Is community the answer to the growing brittleness of our lives?

I get asked this question — or versions of it — a lot. Most of the time, I think what people really want to know is whether there’s an intermediate step they can take somewhere between obliviousness to discontinuity and developing an actual personal climate strategy.

The answer’s not simple.

Certainly, community — in the largest sense, of common purpose and social cohesion — is the glue that holds society together. In that sense, it’s critical, and it seems difficult to overstate how much more connection and commonality we’re likely to need as this crisis really spins up. Having lots of kindness, caring and belonging makes us stronger. We’ll need that strength.

But there’s another sense of community resilience that’s used a lot these days, one I find unhelpful. People using community in this sense often claim that people coming together can create a kind of local resilience that can mitigate the need for big changes in infrastructure and institutions — or even replace those bigger systems and the centers of power that run them, altogether. That grassroots local efforts are the answer to the massive pressures on key global, national and regional systems. That individuals seeking stability in crisis should devote their efforts to connecting up with and growing these efforts. That, in the most extreme claims, there is no other way to improve your odds of a good future.

That last claim might be true, if lack of funds and immobility have left you with no other options. If you live in climate precarity and you lack resources, access to good information and location choice — if you can’t change the brittle systems around you, and you can’t relocate to a relatively safer and more stable place — then these kinds of efforts might be the best hope you have for managing the brutal realities of the brittleness trap you find yourself in. We shouldn’t sugarcoat how horrible a reality that represents.1

Now, I like to hold on to the possibility that we might still achieve the achievable: a massive effort to minimize the pain of loss, make rational and fair decisions about where we invest limited resources, launch supported mass-relocation programs for the millions who will need them, and build housing at inclusive scales to welcome them into the relatively safe places they ought to go. I choose the optimism of believing this scale of solidarity is possible.

Community is a vital layer in the stack of systems we depend on. Hoping it will replace the need for those systems in the face of both deep discontinuities and widespread inaction is unwise. Everyone with choices is likely to find much more success in focusing on systems and governance, relative safety and ruggedization efforts, designing effective personal climate strategies and keeping focused on implementing them. The infrastructure, expertise and governance underpinnings of modern life are incredibly valuable — a value we often don’t even recognize until we have to do without them.

The most self-sufficient rural people I’ve met know this. They are often the first to acknowledge the importance of these larger systems. They know how critical the road into town is, how important the hospital emergency room can be, how much they rely on public servants, from school teachers to firefighters. This is true especially where people have to maintain their own roads, heal themselves, teach their own kids and hope they can save their own homes in a wildfire. Nothing sharpens the mind on the importance of infrastructure like the lack of it.

The substructure matters, a lot. In wealthy societies, community life sits atop a vast machinery of systems, structures and services. Most of us have only a glimmer of an idea how vast is the weave of infrastructure, supply chains, policies, expertise and finance that carries us through our lives. Millions of people work at that loom every day, keeping us alive and, by historical standards, unprecedentedly prosperous.

Now, every system on earth is being subjected to extreme torque, as the conditions for which it was designed give way to an unpatterning of unfamiliar conditions and unprecedented extremes. Anticipated but unavoided disasters interrupt its function. Its components wear down and it requires more work to do the same job. New investments are demanded. New capacities become vital, and they have to be designed and built before they’re needed.

Indeed, the best way to think about our communities in terms of ruggedization is as a connection layer with those larger systems. Neighbors can certainly help one another in serious ways, be the real first responders in emergencies, check on the vulnerable, offer help when it’s needed. But neighbors together can accomplish systems changes that individuals cannot: inform, plan, lobby and monitor governmental institutions and their efforts to produce effective systems-level changes in our communities. The most successful places will be successful in large part because significant numbers of local citizens engage in the civic process to create real ruggedization.

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See you at the block party,

Alex

PS: Want to orient yourself in the planetary crisis, and begin to chart a course forward for yourself and your loved ones?

Personal Climate Strategy: The Basics is the place to start. The next class will be on Thursday, May 28th, from 12:00-2:00 p.m. Pacific, via Zoom (Recording will be made available to registered participants, if you can’t attend live.)

Catch the Early-Bird discount by tomorrow, May 19th, and save $100.

Learn the Basics

PPS: The New York Times recently ran a feature about the Personal Climate Strategy Workshop, the month-long deep dive into making smart decisions when faced with climate chaos and growing uncertainty. The next Workshop will be in September.

Thank you so much for your support and encouragement! I really appreciate it.

This has been an amazing last few weeks: The New York Times feature about the Workshop, a bunch of new readers (welcome!), and the excitement of seeing personal climate responses becoming a growing trend.

If you meant to sign up, don’t fear. We’ll be convening the next full Workshop in September, and we’re exploring doing an intensive version of the Workshop in late June. If you’re interested and you want to be on the Early Notification List for either or both, please email Alison@AlexSteffen.com to let us know.

If you want to get started now, the next live Personal Climate Strategy: The Basics class is now open for sign ups.

That Basics class will be held on Thursday, May 28th from 12 - 2pm Pacific via Zoom. All participants receive a recording of the call, as well as early access and special pricing for the full Personal Climate Strategy Workshop.

To get all the details and sign up, please visit: https://alexsteffen.thinkific.com/products/courses/personal-climate-strategy-class (Early-bird price of $97 until May 14th!)

I’ve also been working on a raft of new pieces for The Snap Forward, and planning out a set of related topics for When We Are.

Coming up on the newsletter and podcast are pieces about: new wildfire research, the risk recognition gap, climate-precarious wealth, personal ruggedization on a budget, and ecological restoration in an unpatterning world. Also, an essay exploring what planetary success looks like in the absence of an orderly transition (a deep update on my 2005 essay Winning the Great Wager, that turned out to be one of the most quietly influential pieces I ever wrote).

Stay tuned!

Thanks again,

Alex

Quick heads up: The next Personal Climate Strategy Workshop begins on Tuesday at 12pm Pacific. Enrollment closes on Monday, and there are only three spots left! Scroll down for details.

CLAIM YOUR SPOT

Two weeks ago, the Sunday New York Times published a feature on the Personal Climate Strategy Workshop: “Lessons in How to Cope With Climate Change: A virtual classroom could help you prepare for any disruptions that global warming may create.”

Reporter Hilary Howard took the course, attended the sessions, talked with alumni, and wrote a thoughtful article about her experience. The response has been fantastic — and revealing.

The real story here isn’t the Personal Climate Strategy Workshop itself. It's the wave that's driving more and more people to seek real answers as planetary disruption crashes into their lives.

Across the country and around the world, people are waking up to a hard truth: the institutions they count on to secure their futures don’t have any real plan to help them. Even the best governments are not keeping pace with the rate of change. Disasters are battering our cities. Insurance markets are straining. Infrastructure is failing in unexpected ways. And the people whose lives and prospects are on the line are done waiting.

So they’re seeking out their own answers. And they’re doing it with a seriousness that would have been unimaginable ten years ago.

Howard spots this trend beautifully. J.P. Morgan has created a dedicated climate advisory role. The Climate Psychology Alliance has grown from a handful of practitioners to more than 700. Community resilience clubs are forming. Real estate brokers are trying to steer clients toward safety. Climate risk mapping companies are booming. Financial advisors are fielding questions they were never trained to answer. The demand for structured, strategic climate guidance (as opposed to crisis reporting, ideological solidarity or emotional support) is exploding.

They want strategies, not slogans.

That practicality is what I see in every Workshop cohort. What unites the participants in the Personal Climate Strategy Workshop is a big-picture seriousness about the decisions that will shape their next decade.

Workshop alumni have included climate and sustainability professionals, investors, academics, scientists, elected officials, doctors, therapists and architects. Participants who work professionally in risk management, climate policy, and institutional strategy have told me repeatedly that the system holds up against the tools they use in their own work — and that it often reveals dimensions they hadn’t considered.

As one alumnus — bestselling author and business thinker Tiago Forte — puts it, you could completely disbelieve that climate change is happening and still find the Workshop transformational, because its focus is on preparing for disruption and compound risk of any kind.

The Workshop is one response to this wave — and I hope a very helpful one. But the bigger point is that this wave isn’t going away. It’s going to keep building, because the climate crisis is now the context for every important decision we make — where to live, what to invest in, which career bets to place, when to move, what to hold onto and what to let go.

Most people still don’t have a framework for thinking about any of this, but more and more people want one.

That’s why I built the Workshop: because I spent thirty years developing tools for navigating planetary disruption at the institutional level and I realized that individuals and families — facing the same compound risks, with far fewer resources — had almost nothing designed for them. I saw I could do something about that.

But I’m just one part of a much larger shift. The real story is that millions of people are starting to take their climate futures into their own hands, because no one else is going to do it for them. My sense is we’re still in the early days of a major movement.

This is a grim moment. But I now see more and more people rising to the occasion with practical planning and intelligent optimism. We may be on our own, but we’re not alone.

Alex

The next Workshop begins this coming Tuesday the 14th at 12:00pm Pacific!

Call dates: April 14, 16, 21, 23, 28, 30; May 5 and 7.

Wrap Up Call May 14 (includes a real-time analysis of three participant-submitted locations).

All calls begin at 12:00pm Pacific and run for approximately 90 minutes on Zoom.

They consist of a presentation followed by a short Q&A. It’s okay to miss a call -- they are recorded and you can return to the recordings throughout and after the Workshop.

There’s now a Six Payment Option available, too, that makes it easier than ever to get started – a first payment of $429, then five payments of $429 spaced 30 days apart, charged automatically through our secure processing system.

Get all the Workshop details here, including the Class-by-Class Syllabus, answers to your FAQs, testimonials, refund policy, etc.

https://alexsteffen.thinkific.com/courses/Personal-Climate-Strategy-Workshop

SIGN UP NOW

Enrollment closes on Monday the 13th at 11:00pm Pacific.

Questions? Email us at alison@alexsteffen.com.

What if the chaos isn’t going away? What if all this isn’t just a rough patch?

We’re in the last week before the start of the next Personal Climate Strategy Workshop. It offers a unique approach to planning and building your life in a world that's already changed more than most people realize.

That approach has two parts: a Framework for learning how to think about discontinuity, and a structured Workshop experience for learning together.

