The Trump administration’s decision to withdraw the US from the intergovernmental science panel for nature “harms everybody, including them”, according to its chair.
In January, Donald Trump announced intentions to withdraw the US from IPBES, along with 65 other international organisations, including the UN climate science panel and its climate treaty.
In an interview with Carbon Brief, Obura says the warming that humans have already caused means “coral reefs are very likely at a tipping point” and that it is now inevitable that Earth “will lose what we have called coral reefs”.
A global goal to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030 will not be possible to achieve for every ecosystem, he continues, noting that a lack of action from countries means “we won’t be able to do it fast enough at this point”.
Despite this, it is still possible to reverse the “enabling drivers” of biodiversity decline within the next four years, he adds, warning that leaders must act as “our economies and societies fully depend on nature”.
The interview was conducted at the sidelines of an IPBES meeting in Manchester, UK, where governments agreed to a new report detailing how the “undervaluing” of nature by businesses is fuelling biodiversity decline and putting the global economy at risk.
On US leaving IPBES: “Any major country not being part of it harms everybody, including themselves.”
On the value of biodiversity:“Nature is really the life support system for people. Our economies and societies fully depend on nature.”
On coral reefs:“We will lose what we have called coral reefs up until this point.”
On nature justice:“The places that are most vulnerable don’t have the income, or the assets, to conserve biodiversity.”
On IPBES’s latest report:“One of the key findings is all businesses have impacts and dependencies on nature.”
On the next UN nature summit:“We need acceleration of activities and impact and effectiveness, more than anything else.”
Carbon Brief: Last month Trump announced plans for the US to exit IPBES and dozens of other global organisations. You described this at the time as “deeply disappointing”. What are your thoughts on the decision now and what will be the main impacts of the US leaving IPBES?
David Obura: Well, part of the reason that I’ve come to IPBES is because, of course, I believe in the multilateral process, because we bring 150 countries together, we’re part of the UN and the multilateral system and we’re based on knowledge [that provides] inputs to policymaking. We have a conceptual framework that looks from the bottom up on how people depend on nature. I’m also doing a lot of science on Earth systems at the planetary level, how our footprint is exceeding the scale of the planet. We have to make decisions together. We need the multilateral system to work to help facilitate that. It has never been perfect. Of course, I come from a region [Kenya] that hasn’t been, you know, powerful in the multilateral process.
But we need countries to come together, so any major country not being part of it harms everybody, including themselves. It’s very important to try and keep pushing through with the knowledge and keep doing the work that we’re doing, so that, over time, hopefully [the US will] rejoin. Because, in the end, we will really need that to happen.
CB: This is the first IPBES meeting since Trump made the announcement. Has it had an impact so far on these proceedings and is there any kind of US presence here?
DO: This plenary is like every plenary that we have had. The current members are here. Some members are not. And, of course, we have some states here as observers working out if they’re going to join or not. And then we have a lot of private sector observers and universities and so on. The impact of a country leaving – the US in this case – has no impact on the plenary itself, because they’re not here making decisions on the things that we do.
We, of course, don’t have US government members attending in technical areas, but we do have institutions and universities and academics here attending as they have in the past. So, in that sense, the plenary goes on as it goes on – the science and the knowledge is the same. The decision-making processes we have here are the same. And, as I said earlier, what has an impact is the actual action that takes place afterwards, because a lot of the recommendations that we make are based on enabling conditions that governments put in place, to bring in place sustainability actions and so on. When governments are not doing that, especially major economic drivers, then the whole system suffers.
CB: When you were appointed as chair of IPBES more than two years ago, you said that your aim was to strengthen cohesion and impact and also get the findings of IPBES in front of more people. So how would you rate your progress on this now that it’s been about a couple of years?
DO: Well, like any intergovernmental process, we have a certain amount of inertia in what we do and it takes a few years to consult on topics for assessments and then to do them and to improve them and get them out.
One of the main things we’re discussing right now is we have had a rolling work programme from when IPBES started until 2030 and we need to decide on the last few deliverables and how we work in that period. We are asking for a mandate to spend the next year really considering the multiple options that we have in proposing a way forward for the last few years of this work programme. I feel that the countries are very aligned. We have done a lot of work, produced a lot of outputs. It is challenging for governments and other stakeholders to read our assessments and reach into them to find what’s useful to them. They make constant calls for more support, in uptake, in capacity building and in policy support.
The second global assessment in 2028 will be our 17th assessment [overall]. We would like to focus on really bringing all this knowledge together across assessments in ways that are relevant to different governments, different stakeholder groups, different networks to help them reach into the knowledge that’s in the assessments. And I think the governments, of course, want that as well, because many of them are calling for it. Many of the governments that support us financially, of course, want to see a return of investment on the money that they have put in.
CB: Nations agreed to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030. Back in 2023 we had a conversation for Carbon Brief and you said that you were “highly doubtful” this goal could be achieved for every ecosystem by that date. Where do you stand on this now?
DO: I work on coral reefs and part of the reason I’ve come to IPBES platform is because the amount of climate change we’re committed to with current fossil fuel emissions and the focus on economic growth means that corals will continue to decline 20, 30, 40 years into the future. I think of that there’s no real doubt. The question is how soon we put in place the right actions to halt climate change. That will then have a lag on how long it takes for corals to cope with that amount of climate change.
We can’t halt and reverse the decline of every ecosystem. But we can try and bend the curve to halt and reverse the drivers of decline. So, that’s some of the economic drivers that we talk about in the nexus and transformative change assessment, the indirect drivers and the value shifts we need to have. What the Global Biodiversity Framework [GBF, a global nature agreement made in 2022] aspires to do in terms of halting and reversing biodiversity decline – we absolutely need to do that. We can do it and we can put in place the enabling conditions for that by 2030 for sure. But we won’t be able to do it fast enough at this point to halt [the loss of] all ecosystems.
We’re now in 2026, so this is three years plus after the GBF was adopted. We still need greater action from all countries and all stakeholders and businesses and so on. That’s what we’re really pushing for in our assessments.
CB: Biodiversity loss has historically been underappreciated by world leaders. As the world continues to be gripped by geopolitical uncertainty, conflict and financial pressures, what are your thoughts on the chances of leaders addressing the issue of biodiversity loss in a meaningful way?
