We are delighted that the founder of the Thrutopian Movement, Emeritus Professor Rupert Read, who coined the term ‘Thrutopia’ and continues to champion the term, has sent us a pro-active, climate majority scenario. Climate majority refers to the 89% of the global population who are concerned about climate change and desire stronger government action, but who often feel they are in the minority or lack the means to act.

Below, Prof. Read brings us a global view of what may be to come. He imagines research-based scenarios which we don’t often see combined in such macro detail, where international climate-events are scoped all at once. Read to the end for ways to consider how to engage personally and tips for pausing and reflecting, before you act.

The Editors

A Climate Majority Scenario

Emeritus Prof. Rupert Read

The future is already arriving; what we sometimes lack is the courage to imagine it clearly.

One of the things we most need to do then—urgently—is to ‘scenario-plan’ our future, imaginatively but realistically.

We need to picture worst-case scenarios, and best-case scenarios (and scenarios in between!). That is to say: We need to picture dystopias: plausible destinations of the road we are already on, laid out plainly as warnings. And we need to picture vital thrutopias: life-affirming futures that pass through hardship without denying it. (Leave utopias aside: they are for the birds, now.)

What is most missing is reality-based thrutopias. For one thing is certain: much of the future will be hard. The question is whether that hardness can be shaped into something survivable—perhaps even, in places, beautiful; perhaps even, thrilling.

What follows is a research-based attempt to imagine a global future, seen from where I write, in Britain. It is intended as a reasonable best-case scenario for a crisis: an outline of a thrutopia for hard times. Times that will, even on this ‘best-case’ scenario, tend to get harder still after we endure and maybe transform circumstances like those imagined below.

The story begins seven years from now.

2033

A super–El Niño year

Early in 2033, another threshold is crossed. Global heating breaches 1.75°C above pre-industrial levels. (Actual experienced temperatures are breaching many more records than this scientific measurement captures.)

The effects are no longer subtle. Climate chaos accelerates. The previous summer, wildfires tore through vast areas of Wales and Scotland. Hundreds died in places that were never prepared for fire.

Yet alongside the damage, something else spreads: adaptation. Resilience. Repair.

Across much of the northern hemisphere, the Dig for Life movement has gone mainstream. Millions of households and neighbourhoods now store water together, generate local energy, and grow food in shared spaces.

This shift does not come from nowhere. Since 2031, serious public finance has backed it. Global capital has begun—haltingly—to move away from fossil fuels and toward renewables and storage. Momentum builds after the eco-business coalition We Mean Better Business launches its bluntly named “Regulate Us!” campaign. Catalysed by the 2027 Eurasian heat dome, the campaign has spread worldwide. Some governments listen. Green pensions become normal. Fossil investments finally fade.

Insurance accelerates the break. A coalition calling itself Insurers for Carbon Resilience Now helps render large swathes of fossil-fuel infrastructure commercially uninsurable.

Geoengineering proposals circulated through the late 2020s, then stalled. By the early 2030s, an international consensus had rejected them. The debate itself generates further momentum toward a post-oil, nature-aligned economy.

In July 2033, Germany’s pro-degrowth, Green chancellor announces a further doubling of natural energy-storage systems—especially gravity-based storage—to be completed within eighteen months.

By now, citizens’ assemblies guide adaptation policy in countries including Scotland, Wales, Chile, Costa Rica, Taiwan, New Zealand, Finland, Italy, and Switzerland. Many have emergency food-rationing protocols ready to deploy.

Not everywhere accepts these changes. In parts of Latin America, wealthy elites fund black markets to undermine rationing. In Paraguay, state forces massacre the landless rural poor. Elsewhere, non-violent resistance triggers mass defections from police and army units whose own families are hungry.

As the year goes on, El Niño intensifies. Harvests fail across parts of North America. Food shipments arrive from South America and western Europe. Much livestock worldwide has already been slaughtered or lost. It is typically not replaced. Humanity eats lower on the food chain.

Malnutrition spreads, worsened by the continued loss of Ukraine’s grain exports. But agri-wilding and farming-for-nature soften the blow. So does citizen solidarity: direct partnerships form between community-supported farms across borders and continents.

Where rationing systems exist—prepared in advance or rapidly improvised—countries fare better, especially their poorest citizens.

2034

Another brutal El Niño

There is no climatic reprieve.

Ocean temperatures remain dangerously high, causing tragic mass die-offs of cetaceans and much more marine life. Early in the year, several data centres in the British Isles shut down under water shortages and heat stress. Resistance to AI, already growing, sharpens suddenly as people confront its competition with humans for electricity and water. In 2034, an international treaty finally follows. AI systems are constrained.

By mid-year, leashed-AI helps optimise food distribution and reduce malnutrition in many countries. However, in some English-speaking nations, elites seize control of these systems. Hunger deepens there.

Meanwhile, AI-driven conspiracy theories continue to rip through politics. During the year, two counter-projects finally take hold. One is a citizen-funded global broadcaster, modelled on the old BBC World Service. The other is Good TV, backed by a small group of green-leaning billionaires, created to blunt the influence of GB News and its 2030 offshoot, Anglo News.