The Framework is evidence-based, grounded in both the latest thinking across a broad range of disciplines and my own 30 years of experience as a climate foresight professional. It’s packed full of vital information and useful expertise. It helps you get real clarity on the magnitude of discontinuity we’re all living through.

It’s not abstract intelligence that’s the point, though, but applied foresight — making moves that improve the odds of you getting the future you seek. It works. Again and again, folks have told me that working through this Framework was transformative for them: that it helped them move from generalized worry into a much clearer, more centered sense of how to be effective in building the lives they seek, in an increasingly chaotic world.

The Workshop experience is designed to guide you through that transformation in thought.

Over the course of a month, we do serious work together. It’s a bit intense, but in a good way. It gathers a small group of thoughtful, aware people who want to take on work that’s hard to do anywhere else. We do that work together, with a spirit of exploration, respect and camaraderie.

Workshoppers come from many different worlds — finance, science, business, academia, tech, public service — but we come together around the same fundamental reality: that we’re unprepared for massive changes that are already happening. No one, not even me, has all the answers. We have to learn as we go, but that shared learning journey pays real rewards.

What if you woke up on May 14th, having completed the Workshop, and felt more capable of handling uncertainty? More aware of the patterns behind the chaos? More confident in your own capacities to plan and act in new ways to build the life you want for yourself and your family, despite the discontinuities around us? What if you woke up feeling more at home in this crazy world, and more competent to meet its challenges and thrive?

A lot can happen in a month.

The next Workshop begins this coming Tuesday the 14th at 12:00pm Pacific!

Call dates and times:

Workshops April 14, 16, 21, 23, 28, 30; May 5 and 7.

Wrap Up Call May 14 (includes a real-time analysis of three participant-submitted locations).

All calls begin at 12:00pm Pacific and run for approximately 90 minutes on Zoom.

They consist of a presentation followed by a short Q&A. It’s ok to miss a call -- they are recorded and you can return to the recordings throughout and after the Workshop.

Get all the Workshop details here, including the Class-by-Class Syllabus, answers to your FAQs, testimonials, refund policy, etc.

https://alexsteffen.thinkific.com/courses/Personal-Climate-Strategy-Workshop

Space is limited and enrollment closes on Monday the 13th at 11:00pm Pacific.

Come join us!

Alex

PS: We’ve also added a new Six-Payment Option, which means you can join the Workshop today for $429. If you’re ready to select this option, please click here (or learn more on our website).

A growing number of Americans are too successful to see how much trouble they’re in.

I’ve spent more than thirty years on the frontlines of this crisis, first reporting on climate solutions, then building tools to foresee climate discontinuity. Now that discontinuity is landing on people close to me.

It’s my job to look at how the planetary crisis is scrambling the future we expected. Increasingly, the people I’m most worried about are not abstractions in a policy paper — they’re my friends, my colleagues, people in my own life who are smart, capable, and working too hard to see what’s coming.

There’s a problem we’re not naming clearly. And I suspect many of the people reading this are living inside it.

But first, let me be clear about something.

The planetary crisis is deeply regressive. The people with the fewest resources and the most exposure face the worst outcomes, full stop. Everyone reading this newsletter knows I care deeply about the unfairness of our transapocalyptic world. I advocate every chance I get, not only for bolder climate action, but for more principled response: for supported mass relocation, for large-scale investments in ruggedizing critical systems, for building enough housing in relatively safe places to catch the millions who are about to fall through the cracks of a climate-battered society.

That work is urgent. That work is not what this essay is about.

This essay is about a different kind of danger — the danger not of having nothing, but of having enough to feel safe while being deeply exposed.

The poorest know they’re vulnerable; their lives remind them daily. The wealthiest know they’re buffered; their advisors tell them so. But there is a growing group in between that finds itself in a blind spot: successful enough to assume the systems around them will hold, stretched thin enough to be ruined if they don’t.

And I find it harder and harder to watch this crisis unfold around them — around us — without saying what I see. It’s time to talk about the brittle achievers.

Brittle Achievement

We are people who, by most conventional measures, are doing well. Educated, employed, often homeowners. Good jobs. Kids in good schools. Neighbors who see us as successful.

We are successful. That’s what makes this hard. Because beneath that surface success, many of our lives are structurally fragile in the face of what’s coming. Low liquidity, serious debt, high fixed costs, geographic exposure to climate risk we may not fully grasp — we’re running without anything like the margin for error that our apparent prosperity suggests.

Remember that term to describe wealthy people whose assets are illiquid, highly leveraged and dependent on future conditions? “Rich on paper?”

Well, a bunch of us are now “resilient on paper.”

That describes tens of millions of people around the world. It describes most of my own friends and colleagues. It describes a lot of the readers of this newsletter. None of the people I care most about are wealthy enough to have climate-level fuck you money.

Nobody’s perfect, but they’re thoughtful, hardworking, doing their best to build good lives under conditions far less forgiving than what previous generations navigated. None of them chose fragility. In most cases, fragility was the only thing on offer at a price they could afford, even with good jobs and sensible goals. And the costs of maintaining those lives — mortgages, student loans, childcare, healthcare — leave them with almost no slack in a system that increasingly hammers constraints into fragility.

That fragility is about to be tested by forces most of them have barely begun to reckon with.

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How the System Funneled Us Here

Remember this: brittle achievement isn’t an individual failure.

Consider what it actually takes, right now, to achieve any kind of well-to-do middle-class life in North America — the kind of life that 30 years ago was attainable on a single professional income, with some effort.

Now we need, at minimum, two incomes. To get those incomes, most of us invested heavily in education — which, for a huge and growing share of professionals, means significant student debt and decades of delayed savings. It’s also meant delayed homeownership (the median first-time buyer is now pushing forty), which in turn means entering the housing market later, with bigger mortgages, less runway to build equity, and missed appreciation.

And to own a home, we have to choose a place. There’s the trap.

See, in America, the places where the good life is affordable — where a stretched professional household can actually buy a home with good schools and reasonable commutes — are, with increasing frequency, the places where climate risk is the worst. This is not a coincidence. It is the result of others’ plays for profit.

NIMBY politics have largely shut down new housing in high-paying, progressive, relatively safe cities, making the homes there out of reach for many. In 1980, the price-to-income ratio (how many years’ wages it took to buy a house) was 3 to 4 years. In my home town, Berkeley, it’s now at least 12 years. Most middle-class kids who grew up in places like this know that they’ll probably never get to live there as adults.

Where do they get to live?

The wildland-urban interface is the fastest-growing land use type in the country.

The Sunbelt exurbs where new development is cheapest are also, disproportionately, the places most exposed to heat, flood, fire, and the cascading infrastructure failures that follow.

Coastal communities where you can still buy in at a semi-reasonable price are often the ones where the insurance market is already starting to crack.

The spreading floodplain subdivisions, the booming mountain towns, the oceanside sprawl — these are the places that still offer an entry point to the life we were raised to expect.

They’re also some of the most brittle places in the country. The search to secure what we’re told is our primary asset becomes the creation of our own vulnerability.

Market dynamics have been quietly funneling the almost-secure into higher-risk geographies. Relatively safe wealthier neighborhoods — more established, better resourced, less exposed — are mostly out of reach for the merely prosperous. Riskier places that offer similar homes at lower entry cost attract the families that can’t pull together huge down payments, ones that a generation ago got you into a mansion and today buy you the keys to a fixer bungalow with foundation problems.

None of this was an accident. Those market dynamics didn’t just happen. Older homeowners squashed urban housing in part to reap some of the fastest housing appreciation in history. Suburban builders lobbied hard to ignore risk and turn risky land into profitable real estate. A host of others — bankers, real estate brokers, local boosters seeking growth — have all done well by ignoring the dangers, and by demanding others ignore them, too. All this is an open secret.

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But there’s a big difference between being able to find something out and knowing you should go looking for it — much less knowing what to do with that information once you’ve got it.

Almost none of the information needed to spot these threats is found in the decision flows we’re funneled into.

Buying a house? Nobody mentions climate chaos in the realtor’s pitch. Intentionally undisclosed in the listing. Missing in the school comparison ratings. Invisible to most of us in the neighborhood walkthrough.

Even if we had the awareness, we might not have had the tools to make better choices — and maybe we couldn’t have found the finances for those choices anyway. For many of us, as one family profiled in the New York Times put it, “there were no good options.”

We bought the best homes we could afford that would support the kinds of lives we hoped to have. We paid for security. We got exposure.

Too Successful to Afford a Change

Even when we begin to worry that we’re exposed, acting on that suspicion is brutally hard. What’s pinning us in place is the way our lives work.

Consumption, for people who are upper middle class (or aspire to be), is not just hedonism but functional display.

The neighborhood eases belonging. The school provides connection. The professional network circulates opportunity. To a real degree, the right car and the right clothes and the right tech — or at least not the wrong ones — increase the trust people have in you. You’ve got to look the part.

Downshifting or relocating doesn’t just cost money — it cuts into our access to the people and institutions and opportunities that make our economic lives work. That means our monthly costs are largely fixed and kind of non-negotiable.

They’re also place-based. The school the kids are finally settled in. The commute that makes the job possible. The professional network that makes the career work. The infrastructure of a life with prospects isn’t as portable as the work-from-home moment promised.

And what some people might consider a lot of money doesn’t necessarily mean you have a lot of easy options. We treat earned income and leveraged assets as proxies for security. They are not. Not anymore. Not in the middle of an unprecedented discontinuity.

Imagine one couple that earns $200,000 a year with a paid-off house in a low-risk metro, a future inheritance backstopping their retirement, and a diversified investment portfolio.

Then consider another couple that also earns $200,000 a year, but with $150,000 in student debt, years left on their mortgage, retirement savings locked in a 401(k), and a cash reserve that might not last them more than a couple months.

The actually rich — those with family money, or who caught an equity event at the right time, or who simply entered the market a decade or two earlier than their peers — have fundamentally different options. They have buffers. They can wait, act later and still land on their feet. Good decision-making still matters, of course, but a bad decision won’t break them.

Brittle achievers have the money to make a move, but they can’t afford to make the wrong move. The decisions they’re being forced to face — where to live, what to invest in, when to move — are the highest-stakes decisions of their lives, being made in the midst of some of the largest climate and ecological upheavals in human history. That crisis is here, and paradoxically it is precisely their successes that now leave them so exposed.