DO: What are the chances of addressing biodiversity loss? I mean, we have to do it. It’s really our life support system and if we only focus on immediate crises and threats and don’t pay attention to the long-term threats and crises, that only creates more short-term crises down the line, we make it harder and harder to do that. I hope that what I’m hoping we get to understand better through IPBES science, as well as others, is that we’re not just reporting on the state of biodiversity because it’s nice to have it, but it’s [because] diversity of nature is really the life support system for people. Our economies and societies fully depend on nature. If we want them to prosper and be secure into the long-term future, we have to learn how to bring the impact and dependencies of business, which is a focus of this assessment, in line with nature. And until we do that, we will just continue to magnify the potential for future crises and their impacts.
CB: You mentioned already that your expertise is in coral reefs. A report last year warned that the world has reached its first climate tipping point, that of widespread dying of warm water coral reefs. Do you agree with that statement and can you discuss the wider state of coral reefs across the world at this present moment?
DO: The report that came out last year in 2025 was a global tipping point report and it’s actually in 2023 the first one of those [was published]. I was involved in that one and we basically took what the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] has produced, which [is] compiled from the [scientific] literature [which said] that 1.5-2C was the critical range for coral reefs, where you go from losing 70-90% to 90-99% of coral reefs around the world. [It is] a bit hard to say exactly what that means. What we did was we actually reduced that range from 1.5C-2C to 1-1.5C, based on observations we’ve already made about loss of corals. In 2024, the world was 1.5C above historical conditions for one year. The IPCC number requires a 20-year average [for 1.5C to be crossed]. So, we’re not quite at the IPCC limit, but we’re very close. Also, with not putting in place fast enough emission reductions, warming will continue.
Coral reefs are very likely at a tipping point. And, so, I do agree with the statement. It means that we lose the fully connected regional, global system that coral reefs have been in the past. There will still be some coral reefs in places that have some natural protection mechanisms, whether it’s oceanographic or some levels of sedimentation in green water from rivers can help. And there’s resilience of corals as well. Some corals will be able to adapt somewhat, but not all – and not all the other species too. We will lose what we have called coral reefs up until this point. We’ll still continue to have simpler coral ecosystems into the future, but they won’t be quite the same.
It is a crisis point and my hope is that, in coming out from the coral reef world, I can communicate that this is, this has been a crisis for coral reefs. It’s a very important ecosystem, but we don’t want it to happen to more and more and more ecosystems that support more [than] hundreds of millions and billions of people as well. Because, if we let things go that far, then, of course, we have much bigger crises on our hands.
CB: Something else you’ve spoken about before is around equity being one of the big challenges when it comes to responding to biodiversity loss. Can you explain why you think that biodiversity loss should be seen as a justice issue?
DO: Well, biodiversity loss is a justice issue because we are a part of biodiversity and – just like the loss of ecosystems and habitats and species – people live locally as well. People experience biodiversity loss in their surroundings.
The places that are most vulnerable and don’t have the income, or the assets, to either conserve biodiversity, or need to rely on it too much so they degrade it – they feel the impacts of that loss much more directly than those who do have more assets. Also, the more assets you have, the more you can import biodiversity products and benefits from somewhere else.
So, it’s very much a justice issue, both from local levels experiencing it directly, but then also at global levels. We are part of it [biodiversity], we don’t own it. It’s a global good, or a common public good, so we need to be preserving it for all people on the planet. In that sense, there are many, many justice issues that are involved in both loss of biodiversity and how you deal with that as well.
CB:How would you say IPBES is working towards achieving greater equity in biodiversity science?
DO: One of the headline findings of our values assessment in 2022, which looked at multiple values different cultures have and different worldviews around the planet, [was that] by accommodating or considering different worldviews and different perspectives, you achieve greater equity because you’re already considering other worldviews in making decisions.
So, that’s an important first step – just making it much more apparent and upfront that we can’t just make decisions, especially global ones, from a single worldview and the dominant one is the market economic worldview that we have. That’s very important.
But, then, also in how we do our assessments and the knowledge systems that are incorporated in them. We integrate different knowledge systems together and try and juxtapose – or if they can be integrated, we do that, sometimes you can’t – but you just need to illustrate different worldviews and perspectives on the common issue of biodiversity loss or livelihoods or something like that.
We hope that our conceptual framework and our values framework really help bring in this awareness of multiple cultures and multiple perspectives in the multilateral system.
CB: When this interview is published, IPBES will have released its report on business and biodiversity. What are some of the key takeaways from this?
DO: Our assessments integrate so much information that the key messages are actually, in retrospect, quite obvious in a way. One of the key findings it will say is that all businesses have impacts and dependencies on nature.
Of course, when you think about it, of course they do. We often think, “oh, well ecotourism is dependent on nature”, but even a supermarket is dependent on nature because a lot of the produce comes from a natural system somewhere, maybe in a greenhouse or enhanced by fertiliser, but it still comes from natural systems. Any other business will have either impacts on the nature around it, or it needs tree shade outside so people can walk in and things like that.
So, that’s one of the main findings. It’s not just certain sectors that need to respond to biodiversity loss and minimise their impacts. All sectors need to. Another finding, of course, is that it’s very differentiated depending on the type of business and type of sector.
It’s also very differentiated in different parts of the world in terms of responsibilities and also capabilities. So small businesses, of course, have much less leeway, perhaps, to change what they’re doing, whereas big businesses do and they have more assets, so they can deal with shifts and changes much better.
It’s a methodological assessment, rather than assessing the state of businesses, or the state of nature in relation to businesses [and] they pull together a huge list of methodologies and tools and things that businesses can access and do to understand their impacts and dependencies and act on them. Then [there is] also guidance and advice for governments on how to enable businesses to do that with the right incentives and regulations and so on. In that sense, it helps bring knowledge together into a single place.
It has been fantastic to see the parallel programme that the UK government has organised [at the IPBES meeting in Manchester]. It has brought together a huge range of British businesses and consultancies and so on that help businesses understand their impacts on nature. There’s a huge thirst.
To some extent, I would have thought, with so much capacity already in some of these organisations, what would they learn from our assessments? But they’re really hungry to see the integration. They really want to see that this really does make a big difference, that others will do the same, that the government will really support moving in these directions. There’s a huge amount of effort in the findings coming out and I’m sure that that will be felt all around the world and in different countries in different ways.
