Program

Room: Norðurljós

The summit opens with a welcome to Reykjavík and to Iceland, setting the two days ahead in the Icelandic context, from the country’s stake in the North Atlantic and the Arctic to its role as host. Author and filmmaker Andri Snær Magnason offers opening reflections, and the Icelandic choir Graduale Nobili performs.

Room: Norðurljós

Joshua Elliott, Renaissance Philanthropy

Joshua Elliott opens the summit with a level-setting talk on nonlinear climate risks: what sets them apart from gradual change, why they demand attention now, and the questions the next two days will take up.

Room: Norðurljós

Moderator: Sarah Kapnick · Charlotte DeWald · Megan Melamed · Brent Minchew · Christopher Schwalm

Sarah Kapnick opens with a view from finance: why interest in nonlinear Earth-system risks is growing, why capital tends to wait until the damage is visible, where engagement is emerging across business, and how these risks reach the systems finance already prices, from food and insurance to sovereign risk. She then brings on a spokesperson from each of the four afternoon risk tracks to introduce their risk cluster and what their track will take on, before opening a conversation across all four.

Room: Norðurljós

Moderator: Kristinn Hróbjartsson · Andrew Light · Bjarni Már Magnússon · Cynthia Scharf

A discussion among policymakers and policy thought leaders, exploring questions such as the comparative politics of where climate risk management is housed within domestic governments; the various multilateral arrangements for climate risk management and stabilization; and stabilization challenges in hard governance in the years ahead

Room: Björtuloft

Moderator: Ryan O’Donnell · Charlotte DeWald · Ginny Selz

To provide an overview of (1) Arctic climate risks and tipping points, how they are interconnected, and what we know about their risk timelines; and (2) the state of interventions research, covering the breadth of Arctic-targeted interventions and their respective timelines. With this established, the session will break out into three groups with facilitators exploring three central questions pertaining to the session theme. Then session participants will reconvene at the end to present synthesized findings and then discussion in plenary.

Room: Háaloft

Melissa Barnes · Charlotte Love · Brent Minchew · John Moore · Edward (Ted) Parson

This session examines the current state of scientific understanding on catastrophic sea-level rise, with particular attention to uncertainty surrounding Thwaites Glacier and its implications for forecasting, coastal planning, and governance. Speakers will address observed trends and outstanding research questions, requirements for decision-ready forecasting systems, standards for safely evaluating stabilization interventions, and governance frameworks appropriate to both research and potential future implementation. Breakout groups will turn discussion into concrete priorities across forecasting, adaptation, intervention research standards, and governance.

Room: Ríma A

Lisa Dilling · Peter Frumhoff · Alasdair Harris · Catherine Nakalembe · Danielle Potocek · Regina R. Rodrigues · Bridget Shayka · Julián Velasco · Fishbowl Moderator: Jessica Seddon

Living systems are already showing signs of changing state. Coral reefs, for example, are crossing thermal thresholds, boreal wildfires are accelerating, thawing the permafrost beneath them, and tropical wetlands are emitting more methane as they warm. These shifts ripple through climate, food, water, and coastal security.

This track opens with short scientific briefings, then works as a group to generate a ledger of open questions: what leading indicators of biosphere tipping might look like, where the science is thin, and which answers would change what happens next. A fishbowl discussion examines the biospheric risks of proposed interventions, including their effects on biodiversity. Output: a prioritized set of questions carried into Day 2 and the summit report.

Room: Norðurljós

Moderators: Steven Hamburg & Jesse Reynolds · Colleen Golja · Dakota Gruener · Jim Haywood · Andrew Light · Megan Melamed · Pornampai (Ping-Ping) Narenpitak

This interactive session first looks at the evidence that Earth is becoming less reflective and what that means for the pace of warming. It then explores the conditions needed to support a responsible path for solar radiation modification (SRM) research over the next decade. Participants will consider how scientific knowledge, technology, institutions, and politics must co-develop to advance the field and support informed decision-making. Using Reflective's SAI Research Roadmap as one starting point, the session will test its assumptions, identify gaps, and consider what the roadmaps look like for other dimensions of this space, including marine cloud brightening and non-sulfur approaches. Small-group scenario discussions will examine how priorities may shift across plausible alternative future scenarios.