That pressure intensifies when social mobility requires the performance of security.

Think about what it means to be a professional in your late thirties or forties, doing well by every visible metric. You signal competence and stability to employers. You project reliability to your networks. You’ve built your life on a narrative of upward mobility — a story that says if you went to the right schools, made the right sacrifices, worked hard enough, the future would arrive as promised. Talking about having underestimated the speed and ferocity of the planetary crisis will not get you a raise, start-up capital, or an approving nod from your in-laws.

So even when the risk comes knocking — the insurance non-renewal letter, the wildfire that burned your friends’ house the next town over, the flood that closed the freeway for a week — you face a tough moment. Staying is increasingly dangerous. Leaving is expensive in both dollars and the social and professional capital that helps you earn your living. With a recession on the way, politics in turmoil, and AI grinding through people’s jobs, it may not feel like the optimal time to start talking about the need to change your life. And all of this is difficult to talk seriously about, anyway, even with people you know well.

Deeply invested in what might be bad bets, locked into stressful expenses, not sure who to talk with and what to say (not to mention saddled with the same anxiety most people get when they think about the ice caps melting and the rainforests burning)… it’s no wonder a lot of us have taken the attitude of “wait and see.”

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Canaries Falling Over Everywhere

But what are we looking for?

One leading indicator of brittleness is the insurance market. The world is increasingly uninsurable, but the effects are highly spiky due to differences in risk.

Insurers don’t do sentiment. Their trade is pricing risk, and when risk exceeds what the math can bear, they pack bags and go.

We’re seeing more and more departures. Premiums are rising. Non-renewals are accelerating. More and more households are being pushed onto last-resort state plans that offer less coverage at higher prices — and are likely to eventually fail.

And here, a little salt in the wound for the resilient-on-paper: more expensive homes get more expensive to insure, more quickly. Replacement cost is the key variable, and the houses we stretched to buy — the ones at the upper edge of what our incomes can service — are precisely the ones where premium increases bite deepest. The mortgage budget doesn’t hold constant when insurance doubles. The math that barely worked stops working.

This is no future problem. It’s happening now. And for families with thin financial cushions, a significant insurance shock is no inconvenience. It signals the beginning of a cascading series of constraints that can push a family from “doing well” to “in serious trouble” in a matter of months. From “house poor” to “mortgage prisoners.”

The insurance market is telling us something the public debate has not yet absorbed: a core pillar of middle-class security is eroding, unevenly and quickly.

The Brittleness Bubble is going to burst.

The Brittleness Bottleneck

Here’s where the crisis sinks its teeth into us.

The subgroup of higher-income households who most need to reposition — to move to relative safety, to get out from under the most exposed assets, to ruggedize their lives — are often in a terrible position to do so.

I’ve worked with enough high-net-worth people to know that the rich ruggedize differently than the rest of us. The wealthy can afford to harden their homes against storm, fire, and flood. They can buy other homes in safer regions while they figure things out. They can collect passports. They can hedge the market. They can certainly eat a loss on a house sale if things go wrong. They have options that don’t collapse under the pressures of discontinuity.

That’s not the position most of us are in. The kinds of decisions you have to make to pursue prosperity are commitments with serious consequences. Buying a home: it takes you a number of years to earn back the upfront costs. Finding a local community. Building a local professional network.

Under stable conditions, commitments are fine. You buy, you build equity, you have options later. That was the deal.

Conditions are not stable.

The house that was our path to security becomes our largest liability. The metro we chose for its affordability turns out to have been affordable because it was exposed — because the risk was underpriced, because the insurance markets hadn’t caught up yet.

We bought the best option we could afford. And now that’s the thing that may break us. Your equity may be locked in a landscape that’s losing its future. Your savings are thin. Your fixed costs leave you less than you’d like to fund a move. Wait, and the potential for loss of value deepens as risk gets priced into properties. Try to ruggedize in place, and you may be throwing good money after bad in a city sliding toward unofficial abandonment.

It’s not too late, but the timing is critical.

We may find ourselves trying to weigh maxing out the benefits of our lives as they are against the gains to be gotten from a more decisive choice. But when problems are steepening, delay always costs.

For one thing, you may be ahead of the curve to be thinking about this stuff now, but not too far ahead. It’s a matter of years, not decades, before millions of others see what you’re seeing now.

When they do, many will be looking for their own ways out. They’ll seek the same relative safety, societal stability, and economic prospects we do.

And there is nowhere near enough to go around. The supply of relatively safe communities doesn’t come close to matching the demand of those who will want to escape worsening loss and damage. Nor are we building enough now to grow that supply before the rush comes.

This is the brittleness bottleneck: the window for action is open now, but it is closing.

Every year of delay narrows our options. Every premium increase, every non-renewal, every headline about a disaster that looks like the one coming for our neighborhood — each is the sound of the bottleneck tightening.

Here’s the thing: while being resilient on paper isn’t an individual failure, most of brittle achievers have only their own resources to fall back on when it comes to fixing things.

They fall through every institutional gap. They earn too much to qualify for assistance. They appear too successful to be at risk. No policy is designed for their resilience. No one’s going to GoFundMe their relocation costs. No one’s coming. As climate adaptation professor Jesse Keenan says, “You’re on your own.”

We can’t plan for situations we can’t imagine. So a lot of us end up blending random doomscrolling and haphazard incrementalism. Informed and adrift: we price solar panels, shop for emergency kits, watch a video about backyard farming, consider whether we need a new firearm for home defense, and make a vague plan to look into the big picture next year, once the renovation is done, once the kids are settled, once things calm down.

I’ve written before that old thinking will break your brain — that the worldviews we inherited from a previous era, formed on a different planet, cannot parse the discontinuity we’re living through. This is true for all of us, but it is acutely true for the brittle achievers, because the specific worldview we need to abandon is the one that tells us we’re winning. That we’re one step away from safety. That the hard part is over.

The hard part is just beginning.

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The Gap Between Agency and Awareness Is the Danger

What worries me most is not the danger. If you know you need a strategy for managing climate chaos in your own life, you can design one. What worries me most is the cost of silence.

It’s not that we face the worst climate problems. We don’t. It’s that we face the largest gap between the scale of our exposure and our recognition of it. The gap between actual risk and awareness of that risk is larger for this group than for almost any other.

We’re people with the skills and resources to make excellent decisions if we only had the right information and frameworks. Instead, every signal the brittle achievers receive — from the housing market, from financial advisors, from the culture, from the absence of policy — nudges them toward climate precarity.

Few are talking about this. Climate discourse focuses — understandably — on the most vulnerable and on the politics of large-scale action. Policy conversations about adaptation rarely acknowledge that a huge swath of the professional class is at serious risk. Financial journalism covers the insurance crisis and the housing market but almost never connects the dots to the specific condition of households that look prosperous but operate without margin. And we ourselves can’t easily raise it, because doing so in the wrong context might strain important relationships.

This gap is itself a danger. It means people in this position are making the most consequential decisions of their lives — where to buy, when to move, how to invest what little margin they have — without adequate information, without social support, without institutional guidance, and often without even the conceptual vocabulary to describe what they’re navigating. We carry a vulnerability to bad decisions that is, frankly, terrifying — because we have just enough agency to act, but not enough margin to recover easily from wrong moves.

The gap was also manufactured. Climate denial, predatory delay, active campaigns to silence scientists and suppress evidence of our endangerment — we don’t see the reality of our situation in part because thousands of people spent billions of dollars over five decades to cloud our eyes.

Partially succeeding, then having success pulled away, doesn’t make us failures. We are people who played the game by the rules read out to us, in an economy that systematically broke those same rules and obscured the risks we were taking on. We were told that homeownership was security. That a good income meant a good future. That the world was still a stable place.

It wasn’t crazy for us to believe them. At one time, when there was less carbon in the sky, these things were true.

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What This Means For You

Cut yourself some slack. I can’t blame anyone who now finds themselves in this position. You shouldn’t beat yourself up, either.

We have been surrounded by silence. There’s no public language for our condition, no policy framework for our risk, no narrative that acknowledges the specific and worsening danger of being prosperous-but-brittle in a discontinuous world. We’re not yet ready for what’s already happened.

But we do have agency. We can act. Early action has outsized leverage for us — more, arguably, than for any other group, because the gap between where we are and where we could be is bridgeable, if we build the bridge in time.

The leverage is real, and it cuts both ways. Get to relative safety before the bottleneck tightens further, and you’ve recalibrated your family’s entire trajectory. But the same forces work in reverse. Wait too long, and the costs of action rise while the resources available to act shrink. Without a currently impossible level of societal mobilization, the bottleneck will be a ratchet. It will only tighten.

If all this makes your head spin a bit, you’re not alone. It’s a lot to take in, that your life is resilient on paper but brittle in practice.

It really helps, though, to engage. To process the news, let go of the world we thought we had, and then take on the challenges of the present. If you need a place to start, here’s a three-point plan:

• Learn more. Climate science is just the start. You need climate foresight — an understanding of discontinuity as the context for every other decision you’re about make. Learn the real risks facing your specific place. Learn how to spot brittleness, and how to recognize relative safety. This newsletter and podcast explore climate foresight: you might want to make use of them.

• Value what you have. It might sound like strange advice when I’ve just spent 4,000 words pointing out real and worsening dangers. But the most important truth of personal climate response is that a good climate strategy serves the person you are, the people you love, and the life you’re trying to build. Climate strategies should build you a stable platform for living your best life, not become your life.

• Start looking. Decide whether you’re going to relocate to another region. Or will you reposition to a better-sited home or safer community while disrupting your life as little as possible? Or will you dig in where you are, invest in ruggedizing your home and encouraging your neighbors to build a little pocket of reduced brittleness? Personal ruggedization isn’t about buying guns, bugging out, or bunkering down. It’s about making smart decisions about where we choose to live, the systems in which we embed ourselves, and the ways we work with others to improve our odds of a good future.

One caution: remember there’s never enough time to think ahead.