CB: As we’re speaking now, you’re still in the midst of figuring out exactly what the report will say and going through line-by-line to figure this out. Something we’ve seen at other negotiations…has been these entrenched views from countries on certain key issues. And one thing I did notice in the Earth Negotiations Bulletin discussion of yesterday’s [4 February] negotiations was that it said that some delegations wanted to remove mentions of climate change from the report. Has this been a key sticking point here or have there been any difficulties from countries during these negotiations?
DO: The nature of these multilateral negotiations is that the science is, in a way, a central body of work that is built through consensus of bringing all this knowledge together. It’s almost like a centralising process. And, yes, different countries have different perspectives on what their priorities are and the messages they want to see or not.
We still, of course, deal with different positions from countries. What we hope to do is to be able to convene it so that we see that we serve the countries best by having the most unbiased reporting of what the science is saying in language that is accessible to and useful to policymakers, rather than not having language or not having mention of things in in the agreed text.
How it’ll work out, I don’t know. Each time is different from the others. I think one of the key things that’s really important for us is that you do have different governance tracks on different aspects of the world we deal in. So, the [UN] Sustainable Development Goals, as well [as negotiations] on climate change – the UNFCCC, the climate convention, is the governing body for that. There’s two goals on nature – the Convention on Biological Diversity and other multilateral agreements are the institutions that govern that part.
We have come from a nature-based perspective, with nature’s contributions to a good quality of life for people…We start in the nature goals, but we actually have content that relates to all the other goals. We need to consider climate impacts on nature, or climate impacts on people that affect how they use nature. The nexus assessment was, in a way, a mini SDG report. It looked at six different Sustainable Development Goals.
We try and make sure that while on the institutional mechanisms, certain countries may try and want us to report within our mandate on nature, we do have findings that relate to climate change that relate to income and poverty and food production and health systems [and] that we need to report [outwardly] so that people are aware of those and they can use those in decision-making contexts.
That’s a difficult discussion and every time it comes out a little bit differently. But we hope we move the agenda further towards 2030 in the SDGs. We have an indivisible system that we need to report on.
CB: The next UN biodiversity summit COP17 is taking place later this year. What are the main outcomes you’re hoping to see at that summit?
DO: The main outcomes I would hope to see from the biodiversity summit is greater alignment across the countries. We really need to move forward on delivering on the GBF as part of the sustainable development agenda as well. So there will be a review of progress. We need acceleration of activities and impact and effectiveness, more than anything else.
That means, of course, addressing all of the targets in the GBF. Not equally, necessarily, but they all need progress to support one another in the whole. We work to provide the science inputs that can help deliver that through the CBD [Convention on Biological Diversity] mechanisms as well. We hope they use our assessments to the fullest and that we see good progress coming out.
KOROR, PALAU, Monday 31 August 2026 — As Pacific leaders gather for the 55th Pacific Islands Forum Leaders Meeting in Palau from today, Greenpeace Australia Pacific is urging Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to stand with Pacific family by keeping Pacific needs at the heart of negotiations, backing longstanding Pacific leadership, supporting Pacific energy sovereignty and ocean custodianship, and holding the line on 1.5°C.
Against the backdrop of tense geopolitical turmoil, increasingly frequent and lethal extreme weather disasters, the threat of deep sea mining and an energy crisis driven by fossil fuel dependence, the Pacific Islands Forum Leaders Meeting (PIFLM) is a critical moment for Pacific nations to unite with Pacific needs central to regional dialogue.
The climate crisis, security, the opportunities of renewable energy in the Pacific, ocean protection, and the shifting political landscape will be the focus of the Forum’s discussions.
Speaking from Palau, Shiva Gounden, Head of Pacific at Greenpeace Australia Pacific, said: “The Pacific Islands Forum is the most important multilateral forum in our region, unifying the Pacific under increasingly turbulent global circumstances. We are urging Forum members, including Australia, to not lose focus of Pacific priorities of climate and oceans amid noise and external pressures at this year’s meeting.
“It is very clear that the greatest security threat to our region is climate change and the only way we can address that is through a just transition away from fossil fuels. Regional cooperation is an antidote to climate chaos and geopolitical tension – together, our region can be guided by Pacific nations’ legacy of leadership from the frontlines of the climate crisis, as we build a more peaceful and secure world.
“This year’s Forum will set the stage as we build momentum toward COP31 and a Fossil Fuel Free Pacific. Australia must back Pacific energy sovereignty as a solution to the compounding threats facing our region, including soaring costs of living and increasingly lethal extreme weather disasters, and resist the militarisation of our oceans, deep sea mining, and power politics.
“We must not lose sight of what is needed. The regional adoption of Pacific-led solutions, a Pacific pre-COP with focus on advancing the just transition away from fossil fuels and community-targeted finance for strong and resilient futures beyond fossil fuels must be the foundations of this year’s Forum discussion. What we need now is stronger political will.”
Also in Palau, Dr Simon Bradshaw, COP31 Lead and climate expert at Greenpeace Australia Pacific, said: “Prime Minister Albanese faces a major test of Australia’s climate credibility and Pacific partnership this week. We cannot be a friend to the Pacific and continue to expand fossil fuel production. The best way for Australia to remain the Pacific’s security partner of choice is to act faster on the Pacific’s number one security concern — climate change.
“The Albanese Government has approved at least five new coal and gas projects since the last Pacific Islands Forum Leaders Meeting, and 36 since being elected, every one of which increases the threats to life, security and sovereignty facing Pacific communities.
“Nowhere in the world are the dangers of fossil fuels or the benefits of renewable energy clearer than in the Pacific, which faces the double blow of climate disasters and expensive fuel imports.
“Australia, as incoming President of Negotiations for COP31, has a responsibility to follow the Pacific’s lead, embrace the vision of a resilient Fossil Fuel Free Pacific, and do everything possible to keep 1.5°C alive. Doing so would establish Australia as a highly effective middle power, a force for good in troubled times, and a true ally and partner to the Pacific.”
—ENDS—
Greenpeace Australia Pacific has delegates from the Pacific and Australia at the PIFLM in Palau available for interview
Every six to seven years, climate modelling groups around the world run a coordinated set of simulations that explore how the climate could change in the future.
The new scenarios are quite different from their predecessors in a number of notable ways.
Rather than being named, somewhat enigmatically, according to their “radiative forcing levels”, the new scenarios are named simply by their emissions trajectories – ranging from “low-to-negative” to “high”.
