Flying blind: Scenario planning in a climate-disrupted world

From climate change to systems breakdown 

The science of climate change is well established. The planetary boundaries framework identifies 350 ppm (parts per million) as a threshold for atmospheric CO₂ associated with a stable climate. Human activities had pushed the global average concentration to approximately 417 ppm by 2022. In 2025, global temperatures averaged approximately 1.4°C above pre-industrial levels. This temperature rise is causing more frequent and intense natural disasters such as wildfires, droughts, and hurricanes, along with sea-level rise, disease spread, and species extinction.  

Scientists warn that unless greenhouse gas emissions decline rapidly this decade, damage to the global climate will be irreversible. If global warming reaches 3°C (5.4°F), risks of crossing irreversible “tipping points” increase dramatically. Current policies put the world on a trajectory toward approximately 2.8°C (5°F) of warming by the end of the century, with substantially greater increases possible under high-emissions scenarios. At higher levels of warming, many human and natural systems will face increasingly severe limits to adaptation. Extreme heat already poses serious threats to human health in some regions. In 2016, India recorded its highest temperature of 51°C (124°F), and in 2023, China recorded its highest temperature of 52.2°C (126°F). Such extreme temperatures are “testing the limits of human survivability,” particularly when combined with high humidity and prolonged exposure.  

Some estimates suggest that the potential global economic damage from climate change could reach a discounted present value of $22.5tn by 2100 in lost labor productivity, declining crop yields, food shortages, early deaths, property damage, infrastructure breakdowns, water shortages, air pollution, flooding, and fires. The Bank for International Settlements, an umbrella organization for the world’s central banks, warned in 2020 that climate change could be one of the largest economic dislocations in history.  

Beyond direct economic costs, climate change will displace millions of people around the world, straining the supply of humanitarian aid and causing mass climate migration that will impact national borders. In 2023, UNICEF reported 43.1 million internal displacements of children caused by weather-related disasters between 2016 and 2021, primarily floods and storms.  

These statistics make clear that climate change is not, in its truest sense, an environmental issue; it is a systems breakdown. And it is just one of nine markers – called “planetary boundaries” – of the Anthropocene, a term describing the profound influence of human activity on the functioning of Earth’s ecosystems. At the latest count, seven of the nine planetary boundaries have been crossed: climate change, biosphere integrity, land-system change, freshwater change, biogeochemical flows, novel entities, and ocean acidification. 

These breached boundaries disrupt social, political, and economic systems, making scenario planning increasingly difficult and less reliable. In what some scholars call Anthropocene society, human institutions, political authority, and natural systems are deeply entangled, with disruptions in one domain spilling into others. This challenges foundational assumptions about how societies are governed, which actors are seen as legitimate, how conflicts over responsibility and sacrifice are resolved, and how human systems interact with biophysical limits. In turn, this challenges the basis of scenario planning. 

Research on possible archetypal scenarios for Anthropocene societies lays out a range of futures. At one end of the spectrum, “collapsing systems” describes a future of institutional fragmentation in which cascading failures dominate and we, as a species, are unable to adapt. At the other end, “cultural re-enlightenment” describes a world where societies undergo deep normative and institutional reordering, redefining values, authority, and human-nature relations to live in balance with nature.  

Two related scenarios lie in between. “Market rules” describes arrangements in which the logic of the market remains the primary mechanism for addressing ecological disruption, leading to the belief that business enterprise can rise to the challenge. In the “technology fix” scenario, societies rely on technological, scientific, and engineering solutions to address the challenges. These scenarios are not forecasts. They are institutional-political archetypes, ways that societies might organize themselves under planetary stress. By isolating these possible archetypes, scenario planning can be adapted to better anticipate disruption.