Fifth episode. The voice of science. We step away from practice and listen to physics for half an hour.
In the Heroes of the Undercurrent series we speak with the people who carry the sustainability transition from the inside out. Often without a mandate, always with conviction. The first four episodes featured professionals from practice. Manon van Leeuwen on the psychology of behavioural change and self-discrepancy. Debbie Rooms (Compass Group Netherlands) on sustainability that has to reach the heart in order to stick. Inge van Baardwijk (Royal Schiphol Group) on an F&B covenant built on trust rather than contract. And Inan Şahin (Efteling) on small experiments that flip behavioural patterns within weeks. Four professionals, one common thread: they see that their work matters, and they act accordingly. Proactively, intrinsically, with courage.
But something is shifting in our sector. The self-evidence of sustainability that was tangible in 2022 and 2023 has thinned out in 2025 and 2026. Politicians are dialling back ambitions. Brussels is diluting CSRD and CSDDD through the Omnibus packages. Companies are rebalancing transition plans 'until things settle in the market'. What was once intrinsic motivation has become extrinsic compliance, and even that compliance is now ebbing away. From proactive to reactive in two years. We are not the only ones wondering where this is heading.
That is why we are now turning to scientists. Time to source the story not from someone with skin in the game in the sector, but from someone who looks at the physics and tells us what they see. We spoke with Wim Thiery, professor of climate science at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. He is co-author of two UN climate reports (IPCC), published in Science (2021) and in Nature (2025), and leads the ERC project LACRIMA on what climate change does to the generations being born today. Not an activist. Not a doomer. Not a techno-optimist. A scientist who quietly tells us what he sees.
It became a half hour that won't let me go.
My first question to Wim: is it going faster than we thought? His answer surprised me.
The warming of the earth isn't actually going faster than we expect. It is something we have known for a hundred years. We are now seeing it unfold before our eyes.
Wim Thiery is not someone who piles on alarm signals. In fact, he pushes back against the 'everything is spiralling out of control' narrative. The physics, he says, is calm and consistent. The predictions of decades ago are now becoming reality. No more, no less.
What is changing is how sharply science can look within that physics. With each new IPCC cycle, the danger thresholds, the temperatures at which we run serious risks, are being adjusted downwards. Not because science is becoming more alarmist, but because we keep learning more, and what we learn consistently points in the same direction.
There is a structural pattern: as we build up our scientific knowledge, the situation turns out to be more serious than previously thought.
So the difference is not in the physics itself; that was already there. The difference is in how sharply we can see it. And what we see more clearly is grimmer than what we suspected.
You can't negotiate with physics. You can say: I don't believe in gravity. But I still wouldn't jump off a building.
It is one of the most haunting lines from our entire conversation.
One of the ways Wim translates the pace of the extremes into something tangible is through a sports comparison.
At the Olympics, records are broken less and less often. And when they are broken, the margins are very small. But now, with heatwaves and what we call water bombs, records are being broken with ever larger margins. It is as if someone improves the world record on the 100 metre sprint by a full second. Then you think: there must be a new kind of doping in the game.
He draws a second comparison with Armand Duplantis, the Swedish pole-vaulter who keeps improving his own world record by centimetres at a time. But the climate is doing something else.
We are dealing with a climate on steroids, where records are being broken with huge leaps, with no end in sight. As if Duplantis suddenly jumps fifty centimetres higher.
Heatwaves that are not just warmer, but substantially warmer. Water bombs (cloudbursts like those in the Ardennes, in Limburg, in Valencia) showing patterns that no longer fit statistically into a stable climate. And a truth that hardly seems to make an impression any more:
An exceptional year of today, what we now experience as extreme, will be the new average within a single decade. And then more extremes will pile on top of that new average.
This may be one of the reasons the shock seems to have worn off. We have normalised yesterday's extremes, and we are not the same people we were a few years ago. Wim himself calls it the poly-crisis: COVID, wars, energy crisis, geopolitics, all at once, while the physics simply keeps working on its own narrative, in the background. Scientists keep delivering new studies. But the cumulative effect of 'climate change is accelerating again' as news is starting to lose its power to shock. We live with it. We carry on.
For a long time we thought we could steer climate change. That, in a sense, is a misconception. What Wim explains may well be the most important insight from the entire conversation, and it is new for many.