Room: Norðurljós

Moderator: Sue Biniaz

Rapporteurs from the four Day One risk tracks report back on the main findings, gaps and priorities their groups identified. Sue Biniaz draws out the threads that connect them and sets up Day Two’s cross-cutting sessions on governance, funding, communication, legitimacy and more.

Room: Háaloft

Theo Cox · Laurie Laybourn · Janani Vivekananda

Before we can act effectively in response to catastrophic climate risks, we must first make sense of them. This requires translating noisy signals into decision-relevant understanding, and ensuring this understanding is structured and located in a way that guides action. The world is a long way from having decision-support tools for catastrophic climate risk. This session will use a scenario exercise to explore the different sensemaking challenges posed by catastrophic climate risks: using the knowledge we have, generating and integrating the knowledge we don't, and navigating the uncertainty we can never overcome.

Room: Björtuloft

Moderator: Ryan O’Donnell · Elena Kavanagh · Masaaki Nagai (Ken Kitatani) · Ernest Ofori · Sandy Trust

Social license can make or break climate stabilization efforts. It rests on trust, consent and the inclusion of the communities most affected, and it is hard to earn and easy to lose. This panel looks at what social license means across cultures, what it takes in practice to earn and keep it, and how it can be restored once lost. It also asks how research organizations and institutions can build and maintain public trust and legitimacy.

Room: Ríma B

Moderator: Joshua Elliott · Kelly Erhart · Andrew Light · Liam St Louis · Marcus Thomson · Ed Whittingham · Qi Zheng

The session examines how to reach the next scale of philanthropic funding and, over a longer horizon, government research leadership and funding. Both conversations share a structure—what progress has been made, what is blocking the next step, and what would build the field’s credibility and legitimacy—but the institutions involved face different constraints and need different approaches. Speakers will share what’s already underway and what’s missing. Across both parts, the room will consider how today’s funding sources and justifications, from tech philanthropy to national-security arguments, shape the field’s long-term legitimacy, and how to pursue near-term opportunities without undermining it.

Room: Norðurljós

Moderator: Brandon Jones · Colleen Golja · Steven Hamburg · Megan Melamed · Brent Minchew · Kate Ricke · Regina R. Rodrigues

This session asks why scientists choose to work on climate intervention and stabilization research — and what makes this young, often controversial field harder than it should be to join and stay in. We'll name the real costs directly (career risk, publication bias, public disputes) and use personal experience as evidence of the structural dynamics shaping the field's long-term credibility and survival.

Room: Ríma A

Day two has a few open slots where participants can propose a session in real-time, at the end of day one.

Room: Ríma A

Marian D’Auria · Anthony Hobley · Sandy Trust · Gernot Wagner

Financial returns and stability ultimately rest on a stable Earth system — yet this dependency remains largely unrecognised within financial services. This 90-minute session confronts that blind spot head-on. Following a short Planetary Solvency introduction, a live "risk management fail" reveal exposes the scale of climate risk underestimation among economic actors. A candid interview with senior financial services leaders then unpacks the real barriers to action: short-termism, unrealistic risk views, cognitive dissonance, reductionist thinking, low biosphere literacy, and genuine constraints on agency. Breakout groups — policymakers, financial services, and customers — then wrestle with who's actually responsible for change, before playback captures the session's collective insights.

Room: Háaloft

Moderator: Oliver Morton · Facilitators: Ben Lachman & Paul Gambill · María Inés Carabajal · Julia Herrle · Ben Kalina · Mark Lynas · Cynthia Scharf · Mark Turner

How do we communicate about planetary risk and intervention research to audiences that need a completely different language: policymakers, scientists, funders, journalists, and the public? Five practitioners will present eight-minute case studies from five different communication frontlines, from countering misinformation on Capitol Hill to reaching the public through film.

