How does it prioritize as a board in this messy landscape?

I mean, from a pure scientific perspective, I would argue that we have at least 10 years of quite clear communication to business, which is that sustainability is is today from a planetary scale perspective, posing because of our unsustainable pressures, which comes to a large extent from the way we run our economies, raising risks that are in many cases, unacceptable, very socially and economically costly, and should be integrated in any business strategy, not from a compulsory reporting perspective and not from some moral decision, but fundamentally from a business operating perspective.

This has been clear for many years in terms of Extreme events caused by climate change in terms of disruption of supply chains, in terms of difficulties in being able to rely on all forms of sourcing because of floods, droughts, heat waves, fires.

This has been clear for a long time.

And then what's happened over just the last five years and culminating just in the last two years, is that this is now accelerating.

So we're seeing acceleration of warming, acceleration of ice melt, higher frequency and amplitude of extreme events.

We're entering a new super El Nino event, very likely just later this year we can come back to that.

What do you think about that? Is that good or bad that climate is not the driver, but it is leading to a better potentially climate outcome?

What are some of the scenarios on the table they're exploring?

Well, to begin with, this has been on JPMorgan's discussions and Allianz for a very long time, I mean, for over a decade.

What has changed is that over the last five years, we have ample new scientific evidence that these tipping points are approaching faster than we had expected.

Tipping points meaning biophysical thresholds where melting of ice sheets, collapse of rainforests, collapse of coral reef systems.

abrupt thawing of permafrost becomes irreversible, and that the more we understand of the fragility of the systems, we are now forced to communicate very clearly that already with a permanent exceedance of warming beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius, we have a 50% probability of crossing tipping points.

Now, if they cross a tipping point, what does that mean? It doesn't mean that you suddenly have a complete collapse overnight.

It may take 200 years for the AMOC to drastically slow down, the AMOC, the overturning of heat in the North Atlantic, but it will be unstoppable.

As somebody who studies this day in and day out, knows this inside out, how do you not get overwhelmed by all of

Johan Rockström is director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, and he noted that 200-some years since the Industrial Revolution, the Earth has remained fairly resilient, but that is changing.

90% of the heat caused by our fossil fuel burning is not in the atmosphere causing the temperature rise which has led us to the climate crisis we see today.

It's in the ocean.

50% of the carbon dioxide from the greenhouse gases we add is not in the atmosphere trapping heat.

It's actually stored, half of it in the ocean and half of it on land.

So a healthy planet has this extraordinary biophysical capacity to buffer and dampen, basically cool the planet.

We're seeing, unfortunately, increasing indicators of our planet losing this capacity.

And what does that look like for humans? If we reach these limits, what d- what does it mean for people on Earth?

To understand tipping points, we first need to understand what scientists mean by the Earth system.

Our planet is a complex system.

self-regulating system that has biological, chemical, and physical components.

And these are like organs in our body.

So think of the planet being an equivalent of our bodies with our lungs and our heart and our liver and our kidneys.

Well, the planet has its big ecosystems on land, the marine ecosystems in the ocean, the ice sheets, the atmosphere, the stratosphere, and the biosphere.

And together, These form a system, and it's a system that interacts, and the interactions are so profound that they actually regulate

So the feedback

Okay, here he is again

againAnd of course, unfortunately, the reason why it was referred to is very likely that it was a scientific update showing with overwhelming evidence that we're facing very severe risks, and that these risks are now, and these risks are global.

So we're seeing accelerated warming on planet Earth, which is the first sign of a planet showing indications of losing resilience, and that the resilience is to a significant extent because of breaching planetary boundaries.

So we're not only emitting greenhouse gases and causing this heat injection into the Earth system, we're also losing biodiversity, degrading land areas, particularly forest systems, losing intact nature, over-consuming fresh water, and overloading with nitrogen and phosphorus and destabilizing the ocean.

These, what I call nature boundaries or the biosphere boundaries, they don't have planetary scale tipping points necessarily, but they operate under the hood, like down in the engine room of the planet, to regulate the stability of the entire system.

And what we're starting to see when we now observe accelerated rates of warming is that it, it proves the risks that we've been trying to communicate in the planetary boundary science that being outside of the safe space on the nature boundaries l- leads to a consequence that carbon uptake, heat uptake, feedbacks through changes in fire patterns, changes in hydrology causing more droughts, which then leads to more indirect warming because of lowered carbon uptake and photosynthesis.

All of these processes was one point of the update in that Zurich Climate Week talk.

What's the number one message you think is important for the private sector, our audience, to understand about climate change?

Can you explain what a tipping point is? Because it sounds like there's a certain amount of biodiversity loss, canopy cover loss, temperature change that would cause the Amazon rainforest to basically not be a rainforest anymore.

Correct.

Yeah, so tipping points is the understanding today that we have a large number of large biophysical systems on Earth, like the Amazon rainforest, like the Gruden ice sheet, like the permafrost systems that have multiple stable states.

And they're separated by a threshold.

And it just so happens that over the past 12,000 years, all these systems have landed and been configured in a state that we depend on.

We can call that the healthy state, the state we need.

So rainforest is one, for example.

And so I do want to talk about that world that we want to live in and what it's going to take to get there and how great it could be to live there.

So Johan, talk to me about the very real health, environmental, and financial consequences of this warming climate, those invoices that are descending.

Yeah, well, to start, this is one of the, the scariest consequences.

We're seeing extreme heat events across the entire planet.

New Delhi, 49 degrees Celsius, Pakistan, parts of Sudan.

Um, I just learned, you know, I, I did my PhD research myself, uh, living in Niamey in Niger, which has just now experienced the, the warmest May ever recorded.

In the middle of the dry harmattan, they have the warmest night temperature, which is life-threatening, particularly if it doesn't cool down at night.

The latest assessments show that, you know, if we reach two degrees Celsius of global warming, we are today approaching that 1.5 level, two billion people, so one, one-third essentially of the people in, in developing countries, will be living outside of the life-threatening climate niche, as it's called, living in regions that exceed beyond that 30 degree Celsius of average mean annual temperature.

In thinking about solutions, how much of this is stuff that we can do as individuals, and how much has to happen from our governments?

What is it and why is the collapse of it or the prospect of that so alarming and worrying?

The AMOC, which is one of the three thermohaline pumps that regulates the whole ocean conveyor belt, so basically the currents across all the ocean systems on planet Earth, is a phenomenally important system that regulates the currents across the Southern Ocean to the Northern Ocean in the Atlantic.

It is a thermohaline pump, which we understand quite well.

It is saline, warm surface water flowing from the Southern Ocean up across the Gulf Stream in the US and reaches the tip of Greenland.

At that point, it releases heat to the atmosphere, which makes it, by the way, more pleasant to live in my part of the planet, which is in the Nordic region.

This high density heavy water having released its heat so cold saline water is so heavy that it sinks and thereby drives the engine that makes the water then flow back on the ocean floor back to the Southern Ocean, and this drives the whole ocean conveyor system, which then regulates heat exchange in the ocean.

And remember that 90% of the heat caused by our fossil fuel burning and our greenhouse gas emissions is not in the atmosphere causing the 1.5 degrees Celsius we just talked about.

So why hasn't climate change produced its own Montreal Protocol moment?