[Draft] LiDAR in space for global forest measurements
Climate change is not just an environmental issue. It is a systemic risk to modern civilisation.
Rising global temperatures act as a force multiplier on nearly every major challenge humanity faces: food security, water availability, geopolitical stability, public health, economic resilience, and national security. Unlike many other global risks, climate change is not episodic or hypothetical. It is cumulative, persistent, and already underway.
As temperatures rise, physical systems that underpin human society begin to degrade. Stable coastlines, predictable weather patterns, reliable agricultural zones, and intact ecosystems all start to fall apart. These stresses compound over time, increasing the likelihood of cascading failures across social, economic, and political systems.
Climate change does not need to be the single greatest existential threat to matter profoundly. Even if other risks, such as nuclear conflict, pandemics, or advanced artificial intelligence, appear more acute and immediate, climate change raises the baseline probability and severity of all of them. It worsens droughts that trigger conflict, amplifies disasters that overwhelm governance, and erodes the margin for error in already fragile regions.
Source: https://www.dawn.com/news/1828113
One of the defining characteristics of climate change is inertia. Carbon dioxide persists in the atmosphere for centuries. Warming is delayed relative to emissions. Decisions made today shape climate outcomes decades into the future, long after political cycles, investment horizons, and institutional memories have turned over.
This inertia creates a dangerous asymmetry:
As a result, societies consistently under-invest in prevention and over-pay for recovery.
Climate change is not a smooth, linear process. Many natural systems exhibit threshold behaviour. These are points beyond which change accelerates rapidly or becomes irreversible. Examples include large-scale forest dieback, ice sheet collapse, coral reef loss, and permafrost thaw.
Crossing these thresholds does not simply increase damage; it reshapes the system. Feedback loops can amplify warming, reduce natural carbon sinks, and lock in higher future temperatures even if emissions decline later.
This makes early, accurate intervention far more valuable than late, reactive measures.
Source: https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2022/12/climate-tipping-points_9994de90/abc5a69e-en.pdf
For much of the past two decades, climate action has been driven by optimism: voluntary commitments, aspirational targets, and proxy indicators of progress. As impacts become more visible and costs mount, this phase is ending.
Governments, markets, and citizens are shifting toward accountability:
In this new phase, measurement becomes infrastructure. The ability to observe, quantify, and verify changes in Earth’s systems—accurately, repeatedly, and at scale—becomes as critical as the policies and projects themselves.
Climate change is therefore not only a question of emissions and energy. It is a question of information: how well we can see the planet we are trying to manage.
That need for planetary-scale, decision-grade measurement is the foundation for everything that follows.