Room: Björtuloft

Joshua Elliott · Melissa Barnes · George Horner · Lauren Mahle · Erik Martin · Erika Reinhardt

Most of the technical progress in this field right now is coming out of a small number of (largely philanthropically funded, not entirely) programs/organizations built specifically to move interventions from early science to decision-relevant strategies with the knowledge-base on safety, efficacy and scalability needed. This session puts those organizations side by side so the room can see what translational, mission-driven R&D efforts actually look like in this space, what model each has landed on, and where they run into the same walls despite working on completely different interventions. What does it take to run this kind of organization well, and what would let them move faster? And what theories of change and scale are these efforts collectively working towards?

Room: Norðurljós

Edward (Ted) Parson · Jessica Seddon · Aaran Patel · Anton Keskinen · Ernest Ofori

Questions of how interventions would be decided on and controlled, by whom and to what ends, are present high-stakes uncertainties in navigating climate change and related earth system disruptions. The session will consider the current state of knowledge and debate on these issues, aiming to summarize major uncertainties and arguments clearly and fairly. It will consider interventions broadly, particularly the examples discussed on Day 1. Discussion will especially aim to illuminate concrete potential near-term actions that could advance knowledge and capacity to address coming governance challenges.

Room: Ríma B

Moderator: Kristinn Hróbjartsson · Noah Deich · Laurie Laybourn · Christopher Schwalm · Janani Vivekananda

This session explores how to engage national security leaders on the security implications of catastrophic and cascading climate risk: what works, what doesn’t, and how to identify entry points. It also asks what lessons nearly two decades of climate security work hold for this next stage of the climate crisis.

Room: Ríma A

Day two has a few open slots where participants can propose a session in real-time, at the end of day one.

Room: Háaloft

Laurie Laybourn · Theo Cox

The stabilisation discourse is primarily focused on intervening to manage catastrophic biophysical risks in the Earth system, like AMOC collapse and rapid sea level rise. These risks would have catastrophic downstream impacts on societies. Yet severe, if not catastrophic, socioeconomic risks are possible even at relatively less severe states of Earth system change. What would a sibling category of stabilisation look like directly focused on catastrophic socioeconomic risks?

Room: Norðurljós

María Inés Carabajal · Richie Kaur · Ryan O’Donnell · Edward (Ted) Parson · Shuchi Talati · Billy Williams

Climate change requires immediate action, and everyone building this field agrees we don’t have time to waste. But moving quickly requires anticipating the mistakes that could undermine progress later. Across contested technologies and this field’s short history, a familiar pattern has emerged: research that arrives as a surprise, without local standing, transparency or a stated off-ramp, gets stopped — and the costs can extend well beyond a single project, slowing research, eroding trust in the broader field, and making it harder to build the conditions for future research to proceed responsibly. This session focuses on the operating layer: what researchers, funders and programs actually put in place, and how that varies by research type and scale. Concretely, that means transparency and disclosure defaults, engagement built into research budgets rather than added on, and shared tools and frameworks that don’t have to be rebuilt per project.

Room: Björtuloft

Charlotte DeWald · Marianne Hagen · David Keith · Lauren Mahle · Sarah Schubert · Yanai Yedvab · Fonger Ypma

Earth systems stabilization interventions show theoretical promise, but bridging the gap between modeling and remote, large-scale deployment remains a major obstacle. This session explores the practical realities of moving stabilizing interventions into the field at scale. Panelists will analyze the near-term technical readiness, infrastructure constraints, and operational challenges of scaling key approaches, including Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI), Marine Cloud Brightening (MCB), Mixed-phase Cloud Thinning (MCT), and glacier and sea-ice interventions. Participants will synthesize lessons from the panelists via an interactive scenario planning exercise.

Room: Ríma B

Day two has a few open slots where participants can propose a session in real-time, at the end of day one.

Room: Norðurljós

Moderator: Joshua Elliott

The summit closes by drawing together what emerged across both days: where the field agrees, where it doesn’t, and what it would want its future self to know. Joshua Elliott leads a conversation framed as a letter from an emergent field to the future, covering the commitments, open questions and next steps for research, funding, governance and collaboration that this moment calls for.