https://www.thecanary.co/uk/2026/08/22/climate-crisis-report/
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
See the original article at https://www.thecanary.co/uk/2026/08/22/climate-crisis-report/
