After U.N. Says 1.5°C Overshoot Is Unavoidable, Nonprofit Declares the Harder Problem Is How Humanity Sees Itself

Policy alone is not enough, the nonprofit says,
and a story of separation from one another and the natural world helps explain the failure to act.

BOULDER, CO, UNITED STATES, September 3, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — The United Nations Environment Programme reported on September 2 that exceeding 1.5°C of global warming is now widely assessed as unavoidable. The assessment, titled Limiting Overshoot, projects peak warming of at least 1.8°C even under the most optimistic scenario, with most other scenarios projecting higher peaks. UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen told journalists there are no good outcomes if the world remains above 1.5°C.

Humanity’s Team, a global 501(c)(3) nonprofit co-founded in 2003 by Conversations with God author Neale Donald Walsch and Steve Farrell, says the report describes a policy failure with a deeper cause underneath it: a widely held assumption that people are separate from one another, from the natural world, and from the consequences of their choices.

“For 23 years we have argued that much of the extraction economy, the hoarding, the indifference to distant suffering traces back to one mistaken belief: that we are separate,” said Neale Donald Walsch, Co-Founder of Humanity’s Team. “The United Nations has now put numbers to the consequences. What it cannot do is change the beliefs and behaviors that helped produce them.”

The report projects escalating and in some cases irreversible damage above 1.5°C, including accelerated glacier loss, sea-level rise, disruption to food production, and strain on water supplies and infrastructure. It also calls for collective global action, inclusive governance, and greater urgency from the countries most responsible for the problem. Humanity’s Team says that emphasis raises a question the report itself does not take up: why humanity has repeatedly struggled to generate that kind of collective action despite decades of knowledge.

“We understand why this news lands as alarming,” said Steve Farrell, Co-Founder and Worldwide Executive Director of Humanity’s Team. “But fear has never been what moves humanity toward its better nature. Awareness has. The invitation in this report is not despair. It is to recognize ourselves as one interconnected, interdependent system, and to act like it.”

The idea is an old one. Writing to a grieving father in a 1950 letter, Albert Einstein described the sense of being separate from the rest of the universe as a kind of optical delusion of consciousness, and called freeing oneself from it a task of widening one’s compassion. Humanity’s Team has spent 23 years building educational programs around a version of that idea found across many of the world’s wisdom traditions.

A Call to See, and to Act

Humanity’s Team points to its 17th Annual Global Oneness Summit, themed “The Evidence of Oneness,” running October 22 to 24, 2026, as one venue where the question will be explored in practical terms. The event brings together scientists, researchers, spiritual teachers, wisdom keepers and changemakers to examine what living from interconnection can mean, from personal choices to planetary stewardship.

“We are not asking anyone to take this on faith,” Farrell said. “We are asking people to look at what the U.N. just published, and then to ask a harder question: now that we see it, what will we do? We welcome debate and challenge from media, scientists and skeptics alike.”

Farrell and Walsch are available for media interviews.

About Humanity’s Team

One Planet. One Humanity. One Future. Founded in 2003 by Neale Donald Walsch, author of the Conversations with God series, and Steve Farrell, Humanity’s Team is a global 501(c)(3) nonprofit working to advance conscious living worldwide so humanity and the Earth can flourish together. Over 23 years, the organization has reached more than 1.4 million people, with a community spanning more than 100 countries. Humanity’s Team operates the Humanity Stream educational platform, is supported by a volunteer network of 70 Country Coordinators, and has earned Charity Navigator’s highest Four-Star Rating.

Dee Meyer
Humanity’s Team
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