Tipping positive change
Lenton, T
Date: 27 January 2020
Journal
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
Publisher
Royal Society
Publisher DOI
Abstract
Tipping points exist in social, ecological and climate systems and those systems are increasingly causally intertwined in
the Anthropocene. Climate change and biosphere degradation have advanced to the point where we are already triggering
damaging environmental tipping points, and to avoid worse ones ahead will require finding and ...
Tipping points exist in social, ecological and climate systems and those systems are increasingly causally intertwined in
the Anthropocene. Climate change and biosphere degradation have advanced to the point where we are already triggering
damaging environmental tipping points, and to avoid worse ones ahead will require finding and triggering positive
tipping points towards sustainability in coupled social, ecological and technological systems. To help with that I outline
how tipping points can occur in continuous dynamical systems and in networks, the causal interactions that can occur
between tipping events across different types and scales of system – including the conditions required to trigger tipping
cascades, the potential for early warning signals of tipping points, and how they could inform deliberate tipping of
positive change. In particular, the same methods that can provide early warning of damaging environmental tipping points
can be used to detect when a socio-technical or socio-ecological system is most sensitive to being deliberately tipped in a
desirable direction. I provide some example targets for such deliberate tipping of positive change.
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