In November 2025, Iceland became the first nation to formally declare a potential collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation a threat to national security. The decision moved through the Ministry for Environment, Energy and Climate, escalated to the National Security Council, and produced an op-ed signed jointly by the Icelandic minister and Johan Rockström. None of the larger Atlantic-rim countries that would be devastated by an AMOC collapse have done anything comparable yet. Páll Gunnarsson, founder of the Reykjavík Institute, has been close to that political process and to the global advocacy effort Iceland has launched off the back of it. This conversation is about why a country of 400,000 people moved faster than the rest of the world, what made the declaration possible at all, and what Páll is now trying to organize at the EU level by September.
Páll Gunnarsson is the founder of the Reykjavík Institute, an Icelandic policy organization focused on climate tipping point response. Before founding the institute, he spent over a year working on AMOC advocacy as an independent activist, a track that began when he realized no one in the Icelandic governance system was actually focused on the threat. He came to climate work after a career in software engineering.
Key topics
(00:00) Enforced vulnerability and the moral argument against the moral hazard framing of climate interventions
(02:35) Iceland’s National Security Council process and Páll’s New York Climate Week trip in late 2025
(10:30) Why Iceland intuits AMOC risk: the Gulf Stream as cultural common knowledge and a governance system attuned to natural hazard preparedness
(15:00) Iceland’s new government and the youngest cabinet acting fastest
(22:30) The pattern Páll keeps finding himself repeating: assume someone is working on the problem, discover no one is, decide to do it yourself
(37:00) Parallel timelines: why intervention capability research can’t wait for climate science to settle
(44:00) Backs against the river: the moral hazard inside the moral hazard argument, and the case against using the vulnerable as motivation
(50:19) Why multilateral SRM governance might be abandoned in favor of a coalition of the willing, and what’s coming at the September OceanEye pledging event in the EU
Notable quotes
“It’s actually fine if we overreact, but let’s react.” — Páll on Icelandic risk culture
“I have a need to be globally useful. And if I’m not working along those lines, then I become very uncomfortable.” — Páll on motivation
“It’s ethically problematic to say that we need the most vulnerable people to continue to be vulnerable in order to drive sufficient decarbonization ambition.” — Páll on the moral hazard argument
Links and resources
Páll Gunnarsson on LinkedIn
The Iceland Minister for Environment, Energy and Climate / Johan Rockström op-ed (Iceland and Sweden, January 2026)
Nordic Council of Ministers report: A Nordic Perspective on AMOC Tipping (February 2026)
EU OceanEye initiative (~€50M fund, announced March 2026; pledging event September 2026)
This conversation is part of what I am trying to do at Inevitable & Obvious: track what is actually happening in climate stabilization at the policy and research level, not just the discourse level. Páll’s work is one of the clearer cases of a single national process opening real political space for the rest of the field, and we will be following the September OceanEye pledging event closely. Subscribe here for the full conversation, weekly episodes, and the writing that goes with them.
