How can wellbeing for all be improved while reducing risks of destabilising the biosphere? This ambition underlies the 2030 Agenda but analysing whether it is possible in the long-term requires linking global socioeconomic developments with life-supporting Earth systems and incorporating feedbacks between them. The Earth4All initiative explores integrated developments of human wellbeing and environmental pressures up to 2100 based on expert elicitation and an integrated global systems model. The relatively simple Earth4All model focuses on quantifying and capturing some high-level feedback between socioeconomic and environmental domains. It analyses economic transformations to increase wellbeing worldwide and increase social cohesion to create conditions that are more likely to reduce pressures on planetary boundaries. The model includes two key novelties: a social tension index and a wellbeing index, to track societal progress this century. The scenarios suggest that today's dominant economic policies are likely to lead to rising social tensions, worsening environmental pressures, and declining wellbeing. In the coming decades, unchecked rising social tensions, we hypothesise, will make it more difficult to build a large consensus around long-term industrial policy and behavioural changes needed to respect planetary boundaries. We propose five extraordinary turnarounds around poverty, inequality, empowerment, energy and food that in the model world can shift the economy off the current trajectory, improve human wellbeing at a global scale, reduce social tensions and ease environmental pressures. The model, the five (exogenous) turnarounds and the resulting two scenarios can be used as science-policy boundary objects in discussions on future trajectories.

Our world is facing a convergence of environmental, health, security, and social crises. These issues demand urgent, systemic solutions now that address not only environmental but also social dimensions. Weak political responses have stalled progress on the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement. We have developed scenarios that explore interconnections between possible climate futures, rising living costs, and increasing inequalities that fuel populism and undermine democracy to the year 2100. We propose five turnaround solutions – energy, food and land systems, inequality, poverty, and gender equality – that if enacted are likely to provide wellbeing for a majority of people plus greater social cohesion. This will support long-term industrial policies and behavioural change to reduce emissions and protect the biosphere toward a long-term goal of living on a relatively stable planet.

Our dominant economic model is destabilising societies and the planet. Earth4All found 5 turnarounds for real system change.

Climate change is one of the most salient issues in current international politics. In all but the most optimistic of scenarios, it has the potential to severely impact human life in many parts of the world. Production and consumption patterns under the current liberal economic order contribute significantly to the climate crisis. Yet the norms and ideas that guide climate policy under this order are remarkably persistent in the face of climate change. This article explores why these norms have not yet been challenged, and how theories of international relations help understand the absence of such challenges.

Multilateral climate policy has institutionalized a set of norms that may be summarized as liberal environmentalism. Liberal environmentalism presumes that economic growth and environmental protection are not mutually exclusive, but prerequisites for each other, thereby connecting the economic order with environmental policy. This article argues that there is a distinct mismatch between the climate crisis and the stickiness of liberal environmentalism. Although the natural system to be governed is in crisis, the political and normative system tasked with governing it is not. The article thus inquires how crises come about by examining why they sometimes do not. It compares theoretical insights borrowed from liberal institutionalism, constructivism, and neo-realism and explores what may be missing from such approaches to fully grasp the nature of crises in international politics. The article finds that liberal environmentalist norms emerged in the 1990s, cascaded in the early 2000s and became institutionalized in the Copenhagen era, culminating in the Paris Agreement. They are likely to remain unaffected by the current polycrisis in international relations, because institutionalized norms are often resistant to change. Liberal environmentalist norms are now deeply embedded in contemporary climate governance, meaning that they can only be challenged through persistent norm entrepreneurship.

Liberal environmentalism persists in global climate policy because of institutionalized norms and the discursive reproduction of these norms.

We summarize what we assess as the past year's most important findings within climate change research: limits to adaptation, vulnerability hotspots, new threats coming from the climate–health nexus, climate (im)mobility and security, sustainable practices for land use and finance, losses and damages, inclusive societal climate decisions and ways to overcome structural barriers to accelerate mitigation and limit global warming to below 2°C.

We synthesize 10 topics within climate research where there have been significant advances or emerging scientific consensus since January 2021. The selection of these insights was based on input from an international open call with broad disciplinary scope. Findings concern: (1) new aspects of soft and hard limits to adaptation; (2) the emergence of regional vulnerability hotspots from climate impacts and human vulnerability; (3) new threats on the climate–health horizon – some involving plants and animals; (4) climate (im)mobility and the need for anticipatory action; (5) security and climate; (6) sustainable land management as a prerequisite to land-based solutions; (7) sustainable finance practices in the private sector and the need for political guidance; (8) the urgent planetary imperative for addressing losses and damages; (9) inclusive societal choices for climate-resilient development and (10) how to overcome barriers to accelerate mitigation and limit global warming to below 2°C.

Science has evidence on barriers to mitigation and how to overcome them to avoid limits to adaptation across multiple fields.