The latest United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30) concluded in November without a roadmap to phase out fossil fuels and without significant progress in strengthening national pledges to reduce climate-altering greenhouse gas emissions. In aggregate, today's climate policies remain far too unambitious to meet the Paris Agreement's goal of capping global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius, setting the world on course to experience more frequent and intense storms, flooding, droughts, wildfires, and other climate impacts. A global policy regime aligned with the 1.5 C target would almost certainly reduce the severity of those impacts. In the '2025 Global Change Outlook,' researchers at the MIT Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy (CS3) compare the consequences of these two approaches to climate policy through modeled projections of critical natural and societal systems under two scenarios. The Current Trends scenario represents the researchers' assessment of current...
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