Positive tipping points: A credible way to meet climate and nature goals

We are tackling climate change too slowly – and we know it. With heatwaves raging in the US, the Middle East and beyond, we’re getting a taste of what a 1.5°C world will be like. We need a shift in mindset and strategy to get out of trouble.

The only credible way we can now meet the Paris Agreement to limit global warming to well below 2°C is to find and trigger positive tipping points that radically accelerate action. Currently, we are decarbonizing over five times too slowly. And we need a comparable acceleration of action to stop destroying nature and start regenerating our life-support system.

Incremental change is simply not going to cut it — research in the Global Tipping Points report made that abundantly clear. In fact, incremental change risks taking us past dangerous tipping points in the Earth system to a 2.5°C or 3°C world, which will expose billions of people to potentially fatal heat and humidity extremes.

We need the acceleration of self-propelling change that happens on crossing a tipping point – but in the human systems that are currently driving greenhouse gas emissions and nature loss. The good news is that we are starting to see positive tipping points unfold in our societies and technology.

They happen when amplifying (positive) feedback takes over from damping (negative) feedback and gets strong enough to support self-propelling change. The uptake of EVs, solar and wind power — and the decline of coal power — have all become exponential in some nations.

That is thanks to strong reinforcing feedback loops, including learning-by-doing and economies-of-scale, that have radically reduced the price and improved the quality and accessibility of green technologies, coupled with social contagion in their uptake.

For those nations and sectors that have already tipped — like the UK shutting down coal power from 40% to 0% of electricity generation — the self-propelling ‘S-curve’ of change has produced a world-leading rate of decarbonization.

Already, positive tipping points are starting to cascade across markets. For globalized products like EV batteries, improvements in price and quality in one market are shared everywhere. Hence actions that stimulate innovation in one market, like bans on future petrol/diesel car sales, benefit everyone.

Positive tipping points are also starting to reinforce each other across sectors. Ever cheaper batteries are reinforcing the tipping point to renewable energy — by helping balance power supply and demand. And ever cheaper renewable energy is helping tip electrification of mobility as it lowers the total cost of ownership of EVs.

This creates super-leverage points — identified in The Breakthrough Effect report – where decisive action can trigger positive tipping to cascade across the energy system, accelerating the elimination of three-quarters of greenhouse gas emissions.

The other quarter of emissions is the result of agriculture and how we use our land, and are largely driven by dietary demand for meat, