In the months prior to the recent presidential election, the public didn’t hear much from either side about climate change, even as the planet is now on track to blow past the 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) post-industrial rise in global average surface temperature and 97% of climate scientists are screaming at the top of their lungs that the house is on fire. Here are three design scenarios that embody some of the constraints and opportunities in planning for Earth’s alarmingly accelerating pace of climate change.

Ecological Systems Plan

The first scenario is grounded in humility and respect for nature-based ecological design principles. It’s designed to align human convenience and economic expansion with the current capacity of Earth’s natural resources. Some of the tools that support this option include ecologically minded ideas, such as ones contained in Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisis’ extensive treatise, “The Systems View of Life.” More can be found at Indigenous Technical Knowledge (ITK) and the work of organizations such as the Lo–TEk Institute, the Indigenous Society of Architecture, Planning and Design, the Rocky Mountain Institute, the Buckminster Fuller Institute, the Cosanti Foundation, and others. The ideal outcome of this design scenario is a human environment that exists in harmony with nature through co-creative networks, natural intelligence, and ecologically regenerative planning practices.

Carbon Management Plan

A second scenario is essentially a backup plan for the first one. It reflects the search for friendly technological solutions that can successfully mitigate our increasingly robust demand for human convenience and economic expansion. Tools that support this option include advancements in clean energy, green building practices, and other forms of carbon reduction and sequestration. The most favorable outcome for this scenario is a set of technological interventions that are planned and managed within the limits of our natural ecosystems. The time remaining to implement this design scenario is perilously limited, however. 

Hail-Mary Tech Plan

The third scenario is Backup Plan II, in case the first two do not occur. Here, the intractable desire to maintain increasingly excessive levels of human convenience and economic expansion must be addressed through bolder and riskier technological solutions. Many scientists, scholars, and environmentalists fear we are already facing this “Hail Mary” turning point. 

One concept for achieving this third scenario, published in Geophysical Research Letters, suggests dispersing chemicals or trillions of dollars’ worth of diamond dust into the stratosphere to cool the planet. “Possible stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) scenarios propose to keep global warming temporarily below 1.5°C until GreenHouse Gas removal techniques are scaled up and net zero emissions can be achieved,” the authors write. “However, it has also been noted that climate intervention through SAI may cause environmental side-effects and raises various ethical questions that need assessment to provide a better scientific basis for the potential risks and benefits.” 

 Another idea, reported by Cara Buckley in the New York Times, is “to create a huge sunshade and send it to a far away point between the Earth and the sun to block a small but crucial amount of solar radiation, enough to counter global warming.” The article continues: 

“Scientists have calculated that if just shy of 2 percent of the sun’s radiation is blocked, that would be enough to cool the planet by 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 Fahrenheit, and keep Earth within manageable climate boundaries. … The sunshade idea also has its critics, among them Susanne Baur, a doctoral candidate who focuses on solar radiation modification (SRM) modeling at the European Center for Research and Advanced Training in Scientific Computation in France. … Time and money would be better spent on working to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, she said, with a small portion of research devoted to ‘more viable and cost-effective’ solar geoengineering ideas.” 

Sunshade proponents say that at this stage, reducing greenhouse gas emissions will not go far enough to prevent climate chaos, that carbon dioxide removal has proved extremely difficult to realize, and that every potential solution ought to be explored.

Inherent in all three scenarios are not just the physical realities, but also the cultural, social, political, economic, and organizational aspects attached to each of them. The complex and risky technological interventions in the third scenario, for example, will present some very tough questions about governance. One can imagine international conflicts over who will pay for trillion-dollar aerosol and sunshade technologies, who will design them, who will own them, and how they will be managed over coming decades.

Meanwhile, as designs are already being developed for the launch of sunshade prototypes, there are still some remaining options for a more natural and community centered approach. 

Community networks, such as The Connection Partners, are aligned with the creative, intelligent, and regenerative principles of indigenous and nature-based solutions, while civil society organizations, such as Counterstream, are revisiting tools from the civil rights movement with Solidarity Rides to help spread the alarm. Visual artists, musicians, and writers are also coming together to make their creative voices heard. It’s hoped that we might be on the verge of another Woodstock Generation, when a creative class of grassroots organizations rose up against heavily entrenched political powers to reinforce not only the civil rights movement, but to bring an end to the Vietnam War. The stakes are exponentially higher now, though.

In either case, the climate-planning clock is now ticking at a terrifying rate. Humanity is faced with a moral dilemma, and an existential turning point, beyond which planning for more democratic and naturally sustainable solutions for the catastrophic impacts of climate change will be much more difficult—or perhaps even impossible to achieve.