Future Ready

Conclusion: The Right Future, the Right Way

Climate change is now and tomorrow. It's local and global. It's risk and opportunity. It's too big to ignore—as a growth market, threat multiplier—but at the same time it can be very overwhelming, confusing, and even polarizing.

What is clear is the importance of rethinking how we design our future. New technologies, sustainability commitments, private sector investment, corporate initiatives, and government policies are all welcome and essential. But if the additional funding, resources, and programs are designed and implemented the wrong way, we'll end up losing valuable time in our decarbonization efforts—and perhaps even make the problem worse.

We've already discussed some climate maladaptation measures. Some sea walls, for example, damage local ecosystems and ultimately exacerbate flooding. But the severity of climate risk is so great that even more extreme climate mitigation measures have been debated. Take, for example, addressing rising temperatures by injecting reflective aerosols into the atmosphere. This form of geoengineering could bounce some of the sun's energy back into space before it can heat the Earth's atmosphere. Though this process has never really been tested by humans, the planet has previously experienced a natural, and very effective, version of this phenomenon. Following the 1883 volcanic eruption of Krakatoa, atmospheric particulate matter circulated at high altitudes around the world. In the Northern Hemisphere, ...