You mean to sit down and read that essay or listen to that podcast, but the dog’s sick, you’ve got a kid’s birthday party to plan (or college visits to book), your parents need some help, or your spouse has a business trip coming up. We wind up short on time, and we drop the thing that feels least urgent — thinking about the future. This is how crises sneak up on us: not through foolishness or lack of grit, but through simple inattention.

And remember this: you and your family may be on your own, but you’re not alone, and doing the right thing here helps everyone. Everything we have to do to help ourselves helps society as well. Denial and inaction are the biggest threats facing our society, and you can’t help change those by sacrificing yourself. You change them by living in the real world. Face facts, speak plainly, strategize accordingly, and work to improve the community you call home.

— Alex

P.S. My Personal Climate Strategy Workshop is one way to learn faster. It won’t tell you what to do. It will give you the tools to make better decisions. You don’t have to join to figure this stuff out, but if you want to seriously jumpstart your strategy — and do so in good company — this is a proven way to do that.

The Workshop begins April 14th. Enrollment closes April 13th. We have a great group coming together for this 10th cohort, and space is limited. Have questions about the PCSW? Email us at alison@alexsteffen.com.

Check Out the Workshop

Climate chaos? You’re living it. Last week’s U.S. heatwave broke more than 1,500 high-temperature records in 11 states. This week, Severe Tropical Cyclone Narelle whipped up dust storms that turned the sky bright red over Western Australia. Earlier this month, softball-sized hailstones fell from a storm stretching from Texas to Illinois. And El Niño is coming.

Most of us are still trying to plan our lives with the same strategies our parents and grandparents used. But we don’t live in the same world as they did. We live on a planet wracked with upheavals and transformations — ecological, economic, technological and political. We need strategies for thriving in discontinuity.

This is exactly what the Personal Climate Strategy Workshop is designed to help you do.

The Workshop was featured Sunday in the New York Times: “Lessons in How to Cope with Climate Change.” The next Workshop begins on April 14th.

Today’s the last call for early-bird pricing. This discount ends at 11pm Pacific tonight. Save 30% on Workshop tuition.

CLAIM YOUR SPOT

P.S. Have questions about the Workshop? Please email us at Alison@AlexSteffen.com

P.P.S. Life’s busy and you might not be able to attend all nine calls. That’s okay. Calls are recorded and we send out recordings and resources between calls so people can catch up and keep pace with the course. This also makes it easy to come back to it later to inform future decisions.

How would you like to know you’re ready for life in a hotter, more chaotic world?

We’re very excited to be able to announce this spring’s Personal Climate Strategy Workshop, beginning April 14th, and running four weeks (classes on April 14, 16, 21, 23, 28, 30; May 5 and 7. Wrap-Up Discussion Call on May 14. Tuesdays and Thursdays from 12 - 1:30pm Pacific on Zoom. Already interested? Find out more here:

Check out The Workshop

The New York Times just ran a feature about the Workshop, and the response has been really terrific.

A lot of people are suddenly feeling the need to ask the question, “Are we ready for what’s coming?” Most of us aren’t. We’re not even ready for all the change whipping around us today. We live during an unprecedented crisis, and we all have to make our way through it. We need strategies for doing that.

I saw that need emerging earlier than most.

Five years ago, I set out to build the best system available to meet that need. It’s based on my decades of on-the-ground experience and research. It’s grounded in the best new evidence from a range of disciplines. It’s informed by thousands of conversations I’ve had with folks facing climate chaos in their own lives. It’s now been delivered, reiterated and improved over nine Workshops.

I’m confident in this system — and I think the fact that a high percentage of Workshop participants make their livings in fields like risk management, climate policy and institutional strategy speaks to the quality of work underpinning this system. It’s why I believe the feedback I’ve gotten, that “there’s nothing else like this, anywhere.”

Now, no one can guarantee your outcomes. Anyone who claims they can is deceiving either themselves, or you.

There’s no one right answer. Models disagree. Data are incomplete. Unchecked assumptions weaken reliability of predictions. The very speed of change ripping through complex and interconnected systems is magnifying uncertainty.

And the same facts can have different implications for different people. Every good climate strategy is bespoke. Your individual circumstances, values and responsibilities mean that someone else’s solid strategy might fall apart for you (and vice versa).

You can, however, definitely improve your odds. I can show you how.

You can stack the cards in your favor by adopting personal climate strategies that build on your own strengths, reduce well-evidenced risks, that secure reliable gains, and ground you in realistic thinking.

Let’s unpack how this Workshop delivers these:

Make Smarter Real-World Choices

A false belief in continuity — that things will more or less happen tomorrow as they happened yesterday — can be ruinous in times of rapid change. Early action means real leverage. It’s absolutely vital to match our thinking to the discontinuities of this moment.

Participants have told me that the tools we use, like the Brittleness Triangle, have helped them:

• Get a practical grasp on climate foresight, understanding the patterns behind the chaos and improving decision-making in every aspect of their lives.

• Become more aware of the systems upon which they depend, and inspired to advocate more effectively for change.

• Find clarity on their own risk tolerance, priorities and value; on their own relationships and connections to community; and on the timing of the changes they need to make.

Already, hundreds of participants have used the mental models I offer in this Workshop to sharpen not only their plans for the future, but also their timelines of action.

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Reduce Knowable Risks

As the planetary crisis bites deep over the next few years, risk is going to translate into financial loss, and the costs of being unprepared will escalate.

Participants have used their personal climate strategies to:

• Relocate — across town or across the world — finding new homes with greater safety.

• Ruggedize their homes to function better in the face of ongoing upheavals.

• Work with their neighbors and local officials to make the essential systems around them more climate-proof.

These steps mean real money saved from loss prevention, but also direct benefits in terms of quality of life, health and family security.

Check out The Workshop

Secure Your Gains

Creating a stable, rugged platform for living the life you’ve built makes it much more likely that your family will continue to thrive in the years ahead.

Participants have used their strategies as a launchpad to:

• Shift careers in ways that make them better prepared for discontinuity in the workplace.

• Give their kids a more stable place to grow up; and guide older children in their own decisions about how to face climate chaos.

• Reallocate investments, improve their insurability, make financially sound home ruggedization improvements and prepare a more robust retirement.

Astute people understand this crisis as both a massive societal upheaval and as a new context for our lives, one that offers us the chance to be more intentional with our choices — and maybe see better results than we were expecting.

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Last, but certainly not least, we Improve Resilience with Connection

This workshop is built on a foundation of science, expertise and evidence. Yet we also spend time talking about our emotions and our worldviews, about who we’re connected with and how we communicate. That’s by design.

First, it’s healthy. Almost everyone who really gets the planetary crisis gets worried about it. That constant concern can leave us feeling isolated and anxious. Self care, mental hygiene, honest communications and positive relationships are important tools for maintaining the grit to navigate this crisis. The heart matters.

Second, it’s smart. Mental resilience and emotional connection are also the keys to getting hard things done. Personal ruggedization is a team sport, even for the most self-reliant among us. Connecting with others and communicating effectively about your common goals and shared future is how you make serious personal changes work.

We discuss approaches to building mental resilience and nurturing intelligent optimism. We have chances to connect with others who are working through the same problems. There’s no need to carry this alone. And we share tools for initiating effective conversations about shared futures with those you care about.

Bottom line: This Workshop works. More than 500 people have now taken my two climate strategy classes. Many of them have written testimonials (see below).

What are the nuts and bolts of the Workshop?

• Eight sessions of 75 minutes each, followed by discussion.

• One wrap-up call, where we go over our new tools and apply them to actual locations participants have suggested.

• Recorded videos of all the calls, to refer to later.

• Extensive resources, readings and prompts for further exploration, to help you keep moving forward after the Workshop.

• Invitation to our alumni network group, and deep discounts on one-on-one consultations.

It’s an extraordinary chance to answer, with confidence, “Yes — we are ready for what’s coming.”

So, if this opportunity — a holistic approach to building the life you want in times of escalating crisis, delivered through a tested system with proven successes, led by a 30+ year climate veteran, and explored together with a group of smart, like-minded people from around the globe — sounds like something you want, then please join us in this Workshop!

Sign Up Here

You can also gift the workshop to a family member or friend.

Space is limited.

Thanks,

Alex

PS: Here’s what a few of the past participants have said about the Workshop.

“Alex Steffen’s course could save your money, your sanity, maybe even your life. At a time when the stability of systems we’ve taken for granted over our lifetimes is shifting beneath our feet in real time --- from insurance and housing to healthcare – due to escalating climate threats, what can you do to face climate reality with savviness and knowledge, so you can make the right decisions for you and your family, think about your investments and possible migrations wisely, using the latest data and insights? If you’re not yet asking these questions, you’re not paying attention. Alex Steffen will change the way you think about planning for your future.”

—Britt Wray, Director of CIRCLE at Stanford Psychiatry

“When all the others are just talking about what systems-collapse or planetary crisis looks like, Alex’s work already gives you a framework on how to navigate it with confidence and with the clear possibility of creating a thriving and hardened future for you, your loved ones, and the communities you serve.”

—Justin D’Atri, Group Sustainability Transformation Lead, Zurich Insurance Group

“Over the course of taking the class I began to realize that developing my own personal climate strategy will likely be the vehicle through which I get back in touch with the things that matter most to me in this life. Alex reminded me that if a strategy is not doing that, then it’s likely not a strategy for me. We are in uncharted territory in this climate crisis, but the world is not ending, life is moving forward and the cities and structures we have now will be the places from which we ruggedize and adjust to living in a hotter world. And some of them are less risky than others. Alex wants to teach us how to spot brittleness and plan ruggedly. He wants us to stop blaming ourselves for this crisis, stop doom-scrolling and to realize that building our own climate strategies and implementing them is the best salve, one of the most positively impactful things we can do, and perhaps one of the best vehicles to a more meaningful and intention-filled life. And we don’t have to do it alone...”

—Katie Herzig, Musician, Nashville, TN

“Thanks to Alex’s course, our family took decisive action and moved to a new city. We love our new home. We’ve jumped right in to work alongside our neighbors who are already ruggedizing the city. There’s much to do. We are so grateful that Alex helped us quickly identify the important factors to consider and set us on a path for being better prepared to care for ourselves, our neighbors and all in our city and wider region. Alex’s work was life-changing for us, and absolutely worth our investment of money and time.”