They no longer consider “no-climate-policy” baseline worlds, but instead explore the implications of current policies continuing, being strengthened, or weakening.
These new scenarios also dramatically revise high-end future emissions downward, far below the highest scenarios in prior generations, in order to reflect a world where a 21st century dominated by coal use is no longer plausible.
At the same time, they revise the lowest emissions scenarios upwards relative to those featured in the AR6, with at least some “overshoot” of the Paris Agreement’s “aspirational” target to limit global warming to 1.5C now “unavoidable”.
While modelling groups are just getting started on the full Earth-system model simulations, the emissions scenarios give a clear picture of the range of futures that will inform the IPCC’s seventh assessment cycle (AR7).
Here, Carbon Brief unpacks how the new scenarios were designed and how they differ from the SSPs published almost a decade ago.
The article also compares CO2 emissions and warming outcomes between the new scenarios and their predecessors, explores the range of future warming outcomes and examines why the high end of the scenario range has shifted markedly downward.
Finally, Carbon Brief examines the scale of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) built into the scenarios and new extensions of scenarios to 2150 and beyond.
Key highlights from Carbon Brief’s analysis of the new scenarios include:
The seven new scenarios give a range of global warming in 2100 from 1.6C to 3.3C above pre-industrial levels – markedly narrower than the 1.5C to 4.7C range in their SSP predecessors.
The top of the scenario range has fallen for the first time in four generations of climate modelling. The highest scenarios used in the three previous IPCC assessment cycles all produced around 4.6-4.9C of global warming in 2100, whereas CMIP7’s high scenario only reaches 3.3C and has around half the cumulative CO2 emissions.
The new “medium” scenario that is analogous to policies in place today reaches 2.9C in 2100, crossing 2C around 2050 and 3C around 2110, with a one-in-four chance of exceeding 4C by 2150.
The lowest scenarios have shifted modestly upwards, as a future that avoids any overshoot of 1.5C is no longer considered plausible. The very-low scenario peaks at around 1.8C mid-century before falling back close to 1.5C by 2100.
The updated socioeconomic assumptions underpinning the new scenarios describe a more crowded and less wealthy planet than the original SSPs, with the global human population now peaking at 10.1bn people around 2080 in the medium pathway and income per person in 2100 between 10% and 25% lower.
Every scenario that limits warming leans heavily on carbon dioxide removal, with cumulative removals by 2150 ranging from 655GtCO2 in the very-low scenario to 2,360GtCO2 in low-to-negative scenario.
To simulate how human activity could shape the climate of the future, climate modellers must estimate future levels of “radiative forcings” – the external drivers that cause global warming. These include atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, air pollutants and land-use changes.
Given that no one knows how the future will unfold, modellers use a handful of scenarios that span a wide range of plausible outcomes.
The Scenario Model Intercomparison Project (ScenarioMIP) coordinates the development and running of emissions scenarios for climate models used in IPCC reports.
In April 2026, high-level details about the new set of scenarios for CMIP7 were published in the journal Geoscientific Model Development (GMD).
On 1 September, the underlying emissions data was released into the public domain by the ScenarioMIP team.
There are seven new CMIP7 scenarios designed to drive model simulations for AR7. The first model runs took place in spring 2026 and initial results are expected later this year.
The previous SSP scenarios were starting to show their age. Finalised in 2015-17 using historical data ending in 2015, several years projected by the SSP scenarios were already in the past by the time AR6 concluded in 2021. Meanwhile, the world had changed considerably.
(For a full guide to the SSPs, see Carbon Brief‘s 2018 explainer.)
Storylines and emissions levels
The most visible change in the new generation of scenarios is their names. Where the SSPs combined five socioeconomic “storylines” with radiative forcing targets (SSP1-2.6, SSP5-8.5, etc), the CMIP7 scenarios are named simply for the emissions trajectory that they follow.
The table below summarises the seven scenarios and the integrated assessment model (IAM) that produced each “marker” run – in other words, the specific IAM run used to generate the scenario that, in turn, will be used by CMIP7 climate models. IAMs run simulations of how the future energy system and emissions may evolve under different assumptions around socioeconomics, future technology costs and climate policy.
The table below also details how the scenario fares against a number of key metrics assessed by Carbon Brief, including CO2 emissions and warming outcomes.
(For more on Carbon Brief’s approach, see: Methodology.).
1.5C with higher overshoot, then net-negative greenhouse gases
-25
384
1.7 (1.2-2.5)
Warming values are medians (with the 5-95% range) from the 841-member FaIR ensemble used in this article (see: Methodology); the marker model assignments come from the ScenarioMIP database. Note that scenario names in the database differ from the official CMIP7 names (for example, the high-to-low scenario appears as “SSP5 – Medium-Low Emissions_a”).
Each of the new scenarios is built on a set of updated SSP storylines similar to those used in the original SSP scenarios. These include assumptions about future population, technological and economic growth, as well as potential for international cooperation that shape the resulting emissions pathways. The socioeconomic assumptions underlying these revised SSPs were updated in 2024 with new population and economic projections.
Most of the new emissions scenarios are now based on the “middle-of-the-road” SSP2 that assumes current socioeconomic trends broadly continue, with only one scenario using each of SSP1 (“sustainability”), SSP3 (“regional rivalry”) and SSP5 (“fossil-fuelled development”). None of the new scenarios uses SSP4 (“inequality”).
The solid lines in the figure below show updated global human population, GDP and GDP per capita values in CMIP7 (solid lines), compared to the original SSPs from CMIP’s sixth phase (CMIP6), shown by the dashed lines.
World population (left), GDP (centre) and GDP per capita (right) for SSPs 1-5 in the original 2013-era SSP database (dashed) and the 2024 update (solid). Note that the updated SSP1 and SSP5 population curves effectively overlap. GDP is shown in 2017 US dollars PPP, with the original converted from 2005 US dollars using the US GDP deflator (x1.235). Data from the IIASA SSP database; chart by Carbon Brief.
The change in socioeconomic assumptions is substantial. Global population was revised upward in nearly every scenario, with the updated SSP2 projecting there will be 9.9 billion people in 2100 – an increase of 1 billion people compared to the 2013-era SSP.
