By Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco, UMass Boston Chancellor
The recent UN climate conference in Brazil, COP30, exposed deep divisions over the best ways to protect us from the worsening impacts of climate change. The petrostates pushed for a final agreement that avoids tackling the main issue: phasing out fossil fuels.
Meanwhile, adaptation to climate change gained some momentum: New commitments were made to triple adaptation financing and to establish new mechanisms to support Indigenous, frontline communities, and nature-based solutions.
If this were soccer, fans, Brazilians, and others would be underwhelmed by a 1-1 tie. The world needs a decisive climate victory.
Climate risks and responsibilities are sharply divided. About 85 percent of emissions come from the world’s more affluent half, while the poorest half—who generate only 15 percent of emissions—have suffered 75 percent of the $4.14 trillion in climate damages since the 1980s. Three billion people still have only marginal access to modern energy infrastructure, leaving them dangerously exposed to heat stress, floods, and droughts.
The challenge seems unmanageable, but the good news is we still have time to lower the warming curve and build climate resilience. More importantly, we know how to do it.
The world’s climate resilience efforts require decisive, coordinated action designed to address these three basic questions effectively: Do they anticipate threats and risks? Do they prepare us to face them? Do they offer the best responses to recover fully? Here is the approach we suggest; it forms the basic architecture for the most ambitious initiative to build climate resilience in the world:
Mitigation: Rapidly cut emissions of heat-trapping gases such as CO2 and methane to keep the warming curve below 2 degrees centigrade.
Adaptation: Involves three phases: reducing sensitivity to climate change, reducing exposure to climate threats, and enhancing adaptive capacity, including investments in modern infrastructure, energy access, and early warning systems to help vulnerable communities survive immediate climate shocks. All adaptation is local.
Societal Transformation: Engage local leadership—mayors, governors, Indigenous knowledge holders, and youth—to tailor solutions to the unique challenges of each region. In the US, this means forging agreements for climate resilience across political divides. All societal transformation is national.
This new approach to resilience is happening where you least expect: the beautifully austere Casina Pio IV, home of the Papal Academies, in the gardens of the walled Vatican City State. From the Casina, Pope Leo’s academies are spearheading the world’s most comprehensive climate resilience initiative to date, a global effort led by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences (PAS, founded by Galileo) and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences (PASS).
Starting in May 2024, with the global summit at the Apostolic Palace hosted by Pope Francis, and the release of the Planetary Call to Action, which I co-authored and was signed by His Holiness and mayors and governors from around the world—from Africa to the Americas, from Asia to Australia, from Europe to the South Seas.
The Academies, home to two dozen Nobel Laureates, are now hosting major regional summits in every hemisphere—including those already held in Austria (with over 20 European countries participating), Brazil (with representatives from the Amazon River Basin countries), California, Kenya, Massachusetts, and Rome. Additional summits are planned in Australia/Oceania, China, India, Japan, Senegal, and the Vatican City State.
The regional summits are demonstrating how MAST works in practice. From Vienna to Brasilia, Santa Barbara to Nairobi, leaders and citizens collaborate to design projects that deliver tangible benefits to cities and villages alike.
The implementation of MAST follows a bottom-up approach. Resilience must start at the local level of a village, town, or city, and then scale upward to states and nations. The summits involve mayors and governors, scientists, academics, leading health officials, Indigenous knowledge-holders, youth, and civil society stakeholders in assessing how the MAST framework is applied across different geographic areas: from the Alpine glaciers in Europe to the savannas of Africa; from the forests of the Amazon to coastal cities in insular Asia.
At global Summits, you will see a governor in rural Kenya consulting the Massachusetts all-of-government climate chief (herself from rural Massachusetts) on the best financing tools to build resilience; you will overhear Amazonian youths engaging California kids on the best ways to mobilize for hands-on, nature-based climate resilience education; and over a cup of coffee, you will see a senior Hungarian climate scientist discusses with an Argentine practitioner how to conduct practical translational climate science under challenging local political conditions.
The world’s major climate gatherings must do more than generate headlines. We need action that begins in local communities and scales upward, uniting rural and urban areas, young and old, Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, scientists and social scientists, and civic and faith leaders.
It’s time to shift from promises and rhetoric to a decisive victory for climate resilience—starting locally, expanding globally, and ensuring no community is left behind. The MAST efforts, initially sponsored by Pope Francis and now supported by Pope Leo, offer renewed hope that grassroots initiatives involving relevant local stakeholders can open new opportunities to address the worsening weather extremes worldwide.
Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco, the chancellor of the University of Massachusetts Boston, is a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences.