—Maia

“Alex has been thinking about the impacts of climate change longer than most people. Through his course, Alex provides an insight to the more likely future scenarios and helps attendees position themselves, physically and mentally, to avoid the worst impacts and take advantage of the opportunities that are created.”

—Jeff Roulston, Queensland, Australia

“In light of the most recent IPCC report, I would recommend this ruggedization course to anyone who plans to live on this planet after 2030. You will acquire a strategic framework to approach personal life decisions in the face of uncertainty, as well as a helpful lens through which to view and evaluate current events and policy decisions. I have gained valuable perspective to help my family and I not just survive, but thrive through the Anthropocene.”

—participant

This course “has changed the way I think about my work in climate change engagement and communications. It has opened up novel routes to talking about both climate risks and the potential of climate action. On a personal level, It stimulated a new level of thinking about personal and family contexts in terms of risk assessment, planning and adaptation activities…I am an academic, climate communications specialists and climate activist; this course met the needs of all of those 'personas.'“

—Liz Gladin; Climate & Biodiversity Communications Consultant

“As someone deeply invested in climate activism, a mother, and a former mayor, I can't stress enough how important it is to consider this course, whether you're just becoming aware of the crisis or have been concerned about our changing climate for some time. …I urge you to enroll in this course and to also reach out to your local elected representatives, encouraging them to do the same.”

—Heidi Harmon; former mayor of San Luis Obispo, CA

“For anyone interested in personally preparing yourself and your family for climate change impacts, boy do I have a great recommendation for you…

“Last year I paid $2,400 for his intensive 6-week course, and it was one of the most impactful learning experiences I’ve had on any topic in the last decade…

“All you have to believe is that the future is likely to be more risky and uncertain, whether from climate change or just natural disasters, political instability, social unrest, armed conflict, economic or supply chain disruption, etc.

“Heck, you could completely disbelieve climate change is happening at all, and this course would still be transformational because its focus is on preparing you and your family and community for a wide range of potential scenarios, whatever those might be. [He] completely dismantles typical “prepper” advice, showing how fundamentally misguided it is for almost any future scenario (the actual best way to prepare is completely counter-intuitive).

“Most of all, the students and community that are part of Steffen’s courses are simply phenomenal. Thoughtful, wise, accomplished but also empathetic people, many of whom are playing active roles in shaping policy, economics, planning, and business.

“Alex addresses a remarkable range of holistic topics, from the all-important choice of where to locate yourself, to the psychological mindset shifts needed, to basic provisioning and preparing for utility interruption, to adapting your career, finances, and business for likely future changes.

“I ‘10 out of 10’ recommend you check this one out.”

Tiago Forte, entrepreneur, Forte Labs

“After nearly 20 years working in sustainability—and having followed Alex Steffen’s work even longer—I finally took his Personal Climate Strategy Workshop. To put it simply: it’s the most valuable climate foresight training I’ve ever taken.”

— Justus Stewart

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We’re grateful that the New York Times has published a story about my Personal Climate Strategy Workshop:

Fearing Chaos of Climate Change, Some Seek Answers in Virtual Classroom: A monthlong seminar offers lessons in how to anticipate and prepare for the mounting disruptions of global warming.

This is great.

We find ourselves, though, facing a minor awkwardness, in that we haven’t actually announced the next Workshop, even as a lot more people are showing up wanting to find out what it is, when it starts and how to join in the fun. (You might say we were not yet ready for the story that has already happened.)

We’ll be sending out a formal launch announcement on Tuesday, but for anyone wanting to know more now, here are the details.

The Spring Personal Climate Strategy Workshop course description can be found here.

Workshop Dates/Times: April 14, 16, 21, 23, 28, 30; May 5 and 7 (Tuesdays and Thursdays from 12:00 - 1:15pm Pacific on Zoom, with a Q and A afterwards). Wrap-Up Discussion call on May 14. All calls are recorded and shared with participants.

Do you already know you want to join?

I'M READY TO SIGN UP NOW

There’s a 30% discount for those who enroll by March 31st.

Space is limited.

Thanks,

Alex

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PS: If you’re new to this newsletter and looking to understand how you can turn profound uncertainty into an actionable life strategy, here are five foundational pieces:

• Hurricane Helene’s Message for Us About Our Future (The big picture.)

• Climate Chaos is Already Making Us Poorer. We’re Just Pretending It’s Not. (The problems are urgent, and already impacting your life.)

• Relative Safety in the Planetary Crisis (How to avoid disaster.)

• The Relocation Bottleneck and You (Why time is short.)

• “It Will Change the Way You Think About Planning for Your Future.” (How a climate strategy prepares you for success.)

“Fearing Chaos of Climate Change, Some Seek Answers in Virtual Classroom: A monthlong seminar offers lessons in how to anticipate and prepare for the mounting disruptions of global warming.”

We’re excited to share that the New York Times has covered my Personal Climate Strategy Workshop in today’s paper.

This is a big deal for a small effort like ours. (And we’d like your help spreading the word…)

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What’s in the story?

Reporter Hilary Howard did a great job of not only explaining my own personal climate strategy work, but also the larger movement helping people manage the realities of life in discontinuity.

Here’s a passage

Mr. Steffen, 58, saw this need coming. When he was younger, he was a freelance environmental reporter, focusing on solutions-based journalism to solve the climate crisis… But about a decade ago, he had the “grim realization” that the solutions weren’t arriving fast enough, he said.

In 2021, he published an essay asserting that society had entered an era of “discontinuity” — when past experiences can no longer help with future decisions — because of global warming. It went viral. … People started asking Mr. Steffen for advice, so he created the class in 2023, charging about $2,500 per student. That same year, the Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine published a paper declaring that climate change had caused a psychological condition of “systemic insecurity.”

Mr. Steffen’s course, while not a cure-all, offers a safe environment for the climate-obsessed, who are uncomfortable bringing up the topic in everyday conversations because it can be so distressing. A recurring joke among many students is that no one wants to talk to them at parties. But for 75 minutes, twice a week, the online course welcomes their questions and concerns…

Howard goes on to point out what is to me the most important truth of personal climate response: that a good climate strategy serves the person you are, and the life you’re trying to build. The science is just the start.

Personal ruggedization certainly isn't about buying more guns, bugging out or bunkering down. Instead, it’s about making smart decisions about where we choose to live, the systems we embed ourselves in, and the ways we work with others to improve our odds of a good future.

Mr. Steffen encourages students to use a holistic approach — taking into account proximity to friends and family, earning potential and cultural interests — in determining where and how they want to live.

And social cohesion, he emphasized, is a must. “If you are guarding canned foods with guns, you’ve already lost,” Mr. Steffen said in a recent class. “The real first responders are your neighbors.”

It’s a great story, and I really encourage you to read the whole thing. Most people really have no idea how to connect to insights they need to manage this crisis. This work is important.

I have a huge favor to ask. Please help us spread the word!

Here’s a gift article link, meaning anyone can read this story on the NYT for free.

Please share this link via email (or forward this newsletter) or post it on social media. If you have a particular family member, friend or colleague who might find it interesting, please send it along with a note.

Here’s the gift link as a plain URL for copying and pasting:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/21/nyregion/fearing-chaos-of-climate-change-some-seek-answers-in-virtual-classroom.html?unlocked_article_code=1.U1A.b38b.Lnuv-UapGlo7&smid=url-share

You can also comment on the story itself or recommend others’ comments you find interesting.

Thank you.

Alex

PS: We’re just about to celebrate our fifth anniversary here on The Snap Forward. I’ve been doing this work for more than 30 years, and a bunch of us have been sharing ideas together since Worldchanging days, or before. I am so grateful.

PPS: If by chance you’re reading this and you’re not yet a regular reader, please subscribe! Most of the essays and podcasts are free, though we really appreciate the support of paying subscribers.

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Welcome! We’re seeing a lot of new visitors, and I want to take a moment to outline what my work is about and how you might find some of my thinking useful.

Who Am I, and What Do I Do?

I’m Alex Steffen. I’m a writer, public speaker, and climate futurist.

For the last 30 years, I’ve been on the forefront of the planetary crisis—as an environmental journalist, the editor of Worldchanging, and an advisor to scores of institutions. Along the way, I’ve had thousands of conversations with smart people wanting to make sensible plans for unprecedented times.

A lot of what used to feel stable no longer does. Almost everything about our lives, communities, and economies was built to work well in another world, back when the climate was stable. Risks are shifting faster than our institutions can track. Now, we are experiencing a discontinuity with that past.

Past experience is now a poor guide to future decisions. And most of us are making life decisions using outdated assumptions, for futures we only partially understand.

Foresight is no longer a luxury, but a life skill. This newsletter exists to help you.

Where to Start With These Ideas.

Where should you start? If you want to understand how to turn profound uncertainty into an actionable life strategy, here are five foundational pieces:

• Hurricane Helene’s Message for Us About Our Future (The big picture.)

• Climate Chaos is Already Making Us Poorer. We’re Just Pretending It’s Not. (The problems are urgent, and already impacting your life.)

• Relative Safety in the Planetary Crisis (How to avoid disaster.)

• The Relocation Bottleneck and You (Why time is short.)

• “It Will Change the Way You Think About Planning for Your Future.” (How a climate strategy prepares you for success.)

You don’t need to read everything. Just check out what looks useful. If something here resonates, stick around.

What Are the Next Steps?

1. Subscribe to this Newsletter: If you haven’t already, make sure you are subscribed. Free subscribers get letters about navigating discontinuity and access to the When We Are podcast.

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2. Build Your Strategy: If you want to make clear, practical plans, I teach workshops and intensive courses on precisely this. You can find them over at my course hub. The next Personal Climate Strategy Workshop runs April 14th - May 14th, 2026. If you’re ready to start building a robust, holistic approach to living the life you want in a time of accelerating upheaval, this is for you. (Early-bird pricing available through March 31st!)

Learn More About the Workshop

Media? Speaking requests?

For these inquiries, please email alison@alexsteffen.com

Do you know how much climate chaos is costing you, now?

This episode of When We Are is a quick exploration of how much loss is both a) already being incurred, and b) largely being ignored (or even being actively denied).

We can’t avoid future loss completely, but turning our attention to the ways we now face riskier, more brittle and less prosperous futures can help us make better decisions as climate chaos worsens.