GDP was revised downward in the high-end growth scenarios (SSP1 and SSP5), slightly upward in SSP3 and SSP4 and was largely unchanged in SS2.
The combination of these changes means that income per person in 2100 is around 10-25% lower in most scenarios, with only SSP3 and SSP4 seeing mostly unchanged income per capita.
In short, the socioeconomic world underlying the new scenarios is somewhat more crowded and less wealthy per person than the one the SSPs originally imagined.
Another notable change is the shift in the SSP that underlies the highest future emissions scenario.
In the original SSPs, the “very high” SSP5-8.5 scenario was based on SSP5, while the new “high” scenario in CMIP7 is based on SSP3.
The GMD study explains that this is because IAM teams that developed the scenarios found that SSP3 and SSP5 variants produced similar emissions. They judged that the “fragmented” SSP3 world – which is characterised by large challenges to adaptation – to be more relevant for exploring high-end risks.
No more ‘baseline’ scenarios and other changes
In another important change, the authors of the CMIP7 scenarios decided to eliminate “baseline” scenarios that assumed a world without any climate policy. These scenarios were previously used as a counterfactual against which to compare climate-changed worlds.
Instead, the range of future emissions scenarios starts with current policies and explores ways that they could be strengthened, weakened, or kept the same. The high scenario explores a plausible “rollback of current mitigation policies“.
The medium scenario, by contrast, extends climate policies officially implemented as of 2025, without assuming countries achieve their Paris Agreement pledges – known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs) – or net-zero targets that are not yet backed by legislation.
In their GMD paper, the authors of the CMIP7 scenarios emphasise that the medium scenario “should not be considered as a ‘most likely’ scenario”, but that it can provide a benchmark against which the effect of future policy strengthening or weakening can be measured. It is roughly analogous in its emissions levels to the old SSP2-4.5 scenario.
The new low scenario explores a world where climate policy is rapidly strengthened and warming by 2100 is limited to below 2C. This makes it analogous to the old SSP1-2.6 scenario.
The very-low scenario limits global warming to around 1.5C by 2100, similar to the old SSP1-1.9 scenario. However, it involves a greater degree of overshoot mid-century, reflecting the fact that global emissions did not begin to rapidly decline in 2020 as envisioned by SSP1-1.9. As the authors of the GMD ScenarioMIP paper point out: “At this point of time, some overshoot of the 1.5C seems unavoidable.”
In addition, there are a number of scenarios that start on one path before undertaking rapid mitigation. These high-to-low, medium-to-low and low-to-negative scenarios are intended to explore futures where mitigation is further delayed, followed by a rapid turn-around later in the century.
The scenario developers noted that there is no specific likelihood or probabilities assigned to any scenario, but rather only a judgement that all are within the realm of plausibility given where the world is today. They also said that “there might be potential futures outside the ScenarioMIP scenario range”.
Timescales and other changes
In addition to the shift away from baseline scenarios, there are three other notable design changes made in CMIP7.
First, CMIP7 models will be driven by emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases, rather than set atmospheric concentrations.
In every previous generation of models, the ScenarioMIP experiments required that modelling groups simulate future climate using the same set of CO2 concentrations. For CMIP7, models with an interactive carbon cycle are asked to run in “emissions-driven” mode for CO2, calculating atmospheric concentrations themselves based on emissions.
This is a significant improvement. It means that the substantial uncertainty in carbon-cycle feedbacks will now show up directly in the range of projected warming, rather than being overlooked. (The change applies to CO2 only; methane, nitrous oxide and halocarbons remain prescribed as concentrations.)
Second, emissions match observations up to 2023. IAM modellers were asked to stay close to observed trends up to 2025 to avoid emissions diverging from reality before models were run. Scenario differences only open up after 2026, avoiding an earlier problem of scenarios diverging from reality years before the models were even run.
Finally, the period over which models are being run has been extended from 2100 to 2150. This is important as the world is already more than a quarter of the way through the 21st century.
The extended model runs out to 2150 will provide a more thorough exploration of the warming that people born in the coming decades may experience within their lifetimes.
In addition, all scenarios have extensions to 2500 where temperatures are eventually stabilised. These allow scientists to explore changes to long-term Earth-system processes, such as ice sheets and sea level, as well as whether warming is reversible.
A narrower range of future CO2 emissions
Overall, the new scenarios provide a notably more narrow range of future CO2 emissions than the SSP scenarios used in CMIP6.
The figure below shows net global CO2 emissions (combining fossil-fuel and land-use emissions) for the seven new scenarios, alongside the five SSP scenarios used for climate model runs in CMIP6 (e.g. SSP1-1.9, SSP1-2.6, SSP2-4.5, SSP3-7.0 and SSP5-8.5).
Net global CO2 emissions (GtCO2/yr) in the seven CMIP7 scenarios (solid lines, coloured) and the CMIP6-era SSP scenarios (dashed) for the period from 1990 to 2100. CMIP7 scenarios are harmonised to 2023, while SSP scenarios (from RCMIP) were harmonised to 2015. Data from the ScenarioMIP database and RCMIP; chart by Carbon Brief.
At the bottom of the range, the new scenarios closely track their predecessors: the very-low scenario reaches net-zero CO2 around mid-century much like SSP1-1.9, while the low scenario lands close to SSP1-2.6.
The chart below shows total emissions for the same scenarios for the period 2024-2100.
Cumulative global CO2 emissions (GtCO2) between 2024 and 2100 in the seven CMIP7 scenarios (solid colours) and the CMIP6-era SSPs (light colours). Data from the ScenarioMIP database and RCMIP; chart by Carbon Brief.
The lowest emissions scenarios now have somewhat higher total emissions, reflecting the failure of the world to rapidly reduce emissions after 2020 that occurred in the lower SSP emissions scenarios, such as SSP1-1.9 and SSP1-2.6. The very-low scenario results in 310bn tonnes of CO2 (GtCO2) cumulative emissions between 2024 and 2100, compared to around 110GtCO2 in SSP1-1.9.
At the top end, the change is particularly dramatic. The high scenario in CMIP7 reaches 55GtCO2 per year in 2100. The previous high scenario, SSP5-8.5, by contrast, reached around 126GtCO2 per year in 2100.
In cumulative terms – which is what matters most for global warming – high reaches around 3,820GtCO2 over 2024-2100, half the roughly 7,600GtCO2 of SSP5-8.5 and about three-quarters of the 5,140GtCO2 of SSP3-7.0.
