As global temperatures continue to rise and the United Nations formally acknowledges that warming will exceed the 1.5°C threshold set by the Paris Agreement, climate scientists are confronting a troubling paradox: the worse climate change gets, the harder it may become to stop it. New research published this year argues that the consequences of a warming planet can undermine the very institutions, finances, and political will required to address its causes — a dynamic that, left unchecked, could accelerate warming toward catastrophic and potentially irreversible levels.
The scientific backdrop to this concern is well established. In 2018, Earth system scientist Will Steffen and an international team warned that cascading climate tipping points could push Earth toward what they called a “Hothouse Earth” state — a condition where self-reinforcing warming loops take over and global temperatures rise far beyond anything seen in the past 1.2 million years. Among the triggers they identified: the collapse of key Atlantic Ocean current systems, which could deprive the Amazon rainforest of moisture; a drying Amazon converting from rainforest to savanna, releasing vast stores of carbon; and accelerating ice sheet loss driving further temperature increases. Each threshold crossed would make the next harder to avoid. Scientists note that the rate of global warming has effectively doubled over the past decade, and that some of these tipping points may be closer — or triggered at lower temperature levels — than previously thought.
What the new research adds to this picture is a focus not on the physical Earth system alone, but on the human one. Authored by James Dyke and colleagues, the study introduces the concept of “derailment risk” — the process by which climate impacts degrade a society’s capacity to respond to climate change itself. The researchers identify several mechanisms through which this can occur. Nations most exposed to climate disasters can be caught in a sovereign debt spiral: extreme weather events damage economies, reduce governments’ ability to service loans, and make it harder to access the financing needed for both mitigation and adaptation. As debt servicing consumes growing shares of public revenue, climate investment is crowded out, leaving countries more vulnerable to the next disaster. Separately, rising temperatures are linked to increased conflict, which in turn corrodes the international cooperation that effective climate policy depends upon. Political polarisation compounds the problem: the researchers point to the surge in support for Spain’s far-right, climate-skeptic Vox party following the deadly Valencia floods of 2024 as an example of how climate disasters, rather than galvanising climate action, can be weaponised to push back against environmental policy.
Underlying all of these dynamics, the researchers argue, is a fundamental asymmetry in how human societies function. Collective action — the kind required to build durable climate institutions, sustain international agreements, and maintain public trust — is far easier to destroy than to create. At a psychological level, negative events register more powerfully than positive ones, meaning that a string of climate disasters is more likely to breed fatalism and social fragmentation than solidarity and resolve. The researchers describe this as a question of “agency” — the capacity of human societies to actually implement solutions. While humans are both the cause of the climate crisis and the source of its potential solutions, derailment risks threaten to strip away that agency precisely when it is most needed.
To address this, Dyke and colleagues propose a three-stage framework for managing derailment threats: first, mapping the feedback loops between the human and natural systems; second, anticipating disruptions and building societal resilience before crises strike; and third, developing active governance strategies capable of functioning under conditions of escalating instability. They frame this within a broader vision of “planetary stewardship” — an approach that goes beyond phasing out fossil fuels to encompass protecting natural carbon stores such as forests and peatlands, transforming social values, and redesigning governance systems. The core message is stark: without deliberate efforts to protect the social and political conditions for climate action, warming itself could become the obstacle to stopping it.