Climate Restoration Details

The understatements in climate science and our climate culture are legion. The sensitivities of our Earth systems are vastly underestimated. Just 0.1 to 0.5 degrees of warming above the maximum natural variation of our old climate, or above the evolutionary boundaries of our Earth systems, and these systems have begun to collapse. If we restore our climate to within the natural boundaries of the evolution of our Earth’s systems before these collapses become irreversible, our systems will self-restore, otherwise these already activated collapses will self-fulfill like any collapse.

Climate restoration to less than 1 degree C warming above normal, can do what our old climate culture of continued warming to 1.5 C cannot, but first our climate culture must understand that current global policy of allowing warming to 1.5 degrees C above normal is not climate restoration. This is the fundamental conundrum that we face.

We must disconnect our past 30 years of attempted sustainability action in the name of climate change, from the new reality of the results of delay in climate pollution action that has allowed our Earth systems to become so degraded that they have now begun to emit, instead of sequester. Climate restoration is not a sustainability exercise like that of emissions replacement and decarbonization. These are what have gotten us into this mess. If we had of treated climate pollution like the pollution it is, and treated it so we could be safe, we would not be in this existential situation. But we did not and we are.

Delay in sustainable climate action has allowed Earth systems tipping collapses to activate whose irreversible completion is now foregone without true climate restoration to back to within the evolutionary boundaries of our systems. The delay has largely been caused by the difficulty of implementing sustainable emissions behaviors, when this concept is almost completely foreign to our culture. We do not as a rule, come close to eliminating the things we need because of the pollution that is created when we make these things. We simply make the things, then treat the pollution responsibly. Now our climate pollution sustainability quest has resulted in a future, that if not treated by restoring our climate, will result in natural climate pollution feedback emissions that dwarf humankind’s.

Example: The Amazon contains 123 Gt carbon in above and below ground biomass, or 451 Gt carbon as CO2. Boreal forests hold over 1,000 gigatons of carbon or over 3,667 gigatons of carbon as CO2. Permafrost holds about 1,400 gigatons of carbon or 5,133 gigatons carbon as CO2. From just these three Earth systems then, there is a risk of natural feedback emissions of 9,251 Gt carbon as CO2 and the total at risk from all the world’s boreal, temperate and tropical forest, soils and oceans is many times this. Total human emissions from fossil fuels, agriculture, forests and other land uses and abuses was 725 Gt carbon from 1850 to 2024, or 2,656 Gt C as CO2. Therefore, there is easily 10 to 20 times more carbon emissions at risks from collapsing Earth systems than humans have emitted since 1850 and these emissions have now been initiated with the ongoing degradation of our systems that are beyond their evolutionary boundaries.

The Amazon is already emitting 1 gigaton of carbon as CO2 annually; Canadian forest about 0.25 Gt, and permafrost emissions are already 2.3 Gt carbon as CO2.

The new climate restoration imperative is that we must prioritize the installation of a network of atmospheric pollution treatment facilities, not unlike our vast network of human sewage pollution treatment facilities, that must now be installed to clean the excess climate sewage out of the sky. Halting all emissions helps, but future emissions are only a relatively small portion of the challenge at 50 Gt carbon as CO2 annually, versus the 1,150 Gt excess human emitted CO2 in our sky that must mostly be removed.

Reducing emissions is important in that it reduces the amount of climate pollution that must be physically removed from our sky, but most importantly, we must use engineered cooling solutions to temporarily cool Earth to below the point of no return, where degraded Earth systems become so degraded they cannot be restored and loss of the carbon storage completes in natural feedback emissions.

Natural Systems Sequestration and Climate Restoration

Earth systems sequestration is now compromised as their evolutionary boundaries have been exceeded. Whenever this happens, to any system, the species and mechanisms in the system change to new ones that are tolerant of the changed boundary conditions. This change first comes as degradation that generally flips the systems from sequestration to emissions. Then as the degradation becomes more and more serious, and it can do this without further warming because of degradation feedbacks, there comes a point where the systems can no longer self-restore. This is called the tipping point and when this occur.  As degradation mounts, natural feedback emissions increase with the capacity to dwarf humankind’s.

What this means is that we cannot expect to be saved by natural systems sequestration and restoration of degraded systems will be very problematic.