To put it another way: the top of the new scenario range sits between SSP2-4.5 and SSP3-7.0 in cumulative emissions terms, which is territory that CMIP6 treated as its middle ground.
To make the scale of this shift clear, Carbon Brief analysed the CO2 emissions trajectories in each of the prior generations of high-end emissions scenarios, using the same simple climate model – FaIR – to calculate future warming.
Fossil CO2 emissions relative to 1850-1900 for the highest scenario of each climate modelling generation: SRES A1FI (CMIP3, used in AR4), RCP8.5 (CMIP5, AR5), SSP5-8.5 (CMIP6, AR6) and CMIP7’s high, all run through AR6-calibrated FaIR ensemble. Data: SRES database v1.1, RCMIP v5.1, ScenarioMIP database; chart by Carbon Brief.
Below, four different generations of emissions scenarios are examined. The SRES scenarios were originally published in 2000 and used in the IPCC’s third (2001) and fourth (2007) assessment reports (and the corresponding CMIP3 model runs). The RCPs were developed in the early 2010s and used in the IPCC fifth assessment report (AR5; 2013) and CMIP5, while the SSPs were developed in the late 2010s and used in the IPCC AR6 report and CMIP6.
Over the past two decades, the highest emissions scenarios all resulted in comparable amounts of warming in 2100: SRES A1FI (the highest SRES scenario) reached 4.6C in 2100 (5-95% range; 3.5-6.1C), RCP8.5 reached 4.9C (3.7-6.5C) and SSP5-8.5 reached 4.6C (3.5-6.2C).
(RCP8.5 edges out its successor despite lower CO2 emissions because it assumed considerably more methane and nitrous oxide.)
Global mean surface temperature change in 2100 relative to 1850-1900 (medians and 5-95% ranges) for the highest scenario of each climate modelling generation: SRES A1FI (CMIP3, used in AR4), RCP8.5 (CMIP5, AR5), SSP5-8.5 (CMIP6, AR6) and CMIP7’s high, all run through AR6-calibrated FaIR ensemble. Data: SRES database v1.1, RCMIP v5.1, ScenarioMIP database; chart by Carbon Brief.
CMIP7’s high scenario comes in remarkably lower, at 3.3C (2.6-4.4C).
The downward revision of future emissions in CMIP7 reflects two key changes since RCP8.5 was published back in 2011. First, the plausible baseline of a repeal of current policy has fallen. Cheap solar, wind and batteries, a global plateau in coal use and more than $2tr per year in clean-energy investment mean that a rollback in climate policy would not result in coal deployment levels assumed in the RCP8.5 scenario.
The GMD study states that CMIP6’s high-emission levels “have become implausible, based on trends in the costs of renewables, the emergence of climate policy and recent emission trends”.
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s recent factcheck of false claims around the retirement of the SSP5-8.5 emissions scenario. Also see Carbon Brief’s recent interview with Prof Detlef van Vuuren, a key architect of both the old SSPs and new scenarios.)
Second, part of the apparent decline reflects a correction of how scenarios are communicated – rather than real-world progress. The old high-end scenarios always represented an estimate of worst-case scenarios at the time, rather than likely outcomes.
Genuine progress in reducing emissions probably accounts for around 0.7C of the roughly 1.7C gap between SSP5-8.5 and today’s current-policy trajectory, with the remainder reflecting that the baseline was never particularly likely.
What the new scenarios mean for future warming
To compare warming outcomes across scenario generations on a like-for-like basis, Carbon Brief ran both the seven CMIP7 scenarios and the CMIP6 SSP emission scenarios through the same simple climate model.
These values may differ from the ultimate results that are found by CMIP7 climate models, but give a sneak peak of what those results may look like when they become available.
Median warming relative to 1850-1900 for the seven CMIP7 scenarios, with observations to 2025 (black) and the 5-95% ensemble range shaded for the medium and low scenarios. Dashed lines show warming between 2100 and 2150. Chart by Carbon Brief.
The seven scenarios produce warming in 2100, relative to pre-industrial (1850-1900), that ranges from 1.6C (with a 5-95% range of 1.1-2.5C) in the very-low scenario to 3.3C (2.6-4.4C) in high, with the current-policy medium scenario reaching 2.9C (2.2-3.9C). Warming also continues after 2100 in both the medium and high scenarios.
The figure below shows the range of 2100 warming (5th to 95th percentile) relative to the preindustrial period expected in each of the old SSP scenarios and the new CMIP7 ones, along with a central estimate (white dots).
Warming in 2100 for CMIP7 scenarios and CMIP6 SSPs run through the identical FaIR ensemble (medians and 5-95% ranges). Chart by Carbon Brief.
The largest changes are, unsurprisingly, at the top. CMIP7’s high scenario (3.3C in 2100) produces less warming than SSP3-7.0 (3.7C in the same ensemble) and far less than SSP5-8.5 (4.7C).
The entire CMIP6 “high” tier (e.g. SSP5-8.5 and SSP3-7.0) now sits above anything in the new scenario set, at least up to 2100. Extended beyond 2100, however, high keeps climbing towards levels the previous extreme scenarios reached earlier.
At the low end, the picture is more similar. The very-low scenario (1.6C in 2100) lands close to SSP1-1.9 (1.5C) and low (1.8C) is essentially indistinguishable from SSP1-2.6 (1.8C) in 2100.
However, the new low scenario involves more rapid late-century emissions reductions and greater amounts of carbon removal than its SSP analogue, while the very-low scenario involves greater overshoot of 1.5C mid-century.
Crossing warming thresholds
In addition to calculating 2100 and 2150 warming, Carbon Brief has calculated the likelihood of passing different global warming levels (2C, 2.5C, 3C, 4C and 5C) over time in the new CMIP7 scenarios.
The chart below uses the IPCC approach of calculating the crossing year based on a 20-year average, rather than when a single year exceeds the warming level.
Share of the 841-member FaIR climate model runs that exceed each warming level by year under the medium (top) and high (bottom) scenarios. Marked years show the median IPCC-convention (20-year average) crossing; percentages show the chance of exceeding each level by 2150. Chart by Carbon Brief.
Under the medium scenario, which reflects a world where current policies are maintained, passing 1.5C is essentially locked in.
