The impacts of climate change are occurring sooner than expected, but governments and businesses continue to underestimate the risks, which could add up to trillions of dollars in economic losses by 2050.

A has warned that the world may have seriously underestimated the rate of warming and faces “planetary insolvency”, where global warming begins to severely damage both the environment and economic growth.

Decision-makers typically focus on the middle-ground estimates of climate impacts. But they should be preparing for the worst-case scenarios instead, the report says, since impacts like short-term precipitation extremes in some regions are happening earlier than anticipated.

“Governments need to agree on a planetary solvency plan quickly,” says , former top climate adviser to the UK government who contributed to the report. “We are looking at an accelerated rate of temperature rise. We’re not sure if that will continue into the future but we can probably assume it’s not going to relax backwards.”

A first step towards such a plan could be to stop assuming the world economy will keep expanding, says at the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries in the UK, an author of the new report. According to the Network for Greening the Financial System, global GDP could fall by 25 per cent with 2°C of warming by 2050. This would mean up to $25 trillion in economic losses annually due to climate-related impacts, says Trust. But the network it doesn’t foresee a recession, since it expects global economic growth to outpace those damages.

“This is Titanic risk modelling, looking backwards from the deck of the Titanic in April 1912 and predicting a smooth voyage,” says Trust. “This fails the first principles of risk management, how to have a best guess about the worst case.”

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The call to plan for the worst comes as a finds 2025 was the third warmest year on record after 2023 and 2024, with an average temperature of 1.47°C above pre-industrial levels. Because 2024 was 1.6°C higher, for the first time, the three-year average was more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial temperatures.

That’s another step towards the 20-to-30-year average needed to fail the Paris Agreement goal of keeping warming below the 1.5°C threshold. When the agreement was signed a decade ago, 1.5°C was predicted by 2045. But if the trend over the past 30 years continues, we will now breach that long-term threshold by 2030, according to Copernicus.

The rate of warming has been quickening. Many scientists attribute that to the decline in sulphur-containing air pollution from coal power and shipping. As the skies have cleared, more of the sun’s heat has been reaching Earth’s surface, “unmasking” about 0.5°C of warming.

But the biggest reason we could surpass 1.5°C sooner than expected is because emissions have continued to increase each year, says  at Copernicus. Fossil fuel emissions set yet another record in 2025.

“Emissions haven’t come down as fast as people believed they would,” says Burgess.

Every tenth of a degree of warming will result in more frequent and intense extreme weather. Already, the Los Angeles wildfires in January 2025 – potentially the costliest natural disaster in US history – were . Hurricane Melissa, the strongest storm to make landfall around the Atlantic Ocean, was associated with wind speeds at least 16 kilometres per hour faster than would be expected without climate change.

“Because this is a global average, the reality is that when we have 1.5 degrees of warming at a global level, that means that heatwaves are often 3 or 4 or even 10 degrees warmer than they otherwise would have been,” says Burgess. “Children today will be exposed to more heat hazards, more climate hazards than we were or our parents were.”

The greatest warming is at the poles due to feedback loops like the loss of reflective snow and ice, which allows more of the sun’s heat to be absorbed. Last year was the warmest year on record for Antarctica due to a rare stratospheric heating event. Combined sea ice extent in the Arctic and Antarctica reached a record low.

But in a positive sign, global emissions are not rising as quickly as they once were, and China’s emissions have flatlined.

“Because of this flattening of emissions of CO2, then we would expect warming to continue but without acceleration, just continue at the same rate,” says at the University of East Anglia, UK.

Cracking down on methane leaks from infrastructure like gas pipelines and old coal mines could be a quick short-term fix, says King. Cutting methane emissions by 30 per cent this decade could warming at least 0.2°C by 2050.

“We need all the slow fixes as well, but this is a critical part of the pathway,” says King. “Because, frankly, the overshoot above 1.5°C is a major challenge to humanity.”

Bronze Age Europeans earned and spent money in much the same way as we do today, indicating that the origins of the “market economy” are far more ancient than expected.

That is the controversial conclusion of new research that challenges the view that elites were the dominant force in Bronze Age economies, and proposes that human economic behaviour may not have changed much over the past 3500 years – and perhaps even longer.

“We often tend to romanticise European prehistory, but the Bronze Age was not a fantasy realm where townsfolk and peasants were merely the background for some great lord providing for their needs,” says at Aarhus University in Denmark. “It was a very familiar world where people had families, friends, a social network, marketplaces and a job, and ultimately had to figure out how to make ends meet.”

Europeans of the Bronze Age, a period that spans 3300 to 800 BC, were not meticulous bookkeepers like people of some other ancient societies, such as Mesopotamia. But Ialongo and at the University of Bologna, Italy, suggest that important revelations about their daily lives, and the roots of our own modern economic behaviour, can be found in the troves of metal fragments, known as hoards, that they left behind.

Lago and Ialongo analysed more than 20,000 metal objects from hoards buried in Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia and Germany during the Bronze Age. The pieces appear in many forms, but around 1500 BC, they start to become standardised by weight, a shift that distinguishes them as a form of pre-coinage money.

“The discovery of a widespread measurement and weight system makes it possible to model things that have been known about for centuries in a way that they have never been modelled before,” says Ialongo. “This opens up new results to old questions, but also new questions that no one was asking before.”

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To that end, the team found that the weight values of the huge sample follow the same statistical distribution as the daily expenses of a modern Western household: small everyday expenses, represented by lighter fragments, made up the vast majority of consumption patterns, while larger expenses, represented by heavier fragments, were comparatively rare. This pattern is analogous to what you might find in an average modern wallet, with lots of smaller banknotes and very few high-value ones.

Lago and Ialongo interpret the findings as evidence that Bronze Age economic systems were regulated by supply and demand market forces, in which everyone participates proportionally to how much they earn. This hypothesis stands in contrast to an influential view put forth in the 1940s by the anthropologist Karl Polanyi, who cast modern economies based on monetary profit as a new and distinct phenomenon from ancient economies centred around barter, gift exchange and social standing.

at Purdue University in Indiana finds the study to be credible. “The argument, I think, will prompt discussion among archaeologists and economic anthropologists, who have been labouring under false assumptions about the antiquity of market economies for decades,” he says.

“I think this paper will beneficially add fuel to that kind of critique,” says Blanton. “For me, the paper throws a whole new light on the function of the bronze hoards and their potential for the use of bronze pieces as units of exchange.”

However, at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland is sceptical of the team’s conclusions. “It’s risky to assume that ordinary people in pre-modern times used money in ordinary economic ways,” says Schoenberger. “Medieval English peasants, for example, only began selling their produce for money when their lords began demanding money in place of in-kind rents and taxes. The peasants handed most – if not all – of that money directly to the lord. They sold in order to get money, but they did not use it to buy things they needed. We’re still a long way from modern economic behaviour [in the Middle Ages].”

Lago and Ialongo hope their research will inspire specialists in other fields to develop similar work on artefacts from different regions and cultures. They suggest that market economies naturally arose across time and cultures, and that such systems are not new or special inventions of Western societies that emerged over the past few centuries.

“Technically, we do not prove that the Bronze Age economy was a market economy,” says Ialongo. “We simply find no evidence that it wasn’t. And we simply point out the paradox: why is everyone convinced that the market economy did not exist, if everything we see can be explained by a market economy model? In other words, why should we imagine a more complex explanation, if the simplest one works just fine?”