Frequently Asked Questions

What is 4 Billion Dead (4BD)?

4 Billion Dead is a community-based project, not a traditional campaign, built around helping people face the scale of the crisis we’re in rather than look away from it.

Most people already know things are getting worse, and that the gap between knowing and actually feeling it is where real change starts. We build community through simple, shared acts of bearing witness: a photo, a silence procession, a weekend gathering done together rather than alone.

What does 4BD actually want people to do?

Start by joining one of our monthly online public calls. That’s the easiest first step, no commitment, just show up and listen.

Then take part in the photo action: take a photo of yourself holding a sign with “4 Billion Dead” written on it, and upload it to our visual record. It’s a small, simple act of bearing witness, refusing to look away from what we’re facing, done alongside everyone else who’s done the same.

From there, we help local groups form, so you can move from an online call to in-person talks and meetings with others near you.

Once a local group is established, you can join a silence procession together. From there, you become part of a community that’s part of something much bigger: a global collective effort working towards political revolution.

We support replacing the current political system with legally binding citizens’ assemblies, ordinary people, chosen by sortition, given real power over the decisions that will determine whether this crisis is confronted or ignored. This complements the work of Assemble, which organises local people to build community power through assemblies, elections, protest, and mutual aid.

Nobody needs to become an expert or a full-time activist to take part. You can join at any point in that path, and stay there as long as feels right.

What is the crisis?

We’ve passed +1.5°C above pre-industrial temperatures, and temperatures are set to rise by a further 0.4°C over the next decade, roughly what happened between 2015 and 2025. On the current trajectory, elites will continue emitting carbon at present levels, and we will hit 2°C at some point in the mid-2030s. This is the point at which feedbacks in the Earth system are most likely to be triggered, causing runaway climatic collapse, meaning mass death.

This most obscene reality comes straight from the UK insurance industry’s own report, which predicts mass death, at least 4 billion deaths on passing 3°C, which may be passed by 2050, hence the name of the project, “4 Billion Dead.”

This isn’t a fringe prediction. The Lancet Countdown’s 2025 report, produced with the World Health Organization, isn’t describing the future. It’s describing now. Heat is killing 546,000 people a year, up 23 percent since the 1990s, over 1,400 people a day, dead, from heat alone, right now. Twelve of the report’s twenty key health indicators have hit record levels. Droughts and heatwaves pushed 124 million more people into hunger in a single year.

Multiple pieces of expert evidence, come to the same conclusion: if present levels of heat-trapping emissions continue, billions of human lives will be destroyed this century.

Pearce and Parncutt’s peer-reviewed research puts the death toll from global heating at 2°C between 300 million and 3 billion people, and estimates 3°C could cause around 2 billion deaths, rising to 3 billion from heat exposure alone.

The UN’s Convention on Desertification warns current land degradation could leave a billion or more people fighting or fleeing within thirty years.

Johan Rockström, one of the world’s most cited earth systems scientists, has said he cannot see how the planet accommodates 8 billion people, or even half that, at 4°C.

Why “4 billion”? Where does that number come from?

4 billion dead is not a figure. It is a demand that you feel something you have spent your whole life being trained not to feel.

The number comes from the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries’ Planetary Solvency report, which places mass death at over 4 billion in the worst-case risk category for 3°C of heating. Some have objected to how we present it, insisting we say “illustrative scenario” and “risk of” rather than “prediction.”

But notice what happens when that becomes the main conversation: people picking through our wording for exactness while the human reality itself, billions of lives, isn’t being engaged emotionally, with our whole selves.

Focusing on whether the figure is “exact” is a way of avoiding what it actually makes us feel. You can win every argument about a figure and still have said nothing about the horror of what it refers to.

This repressed way of seeing has failed for forty years.

Not because the science is wrong, or the numbers weren’t big enough, or the modelling wasn’t precise enough.

It has failed because it was built to be understood rather than felt, argued with rather than surrendered to, and a species that only responds to what it has fully calculated is a species that will calculate its way to extinction with excellent footnotes.

The philosopher Levinas said real communication begins where communication breaks down, in the moment you discover the limits of your own understanding and are forced into something closer to trauma than argument. That is what 4BD exists to do. Not to win an argument about wording, but to open people to the only kind of encounter that has ever actually moved anyone: the one where you stop repressing the feeling and let it in.

Is 4BD saying the insurance industry predicted 4 billion deaths?

Yes, and we mean that plainly. Some have pointed out that the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries call their risk matrix illustrative, not a modelled forecast, and argue we shouldn’t use the word “predict.” We use “predict” the way it’s actually used in everyday English, not the way it’s used inside a specific technical field.

The Cambridge Dictionary defines it plainly: “a statement about what you think will happen in the future.” That’s exactly what the report does, it looks at where we’re heading and says: this is what could happen.

Scientific language is built to survive expert scrutiny: careful, qualified, cautious by design. That’s right for a peer-reviewed paper. It’s wrong for reaching someone who needs to understand, in one sentence, what’s at stake. Nobody outside a small technical community draws a sharp line between “prediction,” “forecast,” and “illustrative scenario.” Ordinary people use “predict” to mean exactly what the dictionary says: here’s what we think could happen. So do we.