Then, in the autumn of 2034, catastrophic floods hit Eurasia. Harvests collapse again. The cumulative toll of years of scarcity—combined with fresh disaster—breaks morale in many places. Anxiety and depression surge.

In much of Europe, the impact is softened by something quietly built over the previous decade: community-based mental-health networks, climate-anxiety groups, shared practices of psychological preparedness. Counsellors, therapists, and coaches are now part of disaster response.

At the same time, the Forests of Food movement continues to spread community agroforestry across borders. Late in the year, progress stalls in central and southern Africa after unprecedented megafires.

Across much of the world, biofuels are abandoned in favour of: bio-foods.

2035

A slightly less severe El Niño—still damaging

By 2035, response begins to catch up with reality.

Governments and communities institute large-scale, biodiversity-friendly food-resilience programmes. These spread across Europe and many US states, building on earlier experiments in the Low Countries, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and Portugal.

During the year, the Love Food, Love Nature campaign sweeps the northern hemisphere. Domestic cat populations fall sharply—good news for birds. The pet-food industry pivots to supplying food banks.

In England, a Labour–Green–Liberal Democrat–Your Party coalition takes power. Post-1.5°C Britain experiences a surge in crop diversity and seed-saving. Chancellor James Meadway makes rolling land reform a centrepiece of his budget.

Across the northern hemisphere, governments use eminent-domain powers to reclaim golf courses and horse farms for food production. After food riots earlier in the year in Reading and west London, solidarity gardens appear in wealthy districts, growing food for poorer ones.

Late in the year, the David Attenborough Memorial Award—now easily the most prestigious honour in environmental life—goes to the rapidly growing Future Majority movement. Led by young people and elders together, it demands political representation for unborn generations; and creates it where governments refuse.

2036

Another severe El Niño. No neutral year in between

The strain now shows everywhere.

Early forecasts suggest a return to neutral conditions by autumn. But by now most global grain reserves have been exhausted. Many millions experience hunger intermittently. Starvation-deaths remain relatively limited.

Throughout the year, local ‘food-future’ schemes help. Food sovereignty is supplemented by international solidarity: food-future schemes step in, in places where governments fail (to).

Culture plays its part. A television drama—Calm in the Storm, set in India and England—airs worldwide and becomes a hit. It tells stories of mindful citizen action under severe climate-pressure. It strengthens a sense of shared fate.

Not everywhere responds peacefully. During 2036, speculators and hoarders in India and parts of South America are assassinated by a group calling itself the Children of Kali, in a spectacular case of life imitating art.

While, correspondingly and by contrast, in parts of South America drug- and superrich-funded militias terrorise many, often seizing control of food-distribution systems; this brings some regions to the brink of outright famine again. Citizens of the global North watch from afar in horror; but then finally start to realise that they are not immune…

…By mid-2036, the ‘Gulf Stream’ has lost 35% of its strength.

As the year draws on, harvests fail again—this time including Britain’s. The British Isles, still quite incapable of feeding themselves despite the innovations of recent years, face a hungry winter and the possible onset of the North Atlantic sub-polar gyre tipping point. China ‘hoards’ its food surplus, drawing open condemnation from populist leaders abroad.

A vicious cold snap sets in, worse than 1963. Britain edges toward famine.

Then, just in time, food shipments arrive—pushed through by public pressure in the United States and Canada, demanding solidarity with the old mother country.

The future balances on a knife-edge. But:

We live to fight another day.

Exercise

Pause.

Before you go on, step into the world you’ve just read about. Not abstractly, but concretely, vicariously, seriously.

Do this: Take a few minutes quietly to imagine your own life in this scenario. Yours, and your family’s.

Picture the everyday. The meals, the conversations. The work. How you heat your home. How you and your neighbours get (good) food. How you cope, emotionally, with 2033, 2034, 2035—and especially 2036.

Stay with the details.

If a story begins to form—of you, in this future—perhaps consider writing it! A thrutopian story.

When you are ready, read on…

Coda: reflecting further

Why is this proto-thrutopian scenario that I’ve written above sketchy in the way that it is?

Here’s a more interesting reason than the fact that there is a word-limit (which I’m well below) for this submission-window to Bending The Arc. I’ve kept it deliberately sketchy because even (or perhaps especially!) in this ‘best-case’ crisis-coping-future, millions of people have acted in ways that cannot be predicted in detail. Much of the real story that I’ve imagined above happens before 2033, in choices already made—and still being made.

You are meant to fill in the gaps. As you read, you supply part of the backstory. I hope that you place yourself, and those you love, inside it. You turn a scenario into a story that might yet be written in the great book of life.

Because this is of course not a game.

This is our life.

With thanks to John Gray and Alison Seddon for comments on an earlier draft, and to many students and colleagues over the years for feedback on readings of this scenario.

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Rupert Read is co-director of the Climate Majority Project and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of East Anglia. He is the author of books including This Civilisation is Finished, Why Climate Breakdown Matters and Transformative Adaptation - Another world is still just possible.

“I came up with the concept of Thrutopia in 2017 as a framework for navigating the climate/ecological crisis. It encourages the active, detailed imagining of the middle passage between utopian fantasies and dystopian, total, unameliorated collapse. Essentially, it's the best possible, endless way through what is already here and the worse to come.”