Beyond 1.5ºC Transformation Hub: Learning from the 2025 catalytic initiatives
Purpose and Context
In 2025, the Beyond 1.5 Transformation Hub served as an experimental space within the Collaborative for Systemic Climate Action’s to explore what it takes to come to terms with reality in a world moving beyond 1.5°C of warming, imagine alternatives, act, adapt, and transform. Rather than focusing on a single sector or geography, the Hub brought together diverse initiatives—from municipal food systems and democratic innovation to landscape-based scenario work and regional adaptation programmes—linked by a shared question: What capabilities are needed to navigate deep uncertainty while staying anchored in lived experience, collective agency and justice?
The Hub was not designed as a project, or a delivery mechanism for predefined solutions. Instead, it functioned as an infrastructure, a “launch pad” that enables experimenting and learning: a place to test approaches, convene unlikely actors, surface tensions, and reflect across contexts and scales. This learning brief condenses what emerged across the Hub’s activities over the year, including both generative outcomes and initiatives that took a different turn than expected.
What was Enabled by the Hub
The Hub contributed catalysing and advancing several initiatives promoting a transformative approach to adaptation in a fast-warming world, including:
A multi-actor dialogue on the future of the Danish landscape
A process addressing cross-sector collaborations for a climate-resilient food strategy in eThekwini (South Africa)
An exploration of obstacles and enablers of multi-stakeholder climate collaboration in the Italian context
A conversation on gaps to be filled for business solutions to contribute significantly to resilient food systems at the global level
Across these different strands of work, the Hub enabled three interconnected forms of learning.
First, it created relational learning spaces. Whether in city-level workshops, during civic encounters on landscapes, or global conversations, the initiatives showed that trust-building, facilitation, and sustained relationships are not peripheral — they are at the same time core capabilities that enable transformation, as well as core elements of it. Progress consistently depended on people feeling able to speak from lived experience, to disagree constructively, and to remain engaged over time.
Second, the Hub made visible the connection between place-based experimentation and systemic constraints. Local and regional initiatives often demonstrated creativity and agency, but their impact was shaped—and sometimes limited—by policy silos, funding structures, and institutional mandates operating at higher levels. The Hub helped surface these tensions without assuming they could be easily resolved.
Third, the Hub foregrounded collective sense-making inseparable from imagination, action and collaboration; not an add-on or ex-post exercise. Some participants across initiatives described being overwhelmed by information, frameworks, data, and tools, yet under-supported in making sense of them. Learning spaces that helped actors interpret complexity, prioritise, and adapt their approaches proved as important as technical expertise.
Fourth: the Collaborative for Systemic Climate Action has been invaluable for the Hub to thoroughly explore and test its assumptions about climate, democracy, narratives and psycho-emotional resilience, as well as the many pathways it could offer to strengthening agency in the face of tough challenges.
Experimenting, Pivoting and Adjusting
Two experimental strands within the Hub generated important learning, including by not unfolding as initially hoped.
Food Transformation Beyond 1.5
A workshop organised at the World Economic Forum in Davos, in collaboration with InTent, explored business solutions for a transformed global food system beyond 1.5°C. Participants identified four strategic gaps—policy, narratives, finance, and collaboration/innovation—as key barriers to progress. While there was initial interest in continuing the conversation, attempts to convene a follow-up process encountered a few challenges, resulting in low engagement.
Debrief meetings with partners and participants elicited potential limiting factors: key actors were possibly busy contributing to COP-related processes; the global scope of the conversation was possibly too broad - having conversations about implications for regional strategies would have made the conversation more relevant; but the most relevant point would probably be the need to look at incentive structures, and dynamics that shape the gaps and make them expand.
Key learning and pivoting: convening around well-known systemic gaps requires either a very clear, narrowly defined focus (geography or sub-sector) or a more thorough approach in addressing the root causes and power structures that keep food systems producing the same outcomes, despite the excellent analyses and ambitious, well-funded initiatives available.
In complex and interconnected systems like food, legitimacy, timing, and scope are as critical as facilitation quality: the implication for our way forward is to support as much as possible place-based (city, region, bio-region) food systems initiatives.
What Was Confirmed—and What Emerged Anew
New insights emerged through the initiatives catalysed by the Hub. Notably, learning across the Danish dialogue on landscapes, the food strategy dialogue in eThekwini, and the initial mapping of challenges in Italy revealed strong resonance in challenges around inclusion, finance, regulatory obstacles, and institutional rigidity—suggesting that Europe has as much to learn from global adaptation practice as it has to contribute. The importance of physical, embodied learning spaces—especially for dialogues related to our relationship with food we eat and the landscapes we inhabit—also stood out as a powerful counterpoint to purely technical or online formats.
Several assumptions were confirmed, especially in dialogue with other partners related initiatives. IIED’s experience on locally led adaptation, and DemSoc bottom-up democracy approach reinforced the insight that there is no one-size-fits-all pathway to transformation: and that capabilities develop unevenly and are shaped by power, place, and history. Also, adaptation and democratic renewal cannot be treated as add-ons or tweaks to existing systems: they require reworking relationships, incentives, and decision-making structures entailing profound changes that can be actively resisted by many.
Implications for Future Work
The Beyond 1.5 Transformation Hub demonstrated the value of holding a portfolio of experiments rather than betting on singular initiatives. It also highlighted the importance of recognising when to pause, adapt, or let go.
Going forward, the learning suggests three priorities:
Invest intentionally in convening, relational and facilitative capacity, recognising it as essential infrastructure rather than an added cost.
Design learning spaces that bridge levels, connecting locally-grounded experimentation with policy and funding environments, without flattening complexity.
Be strategic about what initiatives to catalyse, especially in crowded fields: clarity of purpose, legitimacy, timing, and scope matter as much as intent.
Be clear and articulate about the journey that is at the heart of transformation, which for us boils down to four key shifts - to be articulated in our upcoming playbook:
Face - moving from climate denial or naive optimism, to acceptance of an uncomfortable reality, being clear-eyed about risks and consequence of inaction
Image - explore possible futures and tap into desire to envision healthier societies
Act - put imagination into action by addressing challenges, connecting experiments and actors, and learning together
Care - anticipate, accept and address the emotional impact of the journey to build resilience
Taken together, the Hub’s experiences reinforces a central insight: in a world beyond 1.5°C, cultivating the capabilities to sense what is needed, have honest conversations about transformation, experiment, learn, relate, and act with care even under conditions of deep uncertainty, is possibly the only path to developing the appropriate solutions to such massive, multi-generational challenge.