We are not interested in getting bogged down in arguing with people who raise this objection. The right thing to do is to tell the truth and act as if it’s real, working with others in a spirit of dialogue rather than combat. That applies as much to people who question our use of terms.

What we hope we can all agree on is this: we are on a trajectory towards mass death, in the hundreds of millions or billions, and we urgently need to stop what is happening. 

Doesn’t that mean the 4 billion figure isn’t reliable?

What it actually means is that this figure appears in an actuarial report at all. The report’s own authors describe it as a hypothetical illustration, a worst-case scenario built to test a new way of measuring civilisational risk, not a calculated forecast.

But a profession whose entire job is pricing risk conservatively, for insurers, pension funds, and governments who need numbers they can rely on, looked at the trajectory we’re on and put mass death in the billions into its worst-case band.

Read carefully enough, and the people most determined to correct our wording end up conceding the risk that actually matters. One long rebuttal of the four billion figure closes not by dismissing it, but by admitting it “can’t rule out low likelihood worst-case scenarios of catastrophic outcomes either.” Another, written specifically to take the figure apart, still cannot land anywhere except: “it will be an appalling, unimaginably large number.”

Whatever the disagreement over how the report should be described, nobody serious is arguing mass death from this crisis is implausible. The argument is over one word in one appendix. That misses the point: warning people about the trajectory we’re on, whatever the exact figure turns out to be. A debate about wording shouldn’t become a debate about whether the risk is real, and on that, even our sharpest critics agree with us.

The broader risk is backed independently by research beyond this one report: Pearce and Parncutt’s peer-reviewed mass death research, the Lancet Countdown’s mass death data, the human climate niche research, UN displacement warnings, and statements from senior earth systems scientists all point toward mass death and displacement being a real, serious possibility at these heating levels.

Estimating mass death from a crisis this size is genuinely difficult, and nobody, including the report’s own authors, claims to have a precise number. But the difficulty of precision doesn’t erase the extremity of the horror.

So whether the number that survives scrutiny turns out to be five hundred million, two billion, or three billion isn’t the question we’re organising around.

The question is what a life of integrity looks like in response to it. We’re not here to win an argument about decimal points. We’re here to build the communities capable of facing this together, honestly, without needing false certainty about the exact number of lives at risk to justify acting, and to take power away from those steering us toward mass death, replacing it with legally binding citizens’ assemblies of ordinary people.

Why did the report calculate GDP loss so precisely but not the death toll?

It’s worth noticing what got the calculation and what didn’t. The Guardian’s coverage of the report led with the finding that the global economy could lose 50% of GDP by 2090, GDP loss was the headline. The number of deaths appears only in the fifth paragraph, and the report’s own supplementary material contains supporting workings for the economic projections that simply don’t exist for the death toll. The scale of human death was assigned a number. The scale of economic loss was assigned a calculation.

We don’t think this reflects indifference from the report’s authors, several have spoken candidly about the seriousness of the risk. But it does reflect something about the system that produced the report, and the system all of us operate within: a system built to measure, model, and defend economic value with rigour, while treating the value of human life as an afterthought, an illustrative gesture rather than a number worth the same precision.

That imbalance isn’t incidental. It is part of the same pathological imbalance that has driven the total crisis we are now facing.

Why does 4BD avoid saying “climate”?

We prioritise language like “global heating” and “heat-trapping gases” over “climate change,” “climate crisis,” or “the planet,” because these terms name cause and responsibility more directly. We only use “climate” where it’s genuinely unavoidable: precisely describing the underlying science and mechanisms, a speaker’s title (e.g. “climate scientist”), or a named report, study, or organisation that uses the word in its own title.

What does 4BD believe and want?

4 Billion Dead exists because we don’t think the gap between knowing and feeling can be closed by another lecture or another statistic. The exact number is not the point.

Even if you don’t accept four billion, ask yourself what number would be appalling enough to take this seriously.

Two billion? One billion? A hundred million?

At some point we have to stop treating this as an abstract or technical problem and start asking what it means for the people going to work, falling in love, making dinner, with no idea their lives are being, or are about to be, caught up in this massive episode of human suffering. It’s terrifying, and we need to say so.

4BD is part of a wider ecosystem of organisations who see a democratic revolution as both morally and strategically necessary, given the objective scale of this emergency – there is no time left for graduate change.

4BD’s goal is to replace the existing political institutions with legally binding citizens’ assemblies to set policy on slashing emissions:  ordinary people, chosen by sortition, given real power to make new laws. We work with Assemble, and other democracy groups which organise local people to build community power through assemblies, elections, campaigns, and mutual aid.

We don’t know if we’re going to succeed, and we’re not promising anyone that we will. If your ability to keep going depends on knowing you’ll win, eventually you’ll burn out. Part of what we’re practising is acting because something matters in itself, doing what we can, together, without making our whole emotional lives depend on the outcome. We don’t think hope means telling ourselves everything will be fine. Instead we are looking at something terrifying and saying: I’m still here, you’re still here, we’re here together, and so there are things we are going to do.

