Valencia’s ‘dana’ and Trump’s triumph set the coordinates of the year in Spain and the world. Just a week apart, the catastrophic flash floods of Tuesday 29 October and the landslide presidential election of Tuesday 5 November marked an inflection point in perceptions of climate risk and predictions of geopolitical risk. On the one hand, the failure to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases shows how vital it is for the international community to address the challenge of climate change, given that the planet’s temperature will be rising way above the 1.5ºC objective established by the Paris Agreement, and extreme meteorological phenomena will become more intense and frequent: COP29 in Baku has raised the alarm but nothing makes us think it is not just lip service, as was COP28 in Dubai the year before. On the other hand, growing political and economic mismanagement, the multiplication of military conflicts and trade wars, and the inability of the superpowers and international regulatory organisms to ensure stability bode a time of survival of the fittest: the decline of the influence of the United States and its foreseeable isolationism under Trump, with China as yet not ready to take up the baton, raises fear of a fractal proliferation of chaos. In the current absence of a Pax Americana, and with Chinese leadership still far away, global governance is a sede vacante, at a critical moment for all of us who share this small blue planet...[+]