Example: A third of forests across western North America  are no longer regenerating after fire, with likely similar results from insect and disease forest mortality. Half of the remaining burns (and likely insect and disease attacks) are only regenerating at half the normal 20th century rates. This science is several to four or five years old and conditions have significantly worsened with accelerated warming in 2023 and 2024, where our climate warmed a full one third again, of all warming since prior to 2023 back to 1850.

Example: In 2020, the fires in California burned almost all of the safety buffer for forest sequestrations projects that was supposed to last for the rest of the century, to protect against fire, insect and disease mortality.

Forest and other ecosystem restoration is certainly a tool to address climate change and some ecologies in some areas can certainly be restored, at least for a while.  But today, in light of warming beyond evolutionary boundaries that has already occurred, the capacity of sequestration that natural systems can provide is rapidly shrinking. With further warming, and as degradation mounts even with magical zero additional warming, sequestration capacity will likely decrease nonlinearly.

The Importance of Climate Restoration to Tipping

Critical work on natural systems sequestration shows they have turned the corner to decline across the globe. This work (Curran and Curran 2025) looked at the response of the Keeling Curve of atmospheric CO2 concentration at Mauna Loa, and how the curve’s cold-season decrease has changed over time, where the cold season decrease is relative to Earth’s natural systems carbon sequestration. What they found was that net, our Earth systems’ carbon sequestration is in decline. What this means is that, if our Earth systems were sequestering greenhouse gases at the same rate they did in the 1960s, the annual atmospheric growth rate would have been 1.9 ppm CO2. Instead, the annual growth rate is 2.5 ppm CO2, a 32% decline, and this is the 2010 to 2020 average. In 2023 and 2024, the atmospheric growth rate jumped markedly from previous data at about 3.5 ppm CO2 growth per year, according to the Mauna Loa CO2 records  in Hawai’i. This is a further 40% decline in just two years. Carbon dioxide removal by natural systems has been increasing since emissions began, as an effect of greater a greater concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, and partly because of the CO2 fertilization effect. Natural soil nutrients may now be limiting the CO2 fertilization effect, but most importantly, drought, insects, disease, permafrost thaw, declining ocean absorption, and wildfire are taking their toll and reducing the sequestration capacity of Earth systems.

(See the Remove Greenhouse Gases Section for the full discussion of Natural systems sequestration and permanence at https://healthyplanetaction.org/remove-greenhouse-gases/#more)

Why climate restoration is now mandatory

Climate models and future scenarios tell us that tipping behaviors are an end-of-century issue. What we are seeing happening today however, with degradation of major Earth systems already revealing natural feedback emissions, is that end of the century times have already arrived.

Therefore we must now act with end-of-century strategies and urgency to stabilize these tipping collapses before these collapses naturally become irreversible. The following strategies are the fundamental outline of what needs to happen to prevent irreversible and existential Earth systems collapses:

• Adopt a mission of climate restoration, that replaces our current missions of a little additional warming to a predetermined carbon budget is safe,
• Directly cool the climate through a portfolio of temporary emergency engineered cooling strategies,
  Remove the excess greenhouse gases from our atmosphere,
• Accelerate future emission sustainability strategies to achieve “net zero or “decarbonization” in ways that are faster, greater, and smarter, and
• Restoring a climate like the one the world experienced in the 20th century can stabilize existential climate tipping responses, return the weather extremes back to their normal rare frequency, and eliminate inequity and injustice caused by warming.

Such restoration will directly ameliorate ecological collapse, temper the negative consequences of the population explosion, slow the internal and cross-border migration already beginning, help stabilize agricultural production and prove beneficial in addressing virtually every other component of the climate emergency.

Equally important, stabilizing and cooling the climate will orient people from away from anxiety and despair because future warming and much greater consequences are inevitable, to optimism and action by bringing back our old stable climate, which will then strengthen the forces of democracy and open societies versus those of autocracy and repression.

Adopting a climate restoration mission can provide the 8 billion of us the desperately required additional decades of a stabilized climate for the many insightful and necessary actions and ideas proposed by our colleagues at the Roundtable for the Human Future to gain purchase with citizens and leaders throughout the globe.

Therefore, the most pressing international priority must be for all of us to come together to urge the world community to objectively, equitably and urgently adopt a climate restoration mission of a warming target cooler than today at 1 degree C or less above normal, then use direct emergency cooling strategies to buy time so that greenhouse gas removal can buy time for sustainable emissions strategies to create a safe climate for humanity.