Four billion is an almost impossible number to hold in your head. One person isn’t. Ten people aren’t. A room full of people isn’t. That’s where this starts, and we build from there.

Does 4BD organise civil disobedience or direct action?

No. 4BD is not organising civil resistance. We are living under an increasingly authoritarian regime which makes this illegal. 4BD exists to build community, and to build the mental and spiritual collective resilience that empowers people to keep acting for as long as this crisis demands. 

What happens if we do nothing?

If current trends continue, without a serious course correction, heating keeps climbing past the thresholds where the risk of catastrophic, cascading harm sharply increases: agricultural collapse, mass displacement, social and political breakdown, conflict over dwindling resources. This isn’t a distant hypothetical. Heat-related deaths, displacement, and food insecurity are already rising now, at the heating we’ve already reached.

Why does 4BD focus on rituals like photos and silence processions instead of traditional campaigning?

Through ritual we can switch off our purely rational self and instead focus on the experience of being in community. Every healthy human culture needs rituals: repeated, intentional actions that mark something as significant. A funeral, a wedding vow, a moment of silence, lighting a candle. Rituals aren’t about supernatural belief. They exist because human beings process big, hard-to-hold feelings, grief, fear, love, awe, not just by thinking about them, but by doing something with the body, often together with other people. A ritual gives a feeling somewhere to go.

Many of us have no cultural capacity for what to do with the knowledge that billions of people could die this century from a catastrophe humanity is causing and could still choose to stop. Ritual is how we handle realities too big for individual thought: not by solving them, but by marking them, together, in a way that lets people carry the weight without being crushed by it or numbing themselves to it entirely.

The purpose of these events is “self-purification”, to do an activity for no other purpose than to bear witness to the realities we face, because it is true, and that is reason enough. It does not aim to mobilise or influence. It is an act of practice to train us to be detached, to focus on the here and now. Detachment to outcomes gives us the collective resilience to keep acting with integrity.

Is 4BD a religious or spiritual project?

Not in the sense of requiring any particular belief. But we do draw on an older spiritual lineages such as self-purification, rooted in Hindu concepts like tapas (disciplined inner effort) and shuddhi (purity or cleansing), and central to Gandhi’s approach to nonviolent resistance.

For Gandhi, this wasn’t a private practice separate from political struggle, it was the preparation for it: clearing away ego, the need to win, and the desire for revenge, so that people can act rightly and keep acting for as long as the crisis demands, without being consumed by anger or burning out. This practical inheritance, of how people sustain moral action over a long, painful struggle, matters as much as any statistic.

Is it normal to feel angry or outraged about this?

Yes. Feeling outrage, anger, or moral disgust at what is happening is normal and deeply human. The prospect of billions of deaths is utterly obscene. There are no words. We are not here to ask anyone to suppress or be ashamed of these difficult emotions. They are honest, and they are part of who we are.

Does 4BD support violence or extreme action against those responsible?

No. For our organisation to be sustainable, and to avoid recreating the very systems of domination and harm we are resisting, we must not let anger curdle into hatred of people, a desire for vengeance, or calls for or celebration of violence toward those we consider responsible for this crisis.

This is not tone policing or being polite about an atrocity. It’s a matter of being clear on what we’re actually trying to build. A movement that responds to systemic violence by wishing violence on people, even if their actions rightly deserve moral condemnation, has already started reproducing the logic it claims to oppose.

The rule is to judge the act, not the person. If you feel rage at what’s happening, you’re not wrong to feel it, and you’re not alone in it. What we ask is that it be metabolised into sustained, nonviolent action and community.

Isn’t this doomerism? Doesn’t naming a figure like this just make people fatalistic?

In fact, it’s the opposite. Withholding the risk doesn’t protect anyone, it just leaves them unprepared for what’s already unfolding. People aren’t children who need the truth softened for their own good. They’re adults who deserve to know what’s actually at stake so they can decide, for themselves, how to respond. Fatalism doesn’t come from being told the truth. It comes from feeling powerless and alone with it. The answer to that isn’t silence, it’s other people, showing up, building something together in response. That’s the entire point of this project.

What are 4BD’s principles and values?

1. To tell the truth and act as if that truth is real. To recognize this act as good in itself.
2. To practice nonviolence, in service to others as the foundation of what it means to be fully human. We exist for each other.
3. To undertake continual training so we progressively transcend our attachment to our ego’s desire for results, success, revenge, and power. The process does not end.
4. To take whatever nonviolent action is necessary to prevent the suffering of billions of people due to our collective systemic annihilation of life on Earth.
5. To communicate and enact a grand new vision and plan for a renewed democracy based upon assembly-based government and society, where decisions are made by the people, for the people.
6. To work with others with similar aims in a spirit of dialogue and co-operation.
7. To build the communities we need to do this work of transformation in a spirit of humility and service, and with a good sprinkling of humour.

Join the next public call. Take your photo. Build community. There are no words.