The DOI matches its Crossref record; 19 of the 19 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Climate Endgame: Exploring catastrophic climate change scenarios
Open accessAbstract
Prudent risk management requires consideration of bad-to-worst-case scenarios. Yet, for climate change, such potential futures are poorly understood. Could anthropogenic climate change result in worldwide societal collapse or even eventual human extinction? At present, this is a dangerously underexplored topic. Yet there are ample reasons to suspect that climate change could result in a global catastrophe. Analyzing the mechanisms for these extreme consequences could help galvanize action, improve resilience, and inform policy, including emergency responses. We outline current knowledge about the likelihood of extreme climate change, discuss why understanding bad-to-worst cases is vital, articulate reasons for concern about catastrophic outcomes, define key terms, and put forward a research agenda. The proposed agenda covers four main questions: 1) What is the potential for climate change to drive mass extinction events? 2) What are the mechanisms that could result in human mass mortality and morbidity? 3) What are human societies' vulnerabilities to climate-triggered risk cascades, such as from conflict, political instability, and systemic financial risk? 4) How can these multiple strands of evidence—together with other global dangers—be usefully synthesized into an “integrated catastrophe assessment”? It is time for the scientific community to grapple with the challenge of better understanding catastrophic climate change.
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Citations
Cites
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Cited by
Quantifying the human cost of global warming
Lenton, T. M., Xu, C., Abrams, J. F., Ghadiali, A., Loriani, S., Sakschewski, B., Zimm, C., Ebi, K. L., Dunn, R. R., Svenning, J.-C., et al. (2023) · Nature Sustainability · doi:10.1038/s41893-023-01132-6 · Cited by 409
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Scientific novelty beyond the experiment
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Environmental Impact of Dermatology and Action Towards It: A Narrative Review
Niebel, D., Tso, S., Parker, E. R., Rosenbach, M., Tan, E., Thio, H. B., Coates, S. J., Andersen, L. K., Hecker, C., Saha, S., et al. (2025) · International Journal of Dermatology · doi:10.1111/ijd.17810 · Cited by 8
Metadata
- Authors
- Kemp, L., Xu, C., Depledge, J., Ebi, K. L., Gibbins, G., Kohler, T. A., Rockström, J., Scheffer, M., Schellnhuber, H. J., Steffen, W., & Lenton, T. M.
- Venue
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Published
- 2022-08
- Volume
- 119
- Issue
- 34
- Pages
- e2108146119-e2108146119
- ISSN
- 0027-8424 (ISSN-L)
- 1091-6490
- OpenAlex
- W4289262061
- Cited by
- 791
- References
- 19
- FWCI
- 68.04
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
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- Kemp, L., Xu, C., Depledge, J., Ebi, K. L., Gibbins, G., Kohler, T. A., Rockström, J., Scheffer, M., Schellnhuber, H. J., Steffen, W., & Lenton, T. M. (2022). Climate Endgame: Exploring catastrophic climate change scenarios. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2108146119
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
