Terrifying climate crisis report predicts 4 Billion Dead by 2050

Climate crisis

Climate crisis — A new climate-focused campaign group, 4 Billion Dead, has launched in response to a buried report that its name could become reality. It urges people to wake up to our impending disaster of untold proportions.

4 Billion Dead takes its name from a 2025 report by the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, in conjunction with the University of Exeter. Its superficially cheery-sounding name glosses over its worst predictions:

Planetary Solvency – finding our balance with nature:

Global risk management for human prosperity

The report comes from professionals whose entire careers and profits are based on being able to accurately predict and “risk price” the future. It flew almost entirely under the radar.

This wasn’t helped by the fact that the report downplays its true findings, burying the worst deep in the appendix. Ultimately, it’s not in corporations’ interests to induce panic in the world. But it is needed.

It was written for the insurance industry, the sector whose entire business depends on pricing risk accurately. At 3°C of warming by 2050, the report puts mortality risk at up to four billion people. That’s an “extreme” trajectory, albeit one that ongoing corporate and government policies globally broadly align with.

If it sounds alarming, it is. If it sounds alarmist, that doesn’t make it any less true. Burying our heads in the sand now will cost us potentially billions of lives in decades to come. We cannot afford to dither.

Climate change missing from most UK media reports on June heatwave

Climate crisis — ‘Catastrophic impacts’: we risk everything

This is a formal risk assessment from the profession that prices catastrophe for a living, and it’s had almost no public attention. (Full report is available here.) Its executive summary makes clear the risks:

Increasingly severe climate and nature driven impacts are highly likely, including fires, floods, heat and droughts. This is a national security issue as food, water and heat stresses will impact populations. If unchecked then mass mortality, involuntary mass migration events and severe GDP contraction are likely.

Planetary Solvency, the report, defines “catastrophic impacts” as:

Economic contraction, GDP loss of over 25%;
Mass human mortality events resulting in over 2 billion deaths;
Warming of 2°C or more, triggering high number of climate tipping points;
Breakdown of some critical ecosystem services and Earth Systems;
Major Extinction Events in multiple geographies;
Ocean circulation severely impacted;
Severe socio-political fragmentation in many regions, low lying regions lost;
Heat and water stress driving mass migration of billions; and
Catastrophic mortality events from disease, nutrition, thirst and conflict.

Even in the scenario where global warming is limited to 2°C by 2050, the report still predicts “decimation.” That means 10% of humanity, or around 800 million people would be wiped out.

At this level, which we’re almost certainly on track for without major reversals in greenhouse gas emissions, the consequences are still unfathomably drastic. The report predicts that at 2°C by 2050 we’ll see:

Severe reduction in several critical ecosystem services.
Major extinction events in some geographies.
Frequent global food and water crises.
Severe socio-political fragmentation in regions exposed to climate and/or nature impacts.
Failure of vulnerable states and mass mortality events in impacted areas.

Image shows a table ranging from limited, through decimation, to extreme climate crises. At the upper extreme end, 3°C by 2050, four billion people die and half of global GDP is wiped out. Alongside ecological disaster it predicts high levels of extinction of higher-order life on Earth and frequent large scale mortality events. — Screenshot of the predictions table from the report — via the *Canary*

Right-wing press blame anything but human-made climate change for deadly wildfires

Climate consciousness or mass death

Australian Senator Nick McKim referred to the four billion deaths in a speech recently. McKim called out his Government for failing in its basic duty to protect citizens by siding with fossil fuel interests.

Roger Hallam co-founded and co-ordinated campaign groups including Just Stop Oil, Extinction Rebellion and Insulate Britain. His tireless, “revolutionary” campaigning efforts have made him globally famous and also a target of the British state. He’s been imprisoned multiple times for his peaceful activism and arrested countless more. Upon launching this newest campaign, 4 Billion Dead, Hallam said:

This is just the beginning of something that will become very big. Because, as we have been saying for years now: there comes a point when people want the truth — when people become revolted by being lied to. For years now we have been told you can only mobilise people if you tone it down, if you give hope, because otherwise people will not be able to cope. The idea is that people are actually children — they have to be protected. They have to be told fairy tales.

We are entering a time when millions of people have become sick of feeling sick. We finally realise we are going to get hurt anyway — that we are hurting so much already — that the pain of hearing the truth actually becomes a release.

This call is a moment of liberation. At points like this history is made. Regimes fall. New ways explode into being. We all sense this is going to happen. Things cannot carry on as they are. Humans are not designed to just roll over and die. We are better than that.

Hallam’s words are a reckoning and a call to action. Our governments and ‘leaders’ have let us down for far too long. It’s up to all of us to demand a better, greener, liveable future. It’s on all our heads.