Our colleague Yannick Cornet attended European Forum Alpbach and wrote post about it:

Too late to save the planet – now what?

This morning I arrived at the #EuropeanForumAlpbach #EFA26 with this burning question in mind. Now what? Since it is already too late to avoid all climate damage, what does this mean for planning mitigation, adaptation, and carbon removal?

McKay et al. (2022) showed the consequences of going beyond 1.5°C warming, with the gradual tipping of key ecological systems, raising the risk of cascading change. Models cannot yet fully represent interactions among them, and these might unfold faster than our institutions are prepared for (Boers et al. 2025).

The IPCC AR6 reports estimated that, from 2020, the world had a remaining carbon budget of 300GtCO₂ for an 83% likelihood of limiting warming to 1.5°C. With global emissions continuing at ~40GtCO₂ per year, this budget is on course to be exhausted around summer 2027.

And if that was not enough, a review comparing recent data with the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth scenarios found the world tracking closest to two scenarios, both showing growth in welfare, food and industrial production halting around 2030: BAU2 with sharp decline and collapse setting in around 2040; and Comprehensive Technology, avoiding outright collapse but still declining as technology costs increase at the expense of agriculture and health.

My work deals with #sustainablemobility transitions, for which both mitigation and adaptation are important: mitigation, because transport remains a growing source of emissions and faces huge barriers from entrenched systems of production and consumption; and adaptation, because disruptions from climate effects are unavoidable and intensifying. With mitigation failing to deliver cuts, carbon removal is probably unavoidable, but it cannot substitute for rapid emissions reductions.

My take? We need much more radical ways to decarbonise mobility. Cars – electric or not – must become the exception. Everything should be done to make active and electrically-assisted lightweight mobility, combined with public transport, the most attractive, affordable, safe, pleasant, and natural option for door-to-door trips of any distance. This requires secure parking and charging at both ends, seamless transfers, and the ability to carry bicycles on trains and other public transport.

In mobility planning, there are many synergies between adaptation and mitigation. Restricting car access, increasing multimodality options, enabling cycling, greening public spaces can both reduce emissions and build resilience.

How to raise the level of urgency? How to scale transformation? What to prioritise? Whose needs should come first?  How can change theory help inspire and speed up change processes? How to reduce the gap between what science requires and policies at every level, from local to global? And how to address citizen mistrust? Behind all these questions lies another one: who actually has their hands on the tap?