Most models cross the threshold by the late 2020s or early 2030s. The 2C limit is crossed around 2050 on average and 3C by around 2110. The chance of exceeding 4C is around one-in-four by 2150, but, ultimately, rises to roughly 50% if emissions continue after that point.
Under the high scenario, 2C arrives in the 2040s, 3C in the 2080s and the chance of exceeding 4C by 2150 is around 60% (and around 95% by 2300). Even 5C is reached by 2150 in roughly 20% of climate model simulations.
The lower scenarios tell a different story. In the very-low scenario, the chance that peak warming (which the IPCC determines using a 20-year average of warming) ever exceeds 1.5C is around 90%. This reflects the fact that passing 1.5C is almost unavoidable at this point.
However, the chance of surpassing 2C sits at around 30% and the scenario has warming falling after mid-century as more CO2 is removed from the atmosphere than is added.
Carbon dioxide removal
Every scenario that has global warming peaking and declining requires pulling CO2 back out of the atmosphere. Otherwise, warming from CO2 emissions will persist for millennia.
CO2 removal (CDR) remains one of the few levers available to reduce future temperatures – particularly given additional warming caused by cuts to aerosol pollution.
The chart below shows the total CDR deployment in each of the different scenarios by year, reflecting the sum of both land-based and engineered approaches (top), as well as the total CDR deployment between 2024 and 2150 (bottom).
Total carbon dioxide removal (CDR) in the CMIP7 scenarios (solid) and their extensions (dashed), including both “engineered” and “novel” methods (bioenergy and carbon capture and storage (BECCS), direct air capture (DAC), enhanced weathering, biochar) plus land-based removals (the net land-use sink plus soil carbon management), along with with cumulative CDR for 2024-2150. Chart by Carbon Brief.
Every scenario that deeply cuts global emissions in CMIP7 also involves a large amount of CDR.
The low-to-negative scenario pulls a cumulative 2,360GtCO2 out of the atmosphere by 2150, roughly 60 years of today’s emissions run in reverse.
The high-to-low scenario has around 1,480GtCO2 cumulative CDR, medium-low has 1,450GtCO2 and low has 1,360GtCO2.
Even the very-low scenario, which seeks to minimise CDR use, requires 655GtCO2 of removals between 2024 and 2150.
In the low scenario, roughly one-third of the removals is from the land “sink”, while low-to-negative relies almost entirely on engineered methods, with direct air capture alone reaching around 16GtCO2 per year by 2100.
The chart below shows the deployment of engineered removals by year (top), as well as the total engineered CDR used between 2024 and 2150 (bottom). The lower plot also includes a breakdown between the portion of CDR that requires geologic storage (e.g. DAC and BECCS) and the portion that does not (e.g. enhanced weathering and biochar) and compares the total to a recent “prudent” total CO2 storage limit published in the scientific literature.
(For more on limits to carbon storage capacity, see Carbon Brief’s 2025 guest post.)
Engineered and novel CO2 removal only, with the cumulative BECCS and direct air capture component – the technologies requiring geological storage – compared against the “prudent” 1,460GtCO2 (range 1,290-2,710GtCO2) geologic storage limit set out in Gidden et al. (2025). Chart by Carbon Brief.
The amount of CDR going toward geological storage is most highest in the low-to-negative scenario, which injects around 1,750GtCO2 of BECCS and direct-air-capture CO2 underground by 2150.
The high-to-low and low scenarios each commit around 800GtCO2 to storage by 2150. This is within the range of available geologic storage, but would require that the storage industry handles more CO2 than the mass of oil currently moved by the fossil-fuel industry.
That said, there are other potential CDR approaches – such as enhanced rock weathering, surficial mineralisation and ocean alkalinity enhancement – that do not require injection of CO2 into geologic formations. In-situ mineralisation approaches that inject CO2 into alkaline rock formations such as basalt or peridotite could also open up more potential CO2 storage.
It is worth noting that the amount of CDR deployed in these scenarios would require planetary-scale engineering at the cost of trillions of dollars, while many of the engineered CDR approaches are still relatively early-stage technologies.
No single climate future
The goal of scenarios is to span a range of possible futures. While it may be tempting to treat current climate and energy policies – and the medium scenario – as a forecast, there is no reason to expect that they will not change in the future.
It is likely that policies will continue to be strengthened, as has been the case over the past two decades. However, they may also be weakened if national priorities or politics change, as has happened in the US during the two terms of the Trump administration.
In the new CMIP7 scenarios there is no “business-as-usual” scenario, but rather a narrower range of futures than was available in CMIP6, reflecting greater clarity among scientists on where the world is heading in terms of future energy use and emissions.
The fact that the worst-case scenarios of the past have become increasingly implausible is good news. However, this is tempered by the fact that the very-low emission scenarios have, in turn, become harder to achieve given that global emissions have yet to decline.
There is also real uncertainty in the climate-system response to emissions. This is due to uncertainty around how sensitive the climate is to a build-up of CO2 in the atmosphere, as well as how the carbon cycle will respond to emissions.
The CMIP7 medium scenario – which has a central estimate of 2.9C of warming by 2100 – still has around a 3% chance of reaching 4C by that date. If emissions continue, those odds increase to 25% by 2150. This remains far outside anything resembling a safe outcome for the climate system.
The scenarios are now being run using the new CMIP7 models, whose emissions-driven runs will fold carbon-cycle uncertainty directly into projections. These projections will subsequently be analysed in the reports of AR7.
Ultimately, it will be decisions made by governments, businesses and individuals that decide which of these seven futures become closest to reality.
Methodology
Emissions scenarios shown in this article are the seven CMIP7 ScenarioMIP scenarios set out in van Vuuren et al. (2026), harmonised to observed 2023 emissions, with rule-based extensions to 2500 generated using the FLEX methodology. Emissions through 2100 match the ScenarioMIP database; extension trajectories are indicative and may differ from the final published extensions.
Temperature projections use FaIR v2.2 with the fair-calibrate v1.4.5 constrained ensemble (841 members set out in Smith et al. (2024), which matches the AR6 assessed climate sensitivity (ensemble ECS median 3C, 5-95% 2.0-5.1C), historical warming and ocean heat content.
Historical emissions (1750-2022) use the FaIR historical emissions dataset, with scenario emissions spliced in after 2023.
