Certainty is on the tip of every climate activist’s, scholar’s, and writer’s tongue these days. We are certain that we have only until 2030 to rapidly decarbonize the economy. We are certain that even if we do manage to meet this ambitious goal, sea levels will still rise another foot or so—demanding either that our cities do the same or that their people are relocated away from our shifting shorelines. We are certain that things are getting worse—promised, even, that they are somehow worse than we’ve imagined.

We are so certain, in part, because we have so many models telling us so many things about our now certain damnation. There are physical models of the Earth’s systems, showing how we can expect oceanic and atmospheric forces to change under the various emissions-based scenarios developed by the IPCC. There are projective models of who might be displaced—and where they might go—as sea levels rise, temperatures increase, and the climate refugee crisis becomes impossible to ignore. There are predictive models of how various forms of climate adaptation might perform, often as instruments of flood risk mitigation. There are financial and economic models of how we might pay for a set of planetary transformations like decarbonization and adaptation. Increasingly, there are also simulation models of what it might mean to geoengineer the Earth’s systems, either by spraying sulfates into the stratosphere or by rapidly deploying negative-emissions technologies that remove carbon from the air. We have seen the future, and it works—so long as the assumptions in our models are set just right.

Each model brings a new degree of precision and clarity to our climate imaginary. They help us make sense of which outcomes are probable and which are possible—and they imply their own ideas about desirability in the process. That winnowing of potential futures and choices can bring with it a sense of heightened certainty about how, when, and where things might unfold on a planet devoured by capitalism.

Though these models are an important tool for understanding how the future could or should be made manifest, they are not the only tool—even if we (designers, journalists, and broader publics beyond the climate science community) tend to treat them as such. We do this despite the vast degrees of uncertainty present in even our most basic physical models, to say nothing of our inability to model and imagine the sociopolitical, technical, and economic forces that will, ultimately, determine how much warming, mitigation, and adaptation we will have to live with.

The climate crisis is existential, replete with uncertainty, and happening all around us, all the time. Though we have mapped it extensively in this atlas, maps alone cannot tell this story. We need more tools: for making sense of the changing climate; for envisioning alternative futures that foreground what we might gain instead of only what we’ll lose; and for stoking public imaginations and actions in ways that models, at least on their own, cannot. To adapt David Wallace-Wells’s apocalyptic “The Uninhabitable Earth”: it is, we promise, better than you think. Or at least it can be.

This need for a more pluralistic approach to how we navigate through and respond to the climate crisis is what the 2100 Project aims to address. Though physical, sociotechnic, and simulation models of the future will remain an important part of this conversation, our intervention is not about the precise forecasting of a future world reshaped by varying degrees of carbon emission. Rather, it is about backcasting—a method of scenario modeling working backwards from an ideal outcome or future—as a way of understanding a different set of potential futures that the models might be missing.

As the authors of this Atlas for the Green New Deal, the first component of the 2100 Project, we had three primary rationales for assembling this research. The first rationale relates to the idea of backcasting as it pertains to the principal historical analogues of the Green New Deal: FDR’s New Deal and JFK’s moon shot. We remain convinced that the window for massive, national-scale action on climate will open again soon, and we aim to use this project as a vehicle for generating new research into how those transformations might unfold. The second rationale is tied to the paucity of spatial design expertise and imagination within the current Green New Deal movement. Though it has necessarily been led by organizers, economists, policy experts and advocates, and others, the Green New Deal is the biggest design and environmental idea in a century, with the potential to revolutionize our buildings, landscapes, and public works in ways yet to be conceived. As faculty and graduate students at a prominent school of design, we feel an obligation to engage with the Green New Deal along these lines. And our third rationale for this atlas, and for the 2100 Project as a whole, is that no one else has attempted anything like it—to assemble all of the spatialized climate, land, and social models of the future in one place, synthesized and tightly curated, contextualized and coherently packaged. We also felt compelled to use this project to critique the notion of precision and certainty embedded in these models by representing them through pixelated maps. After all, the future is fuzzy. Our models should be too.

