September 24, 2026
At the beginning of September, the United Nations Environmental Programme released the Limiting Overshoot report, which stated that the world is now expected to exceed 1.5°C of global warming within the next few years. The threshold that the climate and health community has spent decades warning about is no longer something we will be able to avoid.
At MS4SF, we are sitting with the grief and heartache that comes with recognizing what has been lost and what may no longer be possible to prevent. There is no tidy platitude for this moment. There shouldn’t be. Emergent and longitudinal impacts feel insurmountable as we recognize that irreversible losses and permanently changed conditions are now certain.
It may feel like crossing 1.5°C means crossing the threshold of action, but grief cannot be the end of our response. We cannot sit idly by as we wait for the summer’s scorching heat and raging wildfires to settle because we know what lies ahead of us.
The question before us has shifted. It has become a question of how we might limit further warming, protect communities from the harms already underway, and build a future in which adaptation does not further deepen inequity. We must hold governments, institutions, and corporations accountable for the decisions that have brought us here.
As we consider the impacts this will have on our patients and future practice, we must commit to foregrounding equity and justice in every aspect of climate response. Every fraction of a degree still matters. Every ton of waste diverted matters. Every policy won, system changed, and individual empowered to act matters.
We may be entering a new chapter of the climate crisis, but we must recall we are not without agency. At MS4SF, we intend to meet this moment with honesty about what has been and will be lost, and with urgency for what remains at stake.
