Johan Rockström addresses heads of state during United Nations General Assembly: “failure is not inevitable, it is a choice”

His remarks were a part of the programme for the UN Secretary General’s Climate Summit, taking place during the UN General Assembly High-level Week 2025. Below is a transcript of his speech.

It’s now 10 years since the world in Paris entered a legally-binding agreement to avoid dangerous climate change. Since then, science has become overwhelmingly clear: allowing long-term global warming to exceed 1.5°C constitutes danger. 

And yet, greenhouse gas emissions continue rising and in 2024 annual global temperature change was pushed beyond 1.5°C for the first time on our watch. This is a deep concern. An even deeper concern is that warming appears to be accelerating, outpacing emissions. 

The long-term average warming is now between 1.3 and 1.4°C. We are on a path to breach the 1.5°C multi-decadal boundary within the next 5-10 years. Here, we must admit failure. Failure to protect peoples and nations from unmanageable impacts of human-induced climate change. 

But we don’t have to keep failing. Returning to below 1.5°C by the end of the century must remain the obligation for all international efforts to limit dangerous climate change. Extreme heat, fires, droughts, water scarcity, flooding and soil degradation, reinforced by us, are already impacting the lives of billions of people around the world. Beyond 1.5°C, these dangers will become increasingly unmanageable. Every tenth of a degree of avoided warming saves lives and livelihoods – this is not the time for resignation.

Beyond 1.5°C there is also a real risk of crossing tipping points. The most recent science concludes we are therefore dangerously close to triggering fundamental and irreversible changes. 

If we make the right choices going forward, there are still ‘overshoot’ pathways that could bring temperatures back below 1.5°C by the end of this century. Such a narrow escape remains possible, but it will be extremely challenging.  It requires deep and rapid reduction of all greenhouse gases, involving the near complete transition – starting now – away from fossil fuels. 

We also know that cutting emissions won’t be enough. We need to massively scale up carbon dioxide removal. For each 0.1°C of planetary cooling, 200 billion tons need to be removed from the atmosphere. 

But even if this succeeds, we fail, unless we safeguard the world’s most powerful carbon sink and cooling system - a healthy planet. If we don’t return to the "safe operating space” of the nine Planetary Boundaries that regulate Earth’s stability, (including biodiversity, pollutants, land, nutrients and the ocean) a safe climate will be out of reach – irrespective of our mitigation efforts.

Don’t be fooled: we are currently following a path that will take us to 3°C in just 75 years, shorter than the existence of this very institution, an existential threat we have not experienced in the last 3 million years, and there is no guarantee that efforts to cool our planet will succeed. 

My message today: science is clear – we have a planetary crisis on our watch. And we do have scalable solutions for phasing out fossil fuels, efficient resource use and transformation to healthy and sustainable food. Pathways that make us all winners. The window to a manageable climate future is still open, but just.   

Failure is not inevitable. It is a choice.