If you’re interested in the topic, I’ve included some additional reading below.

Thanks for listening,

Alex

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I wrote about the active denial of present risk in this newsletter:

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I wrote about the ways climate chaos is already undermining our economic prosperity in this essay:

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I also wrote about the myriad ways in which the erosive effects of climate shifts — individually almost too slow or small to notice, but dire in aggregate — can wreak havoc on the systems we depend on for our prosperity:

PS: As always, if you get some value from these discussions, please take a minute to rate the show. In Apple podcasts, go to the podcast’s main show page and scroll down to “Ratings & Reviews,” then click the star ratings. This really helps more people find the show. Thanks!

PPS: If you find these newsletters helpful or interesting, please help spread the word:

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Find out more about my Personal Climate Strategy Workshop here.

We live in a planetary crisis that is at its very core intergenerationally unjust. The vast majority of the benefits of predatory delay and extractive prosperity have gone to (and been consumed by) the oldest people in out society, while their unprecedented costs will land most heavily on the youngest.

But what if being young and bold can actually become an advantage at this moment?

The reaction to my podcast Crisis Advice for Young People was very positive, but folks wanted to hear more about what younger people might actually do to improve their odds.

This podcast is my attempt to suggest one way younger people may be able to leverage the freedoms of being young into a better position in the rough times ahead: by moving faster than other can.

As the man says, “Quick’s the word and sharp’s the action.”

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If you find it useful, please pass it along.

Alex

PS: The next Personal Climate Strategy: The Basics class is right around the corner, on Thursday, March 19th at 12pm PST // 8pm GMT! Get an introduction to a proven system for building a rugged decision-making framework, ready for times of increasing stress and disruption. Considering relocation? Planning for kids? Thinking about a new career? Mapping out the future of your business? This class can set you up to make better choices.

Sign up by March 10th and save $100!

GET THE BASICS

PPS: As always, if you get some value from these discussions, please take a minute to rate the show. In Apple podcasts, go to the podcast’s main show page and scroll down to “Ratings & Reviews,” then click the star ratings. This really helps more people find the show.

Reminder: The early-bird for the next live Personal Climate Strategy: The Basics ends on Tuesday, March 10! Sign up now for $97 (save $100). Class meets Thursday, March 19th at 12pm Pacific.

GET THE BASICS

I think of it as “The Myth of the Starting Gun and the Flat Track Fallacy.”

There are two parts here:

The Starting Gun: the idea that climate action and response will have a definable moment of acceleration, where delay drops away and rapid progress begins.

and

The Flat Track: the notion that when that moment of acceleration comes, our task will be deploying the kinds of policies, technologies and culture changes that advocates have been demanding for decades — that future action looks more or less like what we’ve been working towards, just arriving a little later than we hoped.

I think both parts are wrong. No moment of political transformation is coming, only the acceleration of capacities with unevenly distributed and partial successes. And as action does increase, we will increasingly find that our past plans simply no longer match the scale of discontinuity in front of us. No Orderly Transition is coming, and the broader climate debate is unprepared for what’s coming now.

I explore this idea in this episode of When We Are.

Alex

PS: The ninth Personal Climate Strategy: The Basics class is coming up on Thursday, March 19th at 12pm PST // 8pm GMT! Get an introduction to a proven system for building a rugged decision-making framework, ready for times of increasing stress and disruption. Considering relocation? Planning for your kids or grandkids? Mapping out the future of your business? This might be for you.

Sign up by March 10th and save $100!

GET THE BASICS

PPS: As always, if you get some value from these discussions, please take a minute to rate the show. In Apple podcasts, go to the podcast’s main show page and scroll down to “Ratings & Reviews,” then click the star ratings. This really helps more people find the show.

PPPS: If you find these newsletters helpful, please spread the word:

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Thank you!

Millions of us are disoriented.

In this podcast, I explore what foresight tells us about disorientation.

We’ve all been raised, educated and trained to understand the world around us. Much of that understanding, though, is tethered to notions about the shape and behavior of systems. Many of those notions, in turn, we absorb in a variety of informal ways that are lived, social or cultural — what we often think of as common sense.

In times of essential continuity, common sense plus a decent education is a powerful mix.

In discontinuous moments, though, they break down. I’ve written before about how hard we have to work these days to update our education and training to maintain a sort of evergreen expertise:

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Recently, though, I’ve had the chance to think a bit more about the emotional impacts of losing our sense of future direction.

We orient ourselves amidst change by looking for familiar landmarks, comfortable analogies between the new and the known, parallels that allow us to apply common sense to uncommon situations.

When we face a moderate tempo of change, this reference to the ordinary works — and comforts us.

But when we face rapid upheavals, it breaks down.

We find ourselves facing personal discontinuity, since if the world is suddenly different than we thought it was, our lives are different than the ones we thought we were living. We experience horizon collapse, as our experience and common sense no longer offer us a way of anticipating what comes next. We may even confront despair, as the world around us becomes so unfamiliar it just feels wrong.

That’s when it really helps to remember that we should feel this way, at least initially.

The planetary discontinuity we’re in is unprecedented. We’re not supposed to instantly adapt to that. We have to undertake a process of becoming at home in the present.

—Alex

PS: The ninth Personal Climate Strategy: The Basics class is coming up on Thursday, March 19th at 12pm PST // 8pm GMT! Get an introduction to a proven system for building a rugged decision-making framework, ready for times of increasing stress and disruption. Considering relocation? Planning for your kids or grandkids? Mapping out the future of your business? This might be for you.

Sign up by March 10th and save $100!

GET THE BASICS

PPS: If you find these newsletters and podcasts helpful, please let others know:

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Reminder: this season’s Personal Climate Strategy Workshop begins this Thursday, February 12th. Enrollment ends tomorrow at 9pm PST // 5am GMT. Interested? Click the button to learn more and save your spot while there’s still time:

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For a year now, I’ve been recording a climate foresight podcast (When We Are). It’s a pretty informal show — essentially it’s me, riffing on a topic, unedited and unproduced (and ad-free) — but folks seem to like it.

However, astonishing as you might find the idea, not every person has listened to every show. This is true, sadly, even of regular readers of my newsletter. What has the world come to, amiright?

If you’ve been planning to give it a listen, but don’t know where to start, we’ve got you.

We went through the archive and picked out ten of the most popular episodes. Give the episodes a scroll below, and see if one catches your fancy.

Finally, When We Are is also available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast and so on, if you prefer. If you do use a podcast app, please consider subscribing, rating and reviewing. It really helps.

Thanks!

Now, on to the list:

This season’s Personal Climate Strategy Workshop starts this Thursday. I thought you might be interested in hearing what we’re up to.

Build a personal strategy for a time of systemic disruption.

We have entered a new era of instability — ecological, economic, political, and institutional — but most of us are still trying to plan our lives with old tools from a more stable past.

This Workshop offers you the tools you need today. It is not a lecture about climate science, lifestyle changes, or political activism. Instead, it trains you in using a proven system for building a rugged decision-making framework ready for times of increasing stress and disruption.

In eight live sessions, you’ll learn a step-by-step process for getting clear-headed, prepared and effective as systems destabilize. You’ll leave with a personal climate strategy to guide you through the coming critical life decisions you face.

THE PLANETARY CRISIS HAS SHIFTED GEARS

Over the last few years, we’ve crossed many of the very thresholds climate advocates fought for decades to avoid: global heat records shattering, floods costing billions of dollars, wildfires intensifying, ice sheets breaking up, crops failing, droughts spreading. Many climate impacts are arriving sooner than expected and combining to be worse than forecast.

Society, though, has failed to respond at the same pace. Emissions are still rising. Climate adaptation planning is slow and underfunded. Local governments are overwhelmed. Whole nations are rolling back their climate promises and cutting disaster aid. Economists and business leaders warn that continued delay brings financial instability and risks to the economic futures of whole regions.

Worse still, we see a swelling “brittleness bubble” of overvalued, climate-endangered homes and assets -- a bubble that looks bound to burst.

Of course, we face all this in a time of authoritarian attacks on democracy and geopolitical chaos.

Add it all together, and we are living through the most rapid planetary destabilization humans have ever experienced. Solid advice from ten or twenty years ago is often now simply out of date.

THE PLANETARY CRISIS WILL DEFINE YOUR FUTURE

You know this crisis is real. But most of us have tended to see the planetary crisis as something happening elsewhere, to other people. An issue to track, not a context to reckon with.

Now, the chaos is all around us. It’s the wildfire smoke turning your skies hazy orange, the sudden increase in your insurance premiums, the battered infrastructure and flooded roads that turn your commute into a gamble. It’s your retirement investments taking a climate hit. Your kids seeking reassurance and guidance. Your community struggling to recover after heavy weather.

The climate crisis is not an issue, we find, but an era.

And this is only the beginning. We thought we had time. We’re discovering we don’t — that later is too late.

YOUR FUTURE IS NOW YOUR RESPONSIBILITY

We’re all now on a collision course with planetary reality.

We’re not heading into a linear, manageable transition. We’re facing cascading failures, converging disasters, and compounding brittleness risks. We’re in a discontinuity, and past expertise and experience are poor guides to what’s coming. No one is as ready as they should be.

You can’t count on governments (or advocacy groups or churches or charities or anyone else around you) to protect your home, defend the systems you depend on and secure your future. You’ll need to act before bold government rescue plans, or climate-adaptation megaprojects, or large-scale supported relocation programs get up and running — because in many places, they may never come.

If you want to be ready, you have to make yourself ready, and time is not on your side.

YOU FACE FIERCE COMPETITION FOR THE FUTURE YOU WANT

This crisis will be life-changing for many millions of us.

As this fact grows obvious and undeniable, more and more people are scrambling for security, for safer places and sturdier communities.

Place is at the center of personal climate strategies. Where we plant ourselves as the chaos intensifies is one of the most important questions of our lifetimes.

Nowhere is completely safe and no system is completely stable, but some are a lot safer and more stable than others. In relatively safe places, we can build the foundations for successful and relatively secure lives; in the more brittle, vulnerable places, we’re in for an extremely hard future.

Here’s the harsh truth, though: there’s not enough relative safety to go around.

