RESPONSIBILITY

We’re now on a collision course with planetary reality.

We're not heading into a linear, manageable transition. We’re facing cascading failures, converging disasters, and compounding brittleness risks. We’re in a discontinuity, and past expertise and experience is a poor guide to what’s coming.

No one is ready. You can’t count on governments (or advocacy groups or churches or charities or anyone else around you) to protect your home, defend the systems you depend on and secure your future. You’ll need to act before bold government rescue plans, or climate-adaptation megaprojects, or large-scale supported relocation programs get up and running—because in many places, they may not be coming.

We have to ready ourselves for this new, deeply uncertain world. No one else will do it for us. 

As climate adaptation professor Jesse Keenan says, “You’re on your own.”

YOU FACE FIERCE COMPETITION FOR THE FUTURE YOU WANT

This crisis will be life-changing for many millions of us.

The more people understand this reality, the more people will look for safer places and sturdier communities.

Where we plant ourselves as the chaos intensifies is one of the most critical questions of our lifetimes. Nowhere is completely safe and no system is completely stable — but some places are a lot safer and more stable than others. In relatively safe places, we can build relatively successful and secure lives; in brittle, vulnerable places, we probably can’t.

Here’s the harsh truth, though: there’s not enough relative safety to go around. We face a closing climate relocation bottleneck, as more and more worried people scramble for a shrinking supply of places that can offer a durable future. Not everyone will get the future they deserve.