CO₂ is the PFAS of the climate. PFAS, the forever chemicals: as long as you keep producing them, they accumulate. Stop, and they don't get worse. But they're not gone either. CO₂, in that sense, is an everlasting chemical. Pump it into the air, and it stays there for centuries to millennia.
Half of what we emit each day stays in the atmosphere for a very long time. The other half is absorbed by photosynthesis and the oceans. And we are emitting more every year, around 40 billion tonnes of CO₂ per year worldwide, roughly 90% from the burning of oil, coal and gas, with the rest from deforestation.
This has a consequence that is rarely made explicit:
We are still in the escalating phase. With COVID, thanks to the measures, things came down by themselves. With CO₂ they don't. If we go to net zero, the problem stabilises at the level of warming we have at that moment, not at the level of today. That is more than we have now. And it doesn't go down.
In other words: every gram of CO₂ we emit adds something that no longer goes away. Every tenth of a degree of warming we add stays. We are not steering a problem; we are only deciding where the rise comes to a halt.
In the phase we are in now, every degree of warming is de facto irreversible. Every day we add a new lock-in.
For the F&B and FoodService sector, for every sector really, that changes the nature of the conversation. We debate goals for 2030 and 2050 as if we can still choose and reverse. We are only choosing where the escalation stops and the new normal arrives. Unless we actively start filtering CO₂ out of the air.
A second development Wim highlights: in just a few years, science has become dramatically better at attributing damage to causes. Not just in general terms, but down to the level of individual companies.
We are now at a point where we can say: last summer there were x heat-related deaths in Europe, and y of those could have been avoided in a world without climate change. We can say: a flood at Lake Victoria was x centimetres higher because of climate change, and y additional surface area was flooded as a result.
This is called impact attribution. More recently it goes further, into what they call source attribution.
We can now link this to the historical emissions of individual companies. We can say: the heatwave in 2024 in the Netherlands became 0.x degrees warmer due to Shell's emissions, 0.y degrees due to ExxonMobil, and so on. We have looked at more than 200 heatwaves and more than 100 companies. For every combination, we can say: the probability of this heatwave increased by x percent because of that one company's emissions.
What this means for the corporate world, shareholders and lawyers can fill in for themselves. Climate cases are multiplying. Science is now providing the evidence that, until recently, was missing. And that evidence is no longer 'a trend at aggregate level'. It is targeted, local in time and place, and traceable.
And then comes the part of the conversation that hits home. Because here it becomes personal: for Wim, for me, and for every reader with (grand)children, nieces or nephews. For a long time, climate change was a story about future generations. 'We are doing this for our great-grandchildren.' A sympathetic frame, but according to Wim scientifically incomplete. The new scientific research, including the work my team has done, shows that if you don't look at a snapshot in time, but at what a real person experiences in a real life, the picture changes fundamentally.
By coupling climate projections with demographics and with real people in real places, a different number emerges:
A child who is twelve years old today will, on average worldwide, experience four times more crop failures over their lifetime, compared to a life in a world without climate change, if we stay on the current policy path.
Four times more. For a child still in school today. And that is the average, not the outlier. Worldwide, including regions that will be hit much harder.
Under a 3.5 degree warming pathway, more than 90% of children born today will live an unprecedented life in terms of heatwave exposure. Under a 1.5 degree pathway, if we stay within Paris, we can protect about 40% of that younger generation from that condition.
Forty percent of an entire world generation. That is no rounding error. Those are hundreds of millions of children whose lives we are, today, with our choices, making either more liveable or more extreme.
We are letting our children walk into a Terra Incognita, more extreme and more brutal than ever.
It is the line that echoed longest after the interview. A Terra Incognita: an unknown country. A territory where no one has ever lived. In principle this applies to every generation: to your grandparents, your parents and yourself, albeit to a limited degree. But for your children, and certainly for their children, it becomes an 'unprecedented life'.
Climate action today is no longer a story about limiting economic damage for future generations. This is about a safe life for ourselves and for the children who are already here. Everyone has them around: children, grandchildren, or one is young oneself, or has nieces or nephews. It becomes concrete for everyone.
For our sector, this conversation is not abstract. Food production, processing and consumption together are responsible for around a third of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the IPCC between 21% and 37%, depending on how you draw the boundaries and which source you use. That makes our sector unavoidably part of the cause. At the same time, we are also one of the first sectors to feel the physical consequences: harvests are becoming more erratic, water crises reinforce one another, and heat extremes make work harder both in the field and in the factory.
