“We need maximum ambition, maximum acceleration, maximum cooperation. In a word, maximum action.” – UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, Special address on climate, 5 June 2024.

In June, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) reported an 80% chance the global annual average temperature will exceed the 1.5°C limit in at least one of the next five years. In response, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres urged companies and countries to take rapid, decisive action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and transition away from fossil fuels.

Days after the WMO report and the Secretary-General’s speech and as part of the Exponential Race to the Top session held at the UNFCCC climate change conference (SB60) in Bonn, Johan Rockström, Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and Professor in Earth System Science at the University of Potsdam, spoke with the Exponential Roadmap Initiative’s CEO Johan Falk and Head of Communications, Andrea Lindblom. 

Andrea Lindblom: Professor Rockström, what does climate science tell us about where we are headed? 

Johan Rockström: There has never been so much scientific reason for concern as today. The latest science shows that we’ve just had the first taste of a 1.5 degrees Celsius world. It has cost us $300 to $600 billion US dollars so far, and invoices from all the extreme events. They’re starting to hurt people across the entire world.

 

In addition, there are three key factors that are really starting to worry us. Number one is that the remaining global carbon budget was recently updated. It’s now down to 200 billion tons of carbon dioxide. For us to have a chance to hold the 1.5 degrees Celsius limit, 200 billion tons of carbon dioxide, in a world that emits 40 billion tons each year, gives us five more years. 

 

So, we’re truly in the decisive decade of humanity’s future, which is why we need for an orderly phase out of oil, coal and gas to cut global emissions by half over the next five years. This is a pace, which exceeds 7% decline reductions of emissions each year – and we’re still continuing to increase emissions by up to 1%. 

 

Number two, which is even more concerning, is that we have in these reports – the WMO report, the data from the European Union Copernicus Climate Change Service and the latest Carbon Budget Report – the first confirming conclusions that warming is accelerating. The climate crisis is based on the linear relationship between more greenhouse gases gives more heating, but we’re now seeing a tendency, over the past 10 years, of how the rate of warming is accelerating, actually almost doubling compared to the warming rate from 1970 to 2008. 

 

The third and final concern, is that we are very close to tipping points. We cannot exclude crossing tipping points in the Greenland Ice Sheet, in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, but potentially also that we’re under-estimating the tipping point in the Amazon rainforest. Because of all these multiple transgressions of boundaries, it’s not only about greenhouse gases and temperature, it’s also about water insecurity, biodiversity loss, deforestation and land use change, which makes the big tipping point systems more and more brittle. So, it’s urgent and exponential pathways are the only thing that counts.

Andrea Lindblom: Why is exponential transformation needed to ensure a liveable planet?

Johan Rockström: Our only chance to keep the Earth system, the planet, the climate system in a stable state that can support our world, our lives, and future generations, is to stay within planetary boundaries. All of them translates to absolute budgets and these budgets are now so small, with regards to land, fresh water, nitrogen, phosphorus, carbon, that the only orderly pathway we now have is transformative change following exponential pathways. 

 

So, for a safe landing for humanity, to avoid crossing irreversible changes to the Earth system, we have to go from linear change, and linear change tends to be when we change things incrementally from 0.1% to 0.2% per year, to start changing things well beyond 2% to even 5% per year. And as soon as you change things, more than 2% per year, you’re actually doubling or halving something over one generation and that is non-linear. So, you’re actually changing things faster than an incremental journey. 

 

Now, this is what has been taking us on the hockey stick patterns of negative change. The opportunity today is to shift these negative hockey stick patterns over to positive hockey stick patterns where we can show that we can have exponential positive journeys. The question is, is this possible?

 

And the answer is yes, we see exponential rise of renewable energy systems across the world. We have double digit, annual increase in several percentage points that give us this non-linear, positive exponential journey on for example, electric vehicle adoption in countries like Norway, but also in trains in China. So, it’s a question of going from linear to non-linear which is exponential.

Andrea Lindblom: As CEO of the Exponential Roadmap Initiative, Johan Falk, what makes you convinced that this exponential transformation is possible? 

Johan Falk: This is the foundation of our initiative. It’s inspired by Moore’s Law from the computer industry, which has been around for 50 years, which is about doubling the number of transistors and cutting the cost every year by half. 

 

We claim that exponential is really business as usual, because virtually all solutions follow that type of S curve. They go really slow in the beginning, they reach a certain tipping point, then they start to grow incredibly fast. We’ve seen that with the television, we’ve seen it with cars and lately with computers and phones. This is happening in renewable energy, electrical vehicles, storage, which has passed that critical tipping point. They start to out-compete the fossil solutions. Now, there are a number of solutions which haven’t passed the tipping point yet, but they’re growing incredibly fast. That’s around heat pumps, energy efficiency, circular fossil-free steel – all these solutions, which are ramping. We need to ensure that we shift these S curves to the left radically, so they kick in much faster. 

Andrea Lindblom: Johan Rockström, you say that the new economy that this exponential transformation would get us to, is the economy that gets us better results. That it is the only economy that provides prosperity and equity to all of us on the planet. Can you explain?

Johan Rockström: The theory around the S curves, which are founded entirely on true empirical evidence, dates back to Everett Rogers’ theory of diffusion from 1961, where he shows that when you have innovative solutions penetrating 20% to 25% of any market in the world, you start seeing this movement from small marginal volumes to exponential increase, and you start seeing things doubling faster than a linear pathway. This is exactly what we will expect, given that sustainable solutions across the board have increasing evidence of giving more attractive, more competitive, more advanced, healthier outcomes. 

 

That is what has made me and many of my colleagues increasingly reposition the whole sustainability and climate transition agenda. From being a conventional story about how we have a problem, we need to solve it, and to solve it, we must either back off or somehow sacrifice for our economy or our lifestyles. 

 

When, in fact, we have more and more evidence that the solutions we’re talking about give us better outcomes in terms of health, in terms of jobs, in terms of the economy, in terms of competitiveness, but in particular, in terms of security. Security is fundamental when you get more energy dependence, water security independence, more stable food systems, because you have more likely chances of avoiding displacement, migration, even conflicts. 

 

These are amplifying effects of a conventional development pathway, which is why Johan Falk’s point about exponentials being business as usual has validity. Because the way things go, if you provide a better offer, and if the offer is more silent, or healthy or technologically advanced, or economically competitive, then you have a chance of things just going suddenly, very rapidly exponential. 

 

That’s interesting in the food transition, in circular material flows, in the retail industry, in textiles, in everything that has to do with mobility today. Many times, we are early on that curve, admittedly, but we know that the outcomes will actually be much more aligned with both social and ecological benefits. So, in that sense, it’s quite an exciting moment. But it’s also one of the frustrations that now that we have all this evidence of potentially catastrophic risks, unacceptable risks and scalable solutions, why are we not stepping up at a much faster pace towards these pathways? That’s what we need to think through very carefully. How do we accelerate?

Andrea Lindblom: We’re calling these sessions the Exponential Race to the Top for a reason. Johan Falk, why do we need to accelerate?

Johan Falk: The current national climate action plans or Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) will not take us to 1.5°C or even 2°C, as research from the Energy Transitions Commission (ETC) shows. That’s a major challenge. They need to be strengthened and to do this, we need rapid technology development. It’s not possible to cut emissions just by focusing on cutting emissions. We have to focus on scaling-up solutions to shift out the fossil economy. By getting companies, regions, cities and countries to cooperate and compete for the new economy, we basically shift out all the solutions and we can achieve that exponential race to the top.

Andrea Lindblom: Thank you Johan Rockström and Johan Falk for this conversation.

Watch the session (15 minutes):