It’s important to begin this work where the Green New Dealers have directed us, in the last two eras of true national-scale mobilization around a set of shared goals and ideals: the New Deal and the moon shot. The New Deal is often viewed as a single, coherent organizing framework developed by FDR and his advisers at the start of his administration—as a set of boxes to be checked as they rolled through the 1930s. But this is a fundamental misunderstanding of the improvisational and experimental nature of FDR’s presidency. As Richard Hofstadter notes, “The New Deal will never be understood by anyone who looks for a single thread of policy, a far-reaching, far-seeing plan. It was a series of improvisations, many adopted very suddenly, many [of them] contradictory. Such unity as it had was in political strategy, not economics.” It was a grand experiment in social democracy, one in which new agencies were created, new authorities and powers promulgated, and new financial resources marshaled to tackle the overlapping ecological, economic, and political crises of the day: the Dust Bowl and its forced migration of over three million farmers from the Midwest; the Great Depression; and the rise of fascism across the globe. Some initiatives, like the Tennessee Valley Authority, proved wildly successful and continue operating today. Other experiments failed or outlived their usefulness, folding during the mobilization for World War II. Some of these, including the Civilian Conservation Corps, which put more than 500,000 young people to work on soil restoration and other public lands projects at its peak; the Works Progress Administration, which built hundreds of airports, bridges, college campuses; and other public works projects; and the Resettlement Administration, which oversaw the Dust Bowl migration and built a series of pilot “greenbelt” towns, helped make the New Deal a built environment revolution in the United States.

This proved to be the last period in which strong national planning—including an expansive design bureaucracy—would be realized in the United States. Much of the rest of the 20th and 21st centuries was left up to the market. Within this market-driven context, newly elected President John F. Kennedy traveled to Houston in May 1961 to deliver his famous moon shot speech at Rice University. He implored the country to “choose to go to the Moon. . . not because it [it is] easy, but because [it is] hard.” That speech, and the machinations that followed, set a wildly ambitious national goal without any clue how it might be achieved. Little of the technology necessary to make the trip existed in 1961. So, at JFK’s direction, the federal government issued research and procurement contracts and reorganized NASA around the aim of getting to the Moon by the end of the decade, unsure of how—or if—it might ever truly become possible.

Of course, we did go to the Moon. One of the many spoils of the trip was Earthrise—an image of the Earth as an object and thus the first photographic evidence of the planet’s physical boundaries. It would prove to be an iconic image, arriving in a milieu defined by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), Ian McHarg’s Design With Nature (1969), and perhaps the largest and most sustained mass mobilization of the environmental movement in American history—a movement proving so strong that it compelled Richard Nixon to usher in what became known as the “environmental decade,” when the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (“Superfund”) Act were all passed.

It’s in this space where the Green New Deal seems likely to land—in the massive expansion of government as a force for good in the everyday lives of most people (like the New Deal), and in the marshalling of public procurement and standards to drive the private sector towards a shared set of goals (like the moon shot). It requires that we know the destination, but not the path; it requires a bit of backcasting.

This brings us back to the genesis of the 2100 Project. A window is about to open, forced ajar by young climate activists, for the mass mobilization of resources called for by the Green New Deal. When it does, we must be in a better position than we were in 2009 when the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA, Barack Obama’s “stimulus package”) passed. ARRA required that investments in the built environment be tied to “shovel-ready” projects—a caveat that sounds reasonable until you realize that the only shovel-ready projects at the time were those that had been sitting on the books for years, unbuilt largely because they were bad ideas that no one wanted. We don’t expect to develop all—or even any—of the Green New Deal’s potential projects on our own. But we do hope that this atlas can serve as a platform to support those who will.

We also feel compelled to note that while we would have much preferred to build an atlas encompassing more than just the conterminous United States—one that could include Hawaii and Alaska, as well as Puerto Rico and the other territories—the spatial and climate data available to us simply did not permit it. As we continue to expand the 2100 Project, we’re eager to find partners who can help us close these gaps and develop a richer understanding of how the climate crisis will transform all of the places where we live.

This Atlas for the Green New Deal is a product of our own milieu—the overlapping crises we find ourselves living through in 2020. For New Dealers, it was the environmental crisis of the Dust Bowl, the economic crisis of the Great Depression, and the political crisis of fascism that forced open the window for bold, national action. Green New Dealers face the environmental crisis of climate change, the economic crisis of late capitalism, and the political crisis of resurgent fascism across the globe and even here in the United States.

We’re constantly told to go slow, to think small, and to tweak systems rather than transform them; that we are doomed, and all that’s left to decide is the extent of our collective destruction. But the Green New Deal offers something more: a chance to go fast and to think big; to transform the structures that gave us the climate crisis and inequality; and to imagine a world in which things are, we promise, better than you think.