The ARC: Thoughts on a Safe Climate Future

In the first half of 2026, ARC and the Climate Emergencies Forum (CEF) engaged Paul Gambill and Ben Lachman to conduct field interviews with many leading practitioners working to better understand, predict, and prepare for catastrophic climate risks.

Carbon Brief recently identified a 74-fold increase in the number of news articles that mention “Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation” (AMOC) between 2006 to 2024. For decades, scientists have known AMOC is sensitive to climate changes and global warming, and since the 1980s, climate models have forecast that AMOC could slow down as global warming mounts and climate change intensifies. Until recently, these risks were not, however, discussed widely outside climate science circles.

Hurricane Helene, which wreaked unprecedented damage (both in scope and location) in regions more than four hundred miles inland in North Carolina, makes landfall on September 26, 2024. Credit: CSU/CIRA & NOAA The United States has spent decades getting better at weathering hurricanes. Building codes have been strengthened, evacuation systems refined, forecasting windows extended and made more precise.

Climate systems in the Arctic are approaching critical tipping points and there is no coordinated, system-level plan to prepare for and respond to these risks. The Arctic Stabilization Initiative (ASI), a new stage-gated research program, has raised $6.5 million to advance the research needed to assess the safety, efficacy, and feasibility of Arctic-targeted climate interventions. Every country that sits on a major earthquake fault line maintains a disaster risk management and response plan.

Why it’s time to retire it and to come up with other terms and taxonomies for climate interventions The Labadie Power Plant is a 2,389.4-megawatt coal-fired power plant in Missouri. In 2023, it was the largest single point source of sulfur dioxide pollution in the U.S., emitting roughly 44,000 tons of SO₂. It likely remains one of, if not the largest, sources of sulfur dioxide pollution in the U.S. in 2026.

Tucked inside NATO’s latest 5% defense spending pledge is a once-in-a-generation chance to redefine what national security means over the remainder of the 21st century. National security is no longer just about who has the most advanced weapons, but who has the technology needed (or can develop it) to meaningfully reduce long-term global instability and avert conflicts from arising in the first place.

Seduction splashes across entire maps. Sharper lines that were once theoretical—shipping routes blocked by permanent ice, oil fields locked beneath permafrost—suddenly materialize. A new Northern Sea Route cuts 5,000 nautical miles off the trade route between Shanghai and Rotterdam. Reserves to the tune of ~90 billion barrels of oil and ~1,669 trillion cubic feet of natural gas become accessible underneath ice sheets and in seabeds.

Today, we’re thrilled to publish our first-ever guest post on the ARC Initiative substack, from someone who has been a great collaborator and supporter of our work: Kelly Erhart. Kelly is a close friend of ARC and the Climate Emergencies Forum (CEF), and a thoughtful voice working at the intersection of climate risk, planetary systems, and responsible innovation.

In advance of the 2008 financial crisis, financial firms like Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch invested and underwrote significantly against flawed models that assumed low correlation among mortgage defaults. When defaults soared as the crisis began, contrary to their models’ predictions, senior tranches of debt thought to be “safe” became extremely risky, extremely quickly.

A note from the ARC team: This blog is part of a series of ambitious ideas to address catastrophic climate risks we’re publishing in the runup to New York Climate Week – check out our articles from Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, and if you’ll be at NYCW, let us know! We’re once again on the cusp of New York Climate Week, perhaps the largest recurring climate convening after COP, and certainly a consequential one as a nexus for discussion among decision makers, researchers, civil...