Nowhere on Earth are we doing enough to ruggedize more places for climate chaos, or grow at the necessary scales in the places that are relatively safe. We face a closing climate relocation bottleneck, as more and more worried people scramble for a shrinking supply of places that can offer a durable future.

Not everyone will get the future they deserve.

SUCCESS DEMANDS A STRATEGY

To get the future you deserve, you need a strategy.

Specifically, you need a life strategy for making smart choices in unprecedented circumstances — what I call a personal climate strategy.

The discontinues of climate chaos will impact every aspect of your life: your family’s security and health; your career and household finances; your community and civic life; your investments and retirement planning.

And, of course, each of us has unique circumstances and different goals. There is no one-size-fits-all best answer.

A good strategy will prepare you to:

• Care for yourself and your loved ones.

• Honor your values and help those who depend on you.

• Support healthy and sensible decision-making.

• Navigate cascading risks, identify relative safety, and ruggedize your life.

• Plant the future you’re working for on solid ground.

• Thrive in the process, with a grounded approach to tough times.

The cornerstone of all good personal climate strategies is personal ruggedization.

That means making smart decisions about where we choose to live, the systems we embed ourselves in, and the ways we work with others to improve our odds of a good future.

It’s intelligent, purpose-driven engagement with deep uncertainties. It’s how we build ourselves a home on a planet none of us have ever seen before.

Personal ruggedization isn’t about buying more guns, bugging out or bunkering down. Instead, it focuses on serving what matters most to us, using reality-based strategies that grow more options, resilience, and social connection.

The good news? You can learn how to build a strategy based on personal ruggedization. Now’s your chance.

SECURE YOUR PLACE

I TEACH PERSONAL CLIMATE STRATEGIES

I began teaching personal climate strategy courses five years ago. Everywhere I went, I met people asking what they could do in their own lives for their own families, now that a massive climate crisis was unavoidable. At conferences, in emails from readers of my newsletters, even at the neighborhood barbecue, people took me aside and asked me what advice I could give them.

I’d been providing bespoke individual consultations for years, so I was familiar with the kinds of questions people have about their futures now. I also knew that I could use my 30 years of experience working at the forefront of the planetary crisis to help people prepare for what’s coming... to build a framework for individual climate foresight.

Climate foresight is my job. I’ve framed insights used by innovative companies, governments, and foundations around the world. I’ve written extensively about the planetary crisis, sustainability solutions and climate strategies. I created the best-selling book Worldchanging. I’ve presented my thinking at the United Nations, dozens of leading universities and major conferences, including to TED Global talks viewed more than 4 million times.

Now, I’ve taken what I understand about climate foresight and discontinuous systems change, and created a step-by-step approach to understanding the wild future ahead, and finding our place in it. I’ve designed this Workshop to walk participants through that system for building personal climate strategies, offering some of the best actionable climate foresight in the world at a fraction of the cost of buying individual advice from corporate consultants.

I’m grateful and honored that since that first course, more than 500 amazing individuals from around the world have worked with me to build their own climate strategies.

THE BOTTOM LINE: THIS WORKSHOP WORKS

My eight-class personal climate strategy workshop — the only one of its kind — is your opportunity to work directly with me. Together, we’ll build the foundation for your personal climate strategy.

You’ll learn how to anchor the life you’ve built —your career, your family, your goals — on ground that can stand firm in the storms ahead and position you for success.

Imagine being able to:

• Stop doom-looping and focus your energy on what (and who) matters most.

• Understand the key forces shaping your risks — the patterns behind the chaos.

• Use foresight tools to assess and be prepared for future disruptions.

• Make decisions grounded in clarity, prudence, informed intuition, and measured optimism, not panic.

• Build a personal roadmap for smart, timely action that works for you, and become part of a network of people who are working through the same challenges.

Whether you’re preparing to relocate, climate-proofing your retirement, ruggedizing your home, pivoting your business, or simply trying to get ahead of the curve, you’ll come away with a robust strategy, tailored to your needs.

That strategy is designed not just to protect you, but to preserve your ability to support others and contribute meaningfully as conditions change.

WHAT YOU’LL GET IN THIS WORKSHOP:

• Eight in-depth talks delivered live by Alex Steffen, followed by a brief small group discussion and Q&A. Each session runs for approximately 75 minutes.

• Breakthrough frameworks for creating big-picture clarity, not false certainty.

• Personal Climate Strategy prompts to guide reflection.

• Curated readings and essential resource guide.

• Invitation to the Personal Climate Exploration Group (an alumni-only working group).

• Access to expert consulting (50% off).

• Access to class recordings, and to future updates to course materials.

If this sounds like a workshop that meets your needs, check it out: The Personal Climate Strategy Workshop.

Hi there,

You may be wondering where I begin when I teach my process for creating your own strategy for navigating discontinuous times.

You may be surprised to know that it doesn’t begin with reviewing data or looking at the underpinnings of various risk maps and ratings (though we do cover that).

We begin by thinking about WHY. Why are we doing this work? For whom will it matter (besides ourselves)?

That’s why as part of the first session of the Workshop, we reflect on our Horizons of Concern.

Last year, I recorded a podcast asking listeners to think about their horizons of concern. You can listen to the podcast here, if you want, or scroll down to read more:

Here’s part of what I wrote to explain the concept:

When facing threats that are fast-moving and increasingly chaotic, it’s natural to want a simple answer. The more threat and confusion we feel, the simpler the answer we’re likely to seek. Someone is always prepared to provide those simple answers, for profit or political advantage.

We see this in the field of climate foresight, where a wide range of ratings and scores and lists and trainings and survival products are newly available for purchase. Looking for a way to calm your climate anxiety with a soothing bath salt, bug out to a supposed climate haven or build a bunker to save yourself from societal breakdown? Two minutes of Googling and a valid credit card will find you someone willing to tell you what you want to hear.

But in real life, here in the planetary crisis, there are no simple, one-size-fits-all answers.

…we don’t need simple answers. What we need is an increased capacity for making good decisions in unprecedented situations.

The discontinuities unfolding around us will not be “solved” in our lifetimes—or for generations to come. We won’t be returning to past stabilities, and there is no new stability we can now hope for if we just cut carbon fast enough.

Instead we need to understand personal climate strategies as evolving tools. We should make critical decisions before we lose the option to make them, but also be aware that there are no permanent solutions in an era of ongoing large-scale transformations. We’re planning with imperfect information, and each person or family has different needs and constraints.

One way in which our needs differ profoundly is our timelines.

If you’re retired and single, without kids, accepting the short-term odds on increasingly probable catastrophes might be a valid choice. Short planning horizons let us discount future risks.

Taking those same chances becomes reckless, though, when we consider the prospects for our kids or the young people we care about in general. Our horizon of concern dictates that we ready ourselves for a world beset by chaos and calamity, in part so we can help our kids be ready in turn.

Our popular debate still treats 2050 as far ahead, and 2100 as another world. Yet babies born today in wealthy countries are statistically likely to live to see the year 2100.

And 2100 will be a tough time.

Paradoxically, the farther ahead we’re thinking, the more important making today’s big decisions in foresighted ways becomes.

Adaptability is key, but so is getting to relative safety while it’s still affordable. So is updating our worldviews and skillsets. So is investing attentively. So is strengthening our ability to be see this new era for what it is. And so, as well, is growing purpose-driven conversations about the future we face with people we care for.

For each of us, there’s the big abstract future, tumbling off into the unknowable, and then there’s our personal future.

That’s the future of the people we care about, the work we do, the legacies we hope to leave behind. How far ahead does your horizon of concern stretch?

Whether the answer is ten years or 100, the nature of that future is now inextricably entangled with the climate-ecological crisis. That’s just the nature of our times.

By thinking about how to build a better future in these times, though, you are already part of a growing community of people from around the world who are learning to consider the personal and the planetary together — who are making themselves ready for the unprecedented.

That’s who my workshops are for.

The next Personal Climate Strategy Workshop begins on February 12th. We meet on Zoom on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 12pm Pacific for approximately 75 minutes per session, which includes an in-depth talk from me and time for small group discussion and Q&A.

Call dates: February 12, 17, 19, 24, 26; March 3, 5, 10. Bonus Wrap-Up Discussion on March 12. (All calls are recorded).

Flash Sale ends tonight! We offer single payment and flexible payment options. Get the full Workshop Syllabus, read testimonials, and sign up at https://alexsteffen.thinkific.com/courses/Personal-Climate-Strategy-Workshop

Thanks for being here,

Alex

P.S. Do you have any questions before signing up? Please email us at Alison@AlexSteffen.com. Happy to help.

P.P.S. Still not sure? If, after attending the first session, you decide that the Workshop is not going to be what you’d hoped for and you’re not in the “right room,” you have until Monday, February 16 to email us and request a 90% refund.

Reminder: my four-week Personal Climate Strategy Workshop begins next week on Thursday, February 12th. FLASH SALE until tomorrow, February 6th, at 9pm PST // 5am GMT — get up to 30% off! Single Payment and Flexible Payment options are available. Click below to learn more:

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How do we envision the future we’re fighting for?

I like this climate foresight advocacy short film, The Great Transition, 2025-2050, rallying support for the transition to clean energy. But there's something really off about these kinds of "it was almost a catastrophe, but we woke up" portrayals, now.

That's because now, no matter what we do, we are in for massive and unprecedented climate, ecological and societal upheavals. That discontinuity is now hard-wired into every plausible future in front of us.

Sure, we want to cut emissions everywhere and as fast as possible. We must limit the worsening of the crisis, and build the conditions for sustainable prosperity. This must be a top priority for all humanity.

We're going to be doing all that, though, while we face up to the now even larger challenge of societal ruggedization on a world like none humanity has ever known before. We've let that work wait too long, as well.

Staving off catastrophic climate change is now only a part of humanity's total climate challenge. As I wrote in December:

The Last Decade, and its promise of an orderly-if-headlong transition, has been replaced by a Long Ruggedization. We still have all those planetary imperatives to fulfill. Decarbonization and material sustainability, though, have now become part of a vastly larger program of discontinuity management: of climate defenses, reworked supply lines, innovations for new realities, ecological restoration into future patterns, huge movements of people and an unprecedented need to build in safer places.