Solar and volcanic forcing are updated through 2025 from the Climate Indicator forcing timeseries; future volcanic forcing ramps to the 1850-2021 climatological background by 2035 (following the CMIP7 protocol) and solar forcing follows a SOLARIS-HEPPA-derived cycle projection to 2300.
All warming is expressed relative to 1850-1900.
SSP comparisons run the RCMIP-harmonised CMIP6 scenario emissions through the FaIR ensemble, which yields 2081-2100 warming 0.1-0.3C below the AR6-assessed values at the high end (e.g. SSP5-8.5: 4.2C vs 4.4C assessed), reflecting differences between the AR6 assessment and the FaIR configurations used here. Updating the volcanic dataset to use CMIP7 values (which revises the eruption-rich 1850-1900 baseline period) raises all reported anomalies by 0.03-0.05C.
For CDR, the scenario database reports the technology split (for example, BECCS, direct air capture, enhanced weathering, biochar, ocean-based, soil carbon management). Agriculture, forestry and other land-use (AFOLU) removals are available only as a net flux, so are shown as the net sink where negative. Soil-carbon management is grouped with land-based rather than engineered removal, and the geological storage comparison uses BECCS plus direct air capture only.
The figure showing high-end scenarios for the past four CMIP generations runs SRES A1FI through the same ensemble using the A1G MiniCAM model from the SRES database v1.1, spliced onto historical emissions at 2000, and covering CO2 (fossil and land use), methane, nitrous oxide and sulphur; SRES-era ozone-precursor projections (nitrous oxide, carbon monoxide and volatile organic compounds) lie outside the calibrated range of FaIR, so RCP8.5 values are used instead. RCP8.5 uses RCMIP v5.1 emissions, with 13 minor halogenated gases absent from the RCP database following SSP5-8.5.
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When Rojo Neog’s village in northeast India was hit by a power cut in July, he headed out to buy candles. Three days later, his body was recovered – swept away by surging floodwaters. His niece said the water had risen from knee- to neck-level in about half an hour.
The devastating floodshighlight how climate risk across India is becoming harder to confine to a season or a disaster bulletin. Just weeks before the disaster in Assam, authorities in Mumbai rationed water as reservoir storage fell to just over 10%.
India does not lack warnings about climate risk. The more difficult task is making sure money, institutions and communities are ready to act before those warnings become disasters. Adaptation should not be just an obligation once a crisis has arrived, but an investment made while there is still something to protect.
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Splits between developed and developing countries over finance and science held back progress on key areas of climate action, leaving disappointment and much work for COP31
As governments head towards COP31 in Antalya this November, India should push not only for more adaptation finance, but for finance that arrives earlier and can be traced to outcomes on the ground.
That is the gap India needs to close if we wish to become truly resilient in the face of the changing climate. Money must move with risk, institutions must know what to do before an emergency is declared, and long-term spending must reduce vulnerability before it becomes loss.
India’s adaptation disconnect
This year the disconnect has become painfully clear in Assam, where more than 100 people have died due to the flooding, with nearly 140,000 people across seven districts affected. More than 450 villages remain inundated, while some 49,000 people are taking shelter in relief camps after losing everything.
No financing mechanism can stop a river from rising. But timely measures can change what happens before it does. If forecasts and river levels triggered financing before the water arrived, authorities could position boats and stock shelters, and evacuate people where needed, while families could move cattle, seed, medicines and documents before roads disappeared.
India already has much of the information needed to address climate change. High-risk states and districts should agree in advance which local thresholds trigger action, who is responsible and how funds will be released, so officials do not have to negotiate responsibility and budgets from scratch once risk becomes an emergency.
Linking community know-how to financing
Our work in Majuli, a river island district in Assam, shows why this matters.
Across 64 villages, communities helped identify flood and erosion risks, assess their capacity to respond, and to develop resilience measures with indicative budgets and possible funding sources.
Communities often know what would help; the harder task is connecting that knowledge to institutions and finance that can act on it.
Public health offers an example of how systems can adapt as risks change. In New Delhi, vector-control workers who once prepared for a defined “dengue season” now remain on alert throughout the year, using surveillance and hotspot mapping to identify risks earlier.
The next step is to make these systems more predictive by integrating climate forecasts into public health planning.
India needs sustained investment in drainage, health systems, wetlands, water security and climate-resilient agriculture. Some will remain public responsibilities; others, including water reuse, efficient irrigation, resilient cold chains and risk-proofed infrastructure, can generate savings or revenue and attract private capital if projects are prepared well.
The economic case for adaptation is not always about generating new revenue. Often, it is about avoiding future costs. Flood shelters, public-health preparedness, early-warning systems and support for the poorest households will still need public or grant finance. The point is to match the finance to the risk rather than treat adaptation as a single financing problem.
A sugarcane farmer removes weeds which have grown in floodwater in Kolhapur district, Maharashtra, India. Credit: Meenal Upreti
A sugarcane farmer removes weeds which have grown in floodwater in Kolhapur district, Maharashtra, India. Credit: Meenal Upreti
Rising disaster bill shows cost of inaction
India is already spending heavily on adaptation, with related expenditure reaching 5.6% of GDP in 2021-22. Yet tracked adaptation finance was only about $15 billion annually, almost entirely from domestic public sources, against estimated needs of about $100 billion a year through 2030.
Internationally, the shortfall is wider: developing countries may need $310 billion-$365 billion annually by 2035, compared with just $26 billion in international public adaptation finance in 2023.
For governments repeatedly paying for flood, droughts and heat relief, the cost of inaction can quickly exceed the cost of building resilience, though not all the costs of inaction appear neatly on a balance sheet.
In floodplain landscapes such as Assam’s Kaziranga National Park, animals move towards higher ground every monsoon as the floodplain fills, crossing roads and leaving the park in search of safety. During the 2024 floods, 215 animals died, including 13 one-horned rhinos.
Development plans in such sensitive landscapes must leave room for water, wildlife and communities to move safely. A wetland may not generate monetary revenue, but the floodwater it stores has real value. The cost of losing that capacity may only become visible when the next flood arrives.
Success should not be measured only by how quickly relief follows a disaster. It should also be measured by what never had to be replaced: people and animals moved before the water rose, seeds kept dry, medicines waiting at the shelter, a wetland that still had room to hold water, and a family that could leave while the road was still open.
Adaptation becomes an investment when it preserves those choices before they disappear.
