Planetary Emergency

The Planetary Emergency is defined by the interrelated crises of climate change, biodiversity loss, and the transgression of planetary boundaries — compounded by the reality of tipping points that could trigger irreversible, cascading changes across Earth’s systems. This multifaceted crisis poses severe and accelerating threats to ecosystems, human societies, and the well-being of all future generations.

In 2018, the IPCC concluded that global CO₂ emissions must be halved by 2030 to avoid the worst climate disruptions. It is now 2026. Emissions have not halved — they have continued to rise. Fossil fuel consumption reached an all-time high in 2024. The 1.5°C threshold that was supposed to be a guardrail has already been crossed for a full calendar year. The “less than a decade” we had in 2018 is gone.

This is not cause for despair, but for honesty. The solutions exist — renewable energy is now the cheapest source of new electricity in most of the world, electric vehicles are scaling rapidly, and nature-based solutions can draw down carbon while restoring ecosystems. But the gap between what is happening and what must happen remains vast and is growing. The transformation required is no longer a future project; it is an emergency unfolding now.

Explore the climate data yourself: our Corridor of Life interactive visualizes 500,000 years of temperature, showing exactly where we stand — and where different pathways lead. The Planetary Observatory tracks 35 planetary vital signs in real time.

See also: Existential Risks.

How Can This Be an Emergency?

First, a quick primer on what an emergency actually is.

An emergency (E) is defined as the product of risk and urgency. Risk (R) is defined as probability (p) multiplied by damage (D). Urgency (U) is defined as reaction time to an alert (t) divided by the intervention time left to avoid a bad outcome (T). Thus:

The situation is an emergency if both risk and urgency are high.

If reaction time is longer than the intervention time left (t / T > 1), we have lost control.

In 2019, Lenton et al. argued that ”[…] the intervention time left to prevent tipping could already have shrunk towards zero, whereas the reaction time to achieve net zero emissions is 30 years at best. […] The stability and resilience of our planet is in peril. International action — not just words — must reflect this.”

Timothy M. Lenton, Johan Rockström, Owen Gaffney, Stefan Rahmstorf, Katherine Richardson, Will Steffen & Hans Joachim Schellnhuber. Climate tipping points — too risky to bet against. Nature 575, 592–595 (2019).

Since then, the evidence has only strengthened. Armstrong McKay et al. (2022) identified 16 tipping elements in the Earth system, finding that 5 may already have passed their thresholds at current warming — and that exceeding 1.5°C risks triggering several more. The Global Tipping Points Report (2023), the most comprehensive assessment to date, expanded the analysis to 26 Earth system tipping points and identified 7 positive tipping points in human systems — such as the accelerating cost decline of renewables — that could help avert the worst outcomes if triggered deliberately and swiftly.

The t / T argument is now more urgent than ever: intervention time continues to shrink toward zero, while the reaction time required for systemic transformation remains measured in decades.

The Evidence

Climate Change

“Climate change is a threat to human well-being and planetary health. There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all. Climate change impacts and risks are becoming increasingly complex and more difficult to manage. The choices and actions implemented in this decade will have impacts now and for thousands of years.”

— IPCC, 2023: Summary for Policymakers. In: Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report. Contribution of Working Groups I, II and III to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Core Writing Team, H. Lee and J. Romero (eds.)]. IPCC, Geneva, Switzerland.

“[The] IPCC Working Group 1 report is a code red for humanity. The alarm bells are deafening, and the evidence is irrefutable: greenhouse‑gas emissions from fossil-fuel burning and deforestation are choking our planet and putting billions of people at immediate risk. Global heating is affecting every region on Earth, with many of the changes becoming irreversible.”

— United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres

The IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), completed in 2023 across three working groups and a Synthesis Report, represents the most comprehensive scientific assessment of climate change ever conducted. It confirmed that human influence on the climate system is unequivocal, that every fraction of a degree matters, and that the choices made this decade will shape the climate for thousands of years.

Biodiversity and Ecosystem Collapse

The 2019 IPBES Global Assessment — the most comprehensive assessment of nature ever undertaken — found that nature across most of the globe has been significantly altered by multiple human drivers, with the great majority of indicators of ecosystems and biodiversity showing rapid decline. Around 1 million species are threatened with extinction, many within decades.

IPBES (2019): Summary for policymakers of the global assessment report on biodiversity and ecosystem services. S. Díaz, J. Settele, E. S. Brondízio, H. T. Ngo, M. Guèze, J. Agard, A. Arneth, P. Balvanera, K. A. Brauman, S. H. M. Butchart, K. M. A. Chan, L. A. Garibaldi, K. Ichii, J. Liu, S. M. Subramanian, G. F. Midgley, P. Miloslavich, Z. Molnár, D. Obura, A. Pfaff, S. Polasky, A. Purvis, J. Razzaque, B. Reyers, R. Roy Chowdhury, Y. J. Shin, I. J. Visseren-Hamakers, K. J. Willis, and C. N. Zayas (eds.). IPBES secretariat, Bonn, Germany.

In 2024, the IPBES Nexus Assessment further demonstrated that biodiversity loss, climate change, food security, water access, and human health are not separate crises but deeply interconnected — and that addressing them in isolation undermines progress on all fronts.

Planetary Boundaries

In 2023, Richardson et al. published a comprehensive quantification of all nine planetary boundaries, finding that six of the nine have been transgressed — including climate change, biosphere integrity, land-system change, freshwater change, biogeochemical flows, and novel entities. Earth is well outside the safe operating space for humanity.

See our dedicated page: Planetary Boundaries.

Tipping Points

The Global Tipping Points Report (2023) expanded this analysis to 26 Earth system tipping points and warned that the risk of triggering cascading tipping points increases sharply between 1.5°C and 2°C of warming. Given that 2024 was the first year to exceed 1.5°C, several of these thresholds may be closer than previously understood.

