Response: No Place to Hide from Climate Change

Response to Kurt Vandenberghe’s Commentary No Place to Hide: Science Is the Foundation of Policy

Published on August 28th, 2025

Kurt Vandenberghe’s commentary underlines both the urgency of acting on climate change and the central role of science as the foundation of policy.  I would add that, at its core, the climate crisis is fundamentally a global energy crisis, driven by 8.5 billion people buzzing and traveling  in an increasingly connected world and globalized economy. Yet, we still fail to fully grasp the impact of our carbon dependence on the quality of the environment and the ensuing impacts on health, biodiversity, equity, social organization, and global security. In the meantime, multilateral dialogues keep declining in opportunities and number and are losing meaning and impact; bilateralism is on the rise; polarization of opinions – most often not corroborated by evidence and amplified by unregulated social media – is deepening; and both individual anxiety and collective mistrust are growing.

Kurt mentions that 2024 signalled a turning point. The science of climate – both climate variability (natural changes without a human driver, although it interacts with and may exacerbate the effects of climate change) and climate change (human-induced alterations) – has been a mature field for more than two decades. Signals of change have been recorded in multiple regions and at multiple scales – from the Mauna Loa Observatory (the ‘Keeling Curve’) – to  research efforts, aimed at understanding past shifts in the Earth system as a whole and at improving projections of the future climate research, like the Past Global Change project.

The increasingly prominent and inflated narrative of global average temperatures surpassing pre-industrial levels is, in my opinion, misleading. Our narrative should be more straightforward yet better able to reflect complexity: climate is subject to variability (in lay terms, as the sun’s activity is variable); natural phenomena such as El Niño and La Niña (alterations of conventional climate patters) are well understood, as is their cyclical nature. The climate system copes with such variability through the living and non-living components of its buffer systems – the world ocean, forest and other terrestrial ecosystems. Human-driven alterations of the climate system, through increasing emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases, combined with the degradation (pollution, habitat degradation and loss, overexploitation of natural resources) by humans of natural buffers of climate variability, have induced change in the climate system both indirectly (by reducing the planet’s capacity to cope with natural variability) and directly (by pushing temperatures beyond levels compatible with human health). Reducing the narrative to a single temperature tipping point is overly simplistic and unhelpful.

Rather than focusing on this single threshold, we should talk about replenishing the capital. As the pioneer Pilot Analysis of Global Ecosystems and its ensuing Millennium Ecosystem Assessment stated in a rather visionary manner, we are running down the account, as “[i]n effect, the benefits reaped from our engineering of the planet have been achieved by running down natural capital assets “.

Scientific assessments processes – most notably the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, initiated by International Science Council’s predecessor ICSU, jointly with WMO and UNEP, at a conference in Villach, Austria in 1988, have been conducted systematically since the mid- 1980s. The above-mentioned Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and its more institutionalized follow-up, the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services are other notable examples. Worthy of note in these processes is the importance of distinguishing between direct and indirect drivers of change; change is analyzed and described through status, scenarios and responses, reflecting relevance, saliency, cogency and timeliness and in a not prescriptive language. Against these common conceptual and methodological frameworks, the IPCC, the IPBES and other assessments have shed light on the reasons of the multiple crises we are facing.

The International Assessment on Agricultural Science & Technology for Development, for example, demonstrated that the 2007–2008 world food crisis was not caused by shortage in agricultural production or shortcomings in the service chain, but rather by deliberate speculations on food commodities that pushed 100 million people into extreme poverty literally overnight.

Yes, there have been difficulties in scoping and conducting some of these assessments, especially in ensuring the needed multidisciplinary and multistakeholder nature; however, they have delivered critical knowledge that, if communicated effectively, can help specialists and the wider public realize that we live in a world of multiple crises, all human-driven, spanning from an increasingly acidic, oxygen depleted, polluted (microplastics and eutrophication) ocean, to a reduced diversity in living organisms, from genes to ecosystems, and even land and seascapes. All of this, with deeply uneven consequences between the wealthy and the poor.

So, indeed: I agree with Kurt that we must change the narrative on climate policy and that ‘without science, climate policy flies blind’; and that ‘[s]cience is the foundation of all credible climate action’. However, what science, through research, systematic observations and the process of scientific assessments, has not necessarily been able to deliver, though, are solutions (and, provocatively, perhaps until now science could afford not fulfilling the obligation to contribute to providing solutions?).

Kurt refers to the European Green Deal. Indeed, such initiative is impressive not only from the point of view of substantial financial investments and a solid yet creative institutional framing; but also innovative in its conditio sine qua non approach to dialogues among, and interventions by, multiple stakeholders; as it should be. But, unlike other issues, climate change is no simple matter; in fact, it may be the most difficult challenge to confront – for science, policy and society alike. When faced with ozone depletion and the widely known ‘ozone hole’, the world was equipped with all ingredients needed to bake, deliver and implement the needed solutions: a very robust science of the ozone problem; compounds and related technologies alternative to the chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) – the main cause behind ozone depletion; appetite for new markets based on technology alternative to the CFCs; public understanding and acceptance of both the causes and proposed solutions; clear interest from major private investors; political will to work on an intergovernmental agreement and the establishment and replenishment of a complementary multi-billion fund to operationalize the whole.

Today, the Antarctic ozone hole is expected to recover wholly by 2040.

The narrative also ought to change when it comes to economics. The loss in GDP related to the cost of inaction, as Kurt notes, would not necessarily equate with less resilience if action is focused on protecting, restoring and maintaining ecosystems, including ‘abandoned’ or poorly utilized ones. We need to rethink how we measure wealth and well-being. Significant studies exist in this regard -notably on inclusive wealth, Partha Dasgupta’s work on  natural capital, and work on measuring wellbeing and the need for rethinking the Human Development Index.

Kurt states that climate solutions require a ‘truly transdisciplinary, intergenerational, and, therefore, transformational approach’. The ISC could not agree more. The Council has pivoted the notion of ‘science missions’  towards a much more profound transformation around what science can bring to the table when it comes to solving problems – without compromising its core principles and objectives:  empiricism, transparency, quality assurance and openness, that allow science to be a universal system of knowledge. The ISC science missions for sustainability approach calls for supplementing and rebalancing our current scientific model by incentivizing collaboration and outcomes between scientists, and between scientists and other stakeholders, especially civil society, on large-scale sustainability challenges. It also calls for the current science funding model to shift from intense competition and fragmented efforts, both in terms of disciplines and funding, to building collaborative science communities.

Finally, my reaction to Kurt’s presentation concerns the European climate adaptation plan: in line with his message on the urgency to act and on science as the foundation of policy, my belief is that climate risks are owned by all of us – in differentiated ways sometimes but always collectively; and that ‘empowering citizens and businesses’ will not be achieved simply by providing access to climate hazard data and solutions, as he suggests. Citizens empower policy-makers, not the other way around. Citizens own the future of this planet, and their choices should be supported by measures ensuring that decision-making serves their aspirations and expectations, in a bottom-up way, privileging local concerns and ensuring global resilience. Unlike the ozone challenge, we do not yet have all the necessary ingredients for success in the case of climate change. Only by combining science that generates actionable knowledge with transparent, realistic debate, and by making the courageous choices and compromises needed to align our economic models with the conditions needed for the planet’s resilience, human rights and social cohesion, will we be able to meet the scale of the climate crisis.

Copyright: © 2025 [author(s)]. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in Frontiers Policy Labs is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. 

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