Professor Laura Pereira sits in South Africa asking a question that feels urgent enough to reshape the future itself: what if our most sophisticated climate models are stuck asking the wrong question entirely?
That question sits at the heart of a new paper published in One Earth by researchers working with the Earth Commission, a network of 23 leading scientists convened by Future Earth, the world's largest sustainability research organization. Their finding is both sobering and clarifying—the dominant models used to guide global climate and biodiversity policy are built on assumptions that helped create today's crises in the first place. By relying on existing economic systems, governance structures, and social norms, these models tend to imagine incremental, technological fixes rather than the deeper transformations actually needed to achieve a safe and just future.
"Right now, many of our global scenarios are effectively asking how to fix the future without really changing the present," Pereira says. "If we want pathways that work, we need tools that can explore different economic models, different power structures, and different relationships between people and nature, not just different technologies."
The stakes are enormous. The outputs from these models shape major global assessments like the IPCC and IPBES, and influence negotiations under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Convention on Biological Diversity. Yet the research reveals glaring blind spots: many scenarios fail to ask foundational questions like who benefits, who bears the costs, and whose voices are included in shaping the future. These gaps are particularly acute when it comes to perspectives from the Global South, where impacts often hit hardest and where solutions must ultimately originate.
The world, the paper argues, is not facing a single crisis but several colliding at once—climate change, biodiversity loss, widening inequality. Current models rarely capture how these challenges interact or how shifts in power, institutions, and values could reshape possible futures. Most widely used models, such as Integrated Assessment Models, have acknowledged constraints that limit their ability to grapple with this complexity. Notably, Africa is the only region without an IAM, a critical gap the researchers hope to address through expanded funding.
The Earth Commission, with four of its 23 members hailing from Africa, proposes a bold research agenda to move beyond these limitations. Their vision centers on a new generation of "integrated transformative scenarios" that bring together climate, biodiversity, and equity goals—and crucially, are co-developed with Indigenous Peoples, local communities, and a much broader range of actors than traditional modeling approaches involve. They call for a Global South-led "scenarios secretariat," new types of models designed from the ground up to handle complexity and uncertainty, and stronger links between different research fields, including alternative economic thinking.
Early examples already point in this direction: nature-centered scenarios, post-growth economic models, and justice-focused initiatives like the Justice Model Intercomparison Project and the Earth Commission's own Transformations Pathways workstream. Together, these approaches begin to sketch out futures that are not only environmentally sustainable, but more equitable. "We find there's a real need to move beyond business-as-usual modeling," says Albert Norström, the Commission's science director, "and start co-creating futures that reflect the diversity of societies, knowledge, and values around the world."
The message is clear: solving the polycrisis requires not just better data or newer technology, but fundamentally reimagining whose futures count and how we envision them.