Wim points without flinching to the direct consequences for our supply chain:
Think about the supply chain disruptions in food. Failed harvests. Food price stability, regionally or globally. We will see more and more of this.
His own research backs this up: not one breadbasket under pressure, but several at the same time. Heatwaves following each other before an ecosystem can recover. Non-local shocks travelling through trade chains: a failed harvest in Brazil that becomes visible four months later in a price movement on a Dutch procurement contract. The forecast of four times more crop failures in a lifetime is not an abstraction. It is the statistically inevitable consequence of the pipeline we ourselves are filling.
Strategically, that means the following. Scope 3 does not disappear because the European reporting requirements are softened. The physical risk sits in the chain, not in the report. And it is getting bigger, not smaller. For the F&B executive, the FoodService CEO, the sustainability manager, the real estate owner, the management of a holiday park, a hotel chain, a theme park or an airport: the external regulator is partly stepping back, while the physical regulator keeps running at full power. Whoever confuses the two is increasing their own risk.
There is also a second frame. Wim himself points to the place where our sector can accelerate the transition, namely the link between climate and health:
In your case this is also very important: if we move to a climate-friendly diet, like an EAT-Lancet diet, you also gain in health. Better public health. More movement, healthier living.
That shifts the frame for our sector. For years we have appealed to 'what is good for your environment'. Increasingly, it becomes a story of 'what is also good for you and your children'. The sustainable choice as the healthier choice. EAT-Lancet as the bridge between science and plate. For anyone making operational decisions about menus, food courts, casual dining, terminals, parks, hotels or catering contracts: the communicative shift has already been made by science. What remains is the translation onto the plate.
Here the conversation becomes notably hopeful. Because Wim is no fatalist.
We know what it is. We know we can fix this. We have the technologies, financially no problem, around 2% of global GDP. We have the solutions: heat pumps, solar panels, wind turbines, insulation, electric cars, electric trucks. All of those technologies exist.
And these are not just the direct solutions. They come with co-benefits:
Energy independence, no longer being dependent on the Strait of Hormuz. Better air quality. In your case, health gains. Quieter cities. Cheaper energy bills. Once the investment has been made, it pays itself back. After that, the bill is structurally lower. We have so much to gain.
And then, the heart of his message, in a few sentences:
What's missing is taking the bull by the horns. Conducting policy in line with the challenge. Making sure the technologies are rolled out at scale. What's missing, is the will.
In summary: technology present. Money present. Knowledge present. Capability present. Will absent. Leadership absent. That is where the challenge lies, and that is where the open space lies for our sector. The major players in F&B, FoodService, contract catering, real estate, holiday parks, hotels, theme parks and airports have everything in hand to accelerate the rollout. Some of them are already pursuing this challenge with real conviction. What we don't have, is an excuse.
At the end of the conversation I thank Wim. He has freed up half an hour from his diary and is rapidly into the next meeting. But before we close, he repeats, almost casually, the core thought. Everyone has people they care about. Everyone has children, nieces, nephews, or is themselves young. It becomes concrete for everyone. That is where the lever sits.
For the F&B and FoodService sector, this is an invitation to return to the intrinsic motivation with which our first four heroes of the undercurrent themselves began. Not because regulation requires it. Not because the market rewards it. But because we, as executives, as managers, as sustainability leads, recognise that every gram of CO₂ we do or do not emit today becomes an everlasting chemical in the troposphere where our children will live. And because, in all honesty, we already have all the means to choose otherwise.
You can't negotiate with physics.
That sounds at first like a warning. But it is also a reassurance. Physics doesn't lie. The numbers are there. The technology is there. The financial means are there. What is missing is in our hands.
Time to keep going with the undercurrent. Quieter, perhaps, than in 2022. But more steadfast. Because what unites our four heroes from practice and this one scientist is the same conviction: the direction is clear, the means are at hand, and the work need not wait for the right market. It is waiting for us.
This interview is part of the Heroes of the Undercurrent series by Conceptional. Previous episodes: Manon van Leeuwen, Debbie Rooms (Compass Group Netherlands), Inge van Baardwijk (Royal Schiphol Group) and Inan Şahin (Efteling). Wim Thiery is professor of climate science at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and co-author of the IPCC reports Climate Change and Land (2019) and the Sixth Assessment Report (2021). Quotes from Wim Thiery have been translated from the original Dutch.
.png)