Publications The Overshoot
Life After the 1.5°C Limit
— By Narek Ohanyan —
We have exited the Goldilocks Zone.
Order your copyThe premise
For thirty years, the central organizing principle of global climate policy was a red line: do not cross 1.5°C. It was the safety rail of the Holocene, the boundary between manageable disruption and catastrophic instability.
The Overshoot begins with a singular, scientific reality: we are going to cross it.
This is not a book about how to save the world of yesterday; it is a manual for surviving the world of tomorrow. Authored by climate strategist Narek Ohanyan, it moves beyond the paralyzing binary of “hope vs. doom” to map the physical and political terrain of the coming decades. It argues that we are entering a period of overshoot — a turbulent, temporary state where humanity must simultaneously endure the consequences of past emissions while engineering the restoration of the future.
The narrative arc
Part I
The book dissects the inertia of the planetary system, explaining why the warming we see today is merely the lag of emissions from decades ago. It grounds the reader in the paleoclimate history that confirms we have already broken the stability of the last 10,000 years.
Part II
The present. From the atmospheric rivers drowning cities to the feedback loops threatening the Amazon, it translates the dense physics of the IPCC reports into a clear warning: the climate system is no longer passive; it is reacting.
Part III
The solutions that matter now — the wet-bulb world where cooling is a human right, the sponge cities that will weather the floods, and the great wealth transfer required to finance a restorative economy. It culminates in a vision for net negative: not just to stop emitting, but to clean up the sky.
The manifesto
Uniquely, The Overshoot concludes with the 2025 Manifesto: the Sustainable Climate Goals. Recognising that the UN’s SDGs are no longer sufficient for the emergency we face, Ohanyan proposes 10 scientifically bounded targets — from a Zero Combustion energy standard to a Future Veto in governance — that provide a concrete checklist for survival.
The promise
Authoritative, urgent, and deeply researched, The Overshoot challenges the reader to look past the bottleneck of the current crisis and see the long game. We are the first generation to feel the impact of climate change, and the last that can do something about it. This book is the blueprint for that something.
The Holocene was a gift of nature. The Habitable Anthropocene must be an achievement of humanity.