Explore the tipping elements in detail: Tipping Interactive | View tipping points on the climate timeline

World Scientists’ Warning

The World Scientists’ Warning series has tracked the accelerating planetary crisis since 2019, with each report adding new data and growing numbers of signatories:

“Life on planet Earth is under siege. We are now in an uncharted territory. For several decades, scientists have consistently warned of a future marked by extreme climatic conditions because of escalating global temperatures caused by ongoing human activities that release harmful greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. Unfortunately, time is up. We are seeing the manifestation of those predictions as an alarming and unprecedented succession of climate records are broken, causing profoundly distressing scenes of suffering to unfold. We are entering an unfamiliar domain regarding our climate crisis, a situation no one has ever witnessed firsthand in the history of humanity.”

— The 2023 state of the climate report: Entering uncharted territory · OCTOBER 2023

The most recent report — Ripple et al. (2025), “The 2024 state of the climate report: Perilous times on planet Earth” — documents 22 of 34 planetary vital signs at record extremes and warns of “a planet on the brink.” Over 15,800 scientists from 170+ countries have now signed the warning.

Ref: scientistswarning.forestry.oregonstate.edu | Track the vital signs: Planetary Observatory

Climate Action Gap

The State of Climate Action 2025 (World Resources Institute) finds that none of the 45 indicators of climate action assessed are on track to meet 2030 targets — and progress on most is far too slow or heading in the wrong direction.

At COP28 in Dubai (December 2023), countries agreed for the first time to “transition away from fossil fuels” — a landmark acknowledgment, though without binding commitments. At COP29 in Baku (November 2024), a new climate finance goal of $300 billion per year by 2035 was adopted, but widely criticized by developing nations and scientists as insufficient to address the scale of the crisis.

By Declaring a Planetary Emergency

• We acknowledge that climatological and ecological tipping points can fundamentally change the conditions for complex life on Earth;
• We recognise that human health and planetary health are deeply connected;
• We understand that reducing inequality, eradicating poverty, and empowering women are essential to planetary stewardship;
• We accept that the window for preventing the worst outcomes is measured in years, not decades;
• We affirm that the time for systemic transformation is now.

These crises do not exist in isolation. The concept of a polycrisis — in which multiple global crises interact, compound, and amplify each other — underscores the need for integrated, systemic responses rather than siloed interventions.

“I am here to sound the alarm: The world must wake up. We are on the edge of an abyss — and moving in the wrong direction.”

— António Guterres, UN Secretary-General

The Planetary Emergency Symbol

Drawing inspiration from brutalism iconography and the Doomsday Clock by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, we offer this symbol as a means to alert people about the planetary emergency. It is a minimalistic and easy-to-reproduce design consisting of a Circle, a Line, and a Point.

The Planetary Emergency Symbol has different levels of reading:

Further Readings

• IPCC, 2023: Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report. Contribution of Working Groups I, II and III to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Core Writing Team, H. Lee and J. Romero (eds.)]. IPCC, Geneva, Switzerland.
• Katherine Richardson et al. (2023). Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries. Science Advances 9, eadh2458.
• David I. Armstrong McKay et al. (2022). Exceeding 1.5°C global warming could trigger multiple climate tipping points. Science 377, eabn7950.
• Timothy M. Lenton et al. (2023). The Global Tipping Points Report 2023. University of Exeter.
• IPBES (2024). The Assessment Report on the Interlinkages among Biodiversity, Water, Food and Health (Nexus Assessment). IPBES secretariat, Bonn, Germany.
• William J. Ripple, Christopher Wolf, Jillian W. Gregg, Johan Rockström, Thomas M. Newsome, et al. The 2024 state of the climate report: Perilous times on planet Earth. BioScience, 2025.
• William J. Ripple, Christopher Wolf, Jillian W. Gregg, et al. The 2023 state of the climate report: Entering uncharted territory. BioScience, 2023.
• William J. Ripple, Christopher Wolf, Thomas M. Newsome, Jillian W. Gregg, et al. World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency 2021. BioScience, 2021.
• William J. Ripple, Christopher Wolf, Thomas M. Newsome, Phoebe Barnard, William R. Moomaw. World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency. BioScience 70(1), 8–12 (2020).
• Boehm, S. et al. (2025). State of Climate Action 2025. Washington, DC: World Resources Institute.
• United Nations Environment Programme (2021). Making Peace with Nature: A scientific blueprint to tackle the climate, biodiversity and pollution emergencies. Nairobi.
• Our Planet, Our Future — An Urgent Call for Action (2021). A statement inspired by the discussions at the 2021 Nobel Prize Summit, issued by the Steering Committee and co-signed by Nobel Laureates and experts. We have designed a PDF.
• Bradshaw CJA, Ehrlich PR, Beattie A, Ceballos G, Crist E, Diamond J, Dirzo R, Ehrlich AH, Harte J, Harte ME, Pyke G, Raven PH, Ripple WJ, Saltré F, Turnbull C, Wackernagel M and Blumstein DT (2021). Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future. Front. Conserv. Sci. 1:615419.
• Folke, C., Polasky, S., Rockström, J. et al. (2021). Our future in the Anthropocene biosphere. Ambio 50, 834–869.
• Burke, K. D., Williams, J. W., Chandler, M. A., Haywood, A. M., Lunt, D. J., Otto-Bliesner, B. L. (2018). Pliocene and Eocene provide best analogs for near-future climates. PNAS 115(52), 13288–13293.
• IPBES-IPCC Co-Sponsored Workshop (2021). Biodiversity and Climate Change: Scientific Outcome.