Welcome to the future we fought for five decades to avoid. This new era will demand far more of every society’s resources, putting climate discontinuity at the core of all important decisions, from governments planning to business strategies to community hopes to the most personal decisions of our lives.

That’s when we are, in 2026. That’s what predatory delay has cost us.

So what does it mean to advocate for sustainability now?

On one level, it means accepting climate action and ecological restoration not as solutions, but as harm reduction. Not as something that restores continuity to our lives, but that increases our odds of facing a somewhat manageable crisis.

On another level, though, it just makes clearer what we’re known for years, which is (as I put it before) that “Our job is not to decide the future, but to leave the future as many options as possible. The most sustainable society is the one which passes forward the best possibilities to future generations.”

Alex

PS: If you want to learn more about how to make good decisions in a time discontinuity, you might be interested in my acclaimed four-week, live Personal Climate Strategy Workshop. The next one begins next week, on Thursday, February 12th.

Catch the Flash Sale when you join by tomorrow, February 6th at 9pm PST!

SIGN UP NOW

“Alex Steffen’s course could save your money, your sanity, maybe even your life… Alex Steffen will change the way you think about planning your future.”
— Dr. Britt Wray, author of Generation Dread and Director of CIRCLE at Stanford Psychiatry

“After nearly 20 years working in sustainability — and having followed Alex Steffen’s work for even longer — I finally took his Personal Climate Strategy Workshop. To put it simply: it’s the most valuable climate foresight training I’ve ever taken.”
— Justus Stewart, writer, Climate Quitter

Things are crazy out there.

We’re now living in an era of instability, driven by climate chaos, but intensified by economic, technological, geopolitical and institutional upheavals.

What used to work before no longer does. Yet most of us are still trying to plan our lives with old tools from a more stable past.

Help is not on the way. Even the best-governed societies aren’t responding at the pace demanded. Emissions are still rising. Climate adaptation planning is slow and underfunded. Local governments are overwhelmed. Climate science and risk management are under ideological assault. Economists and business leaders warn that large parts of the world are becoming uninsurable, and that continued delay risks the economic futures of whole regions.

This is a profound discontinuity with the past, and there’s less sign than ever that someone else — the government, the market, activists — is coming to the rescue. We have to rescue ourselves. Crazy demands a plan.

We thought we had time. But the crazy is here, now.

If you’re someone who’s been meaning to step back and build a clear, actionable strategy for navigating chaos, this is your chance.

The Personal Climate Strategy Workshop is a live, small-group program focused on revealing the patterns behind the chaos — and translating that systems understanding into practical decisions you can act on now.

There is no other applied climate foresight program of this quality available.

Learn More About the Workshop

The Workshop sessions are 75 minutes long, and held live, online. Sessions are February 12, 17, 19, 24, 26; March 3, 5, and 10. We’ll have a group wrap-up conversation on March 12. All sessions meet Tuesdays and Thursdays at 12pm Pacific / 8pm GMT.

All calls are recorded and shared after each session. You can participate live or follow along on your own schedule. If you want to continue developing your strategy after the Workshop ends, we host an alumni group with regular discussions.

Until Friday, February 6 at 9pm Pacific, we’re offering a flash sale: 30% off a one-time payment, or a 7-month payment plan. If you’re ready to turn general concern into specific action, secure your seat for the Personal Climate Strategy Workshop.

Sign Up Now

Here’s the link: https://alexsteffen.thinkific.com/courses/Personal-Climate-Strategy-Workshop

I hope you’ll join us!

Alex

The greatest pitfall in climate foresight is the assumption of continuity.

The assumption of continuity is the belief that the structure of past events — the fundamental linearity of baselines (in things like temperatures and growing seasons, snowpacks and sea levels), the former stability of systems around us, and historically experienced limits on the rate at which conditions can change — provides good evidence for evaluating what’s coming now.

The nature of discontinuity, though, is that what was true before becomes a poor guide for making decisions in the present.

Too rigid a clinging to continuity can even lead us to make choices with catastrophic outcomes, as our outdated thinking gets smashed by disruptive new realities. Assume Continuity and Find Out.

Indeed, the climate crisis is a crisis precisely because of the magnitude of discontinuity it’s driving into the systems, natural and human, upon which our civilization was built. That process is speeding up, meaning not only greater levels of discontinuity, but less time to prepare for tumultuous change.

We find ourselves in a moment of escalating discontinuity.

Why? The biggest reason is our failure to rebuild our economy for sustainability and decarbonization. We needed a sharp bending of the curve on climate emissions, ecological destruction and toxic pollution, and our opponents prevented us from getting it. The Last Decade has become the Lost Decade.

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As an excellent recent piece in Yale Environment 360 puts it:

“The 1.5ºC target was set at the Paris climate conference a decade ago… [C]limate scientists say that 10 years of weak action since mean that nothing can now stop the target being breached. ‘Climate policy has failed. The 2015 landmark Paris agreement is dead,’ says atmospheric chemist Robert Watson,” former chair of the IPCC.”

That failure has transformed the human future.

“Meanwhile, a picture of what lies ahead is becoming clearer. In particular, there is a growing fear that climate change in the future won’t, as it has until now, happen gradually. It will happen suddenly, as formerly stable planetary systems transgress tipping points — thresholds beyond which things cannot be put back together again.”

If we don’t radically alter course — and, let’s be real, there’s little sign that’s happening yet — we will, sooner or later, begin triggering planetary tipping points. Natural systems (upon which our very ability to manage our societies depends) will snap into new states, rendering every place, human system and pattern of living permanently altered. Even at 1.5ºC, we’re teetering on the threshold of a one-way visit to an alien world.

But we don’t even need to collapse the ice sheets and ocean currents or kill the Amazon to find ourselves hurtling into an undiscovered country of “what the frack is happening?”

Unprecedented disasters are each themselves discontinuities, and there’s abundant evidence that truly extreme weather is becoming more common. Hottest decade, year and month on record, heaviest rainfall in 24 hours, the costliest peacetime urban firestorm, the strongest hurricane wind gusts, deepest droughts — recent years have kept the hits coming.

Expect more. Last summer, NASA released data revealing a rapid intensification of extreme weather disasters. The article I link to there goes on to cite an unnamed “Met Office expert” warned that people are unprepared for such extreme events, “which would be outside previous experience.”

We fool ourselves, though, if we think that transapocalyptic tipping points and unprecedentedly heavy weather are the only ways we’ll feel the torque that transformed conditions put on unchanged societies. The small pressures may well, in aggregate, be the biggest and most disruptive.

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This winter, maintenance has come back into fashion. A number of us seem, suddenly, to be remembering just how much effort it takes to rescue from entropy the infrastructure and supply chains that underpin our daily life. Keeping the world running was hard work, even when the world didn’t change that much from year to year. (As a side note, I’m looking forward to reading Stewart Brand’s new book Maintenance of Everything.)

“You live in a world of sand castles that are constantly falling apart,” Noah Smith wrote recently, “and only the constant maintenance effort of billions of people keeps it from turning into a post-apocalyptic movie in a matter of months.”

The single best way to understand what the climate crisis means to you is to think in terms of climate brittleness. But here’s a twist: If most folks don’t get how hard it is to keep the world running, even fewer understand that climate brittleness is essentially an increase in demanded maintenance and preparation.

Everything humans have made was made with a certain sense of normal in mind. Within a given range of tolerances, that thing will work more or less as expected, until it wears out.

Climate chaos nudges the context for every object and system in our world, pushing them into conditions that exceed their design tolerances. As tolerances are exceeded, wear and tear rises, deferred maintenance costs more, direct impacts cascade more easily and interconnections fail more frequently... unless you work harder. That need to work harder, in turn, undermines the capacities you previously had to do other things. Things fall apart; the maintenance schedule cannot hold.

We’re down to three choices: work harder, everywhere, just to keep what we have (and rebuild what we can when things break down); abandon the places and systems where it’s too hard to do that, to minimize our losses; rebuild what we have now, to ruggedize it for the conditions it will face in the future.

We’ll be doing all three, but we won’t keep up.

We are running a losing race with brittleness, in most places. We’ll hang on longer than we should in the most endangered places. We’ll start letting systems degrade. Ruggedizing our societies for conditions no one has ever experienced is already politically contentious, and we’ll find we don’t have the resources to do it everywhere, anyway.

We are trained to think of climate impacts as huge, monstrous things — giant dinosaur weather-beasts rampaging across our cities. But it turns out we should be at least as worried about the plague of small strains spreading through our lives, eating away at systems functionality like a horde of gnawing rodents. Cascading, interconnected, unpatterning and abrasive minor embrittlements.

The consequences of these small erosions will pile up around us. Even in the next decades, almost nothing we use will work quite as we expect it to, or cost what it once did, or be as easy to keep running as it once was. And we’ll be hassling with those realities when the bigger storms slam through, when the drought stretches on, when the wildfire crests the hilltops.

None of this is evenly (much less fairly1) distributed. The risks of huge disasters differ from place to place, but so to does exposure to brittleness. Even in a world tumbling over planetary thresholds, some places and systems will do better than others. Some ruggedization efforts will work better than others. Some communities will have more wealth and capacity to adapt than others. Some people will plan for discontinuity more sensibly than others.

Not everyone will even experience these impacts as losses — some places and groups will find opportunities they never had before, perhaps even successes at scales that would surprise most people today. (Though economic disruption and the geographic redistribution of wealth means further instability.)

No one, though, will find their way back to “how things have always been.”

The unprecedented is the only future we get.

- You can learn how to plan more sensibly and successfully for life in planetary discontinuity. That’s what I teach in my four-week, live Personal Climate Strategy Workshop. The next one is coming up soon, beginning on Thursday, February 12th.

To gain access to the Early-Bird Discount (that’ll save you more than $700), please enter your email at the bottom of this page and we’ll send your invitation ASAP.

- Need expert guidance for your own climate planning or business strategy? Schedule a private Climate Strategy Consultation.

- Let’s connect on Bluesky, LinkedIn or Facebook

- Check out my books: Worldchanging (which recently celebrated its 20th anniversary!) and Carbon Zero

- View my TED Global talks on sustainability and cities.

- My podcast, When We Are, is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast and other podcast platforms around the world. Please subscribe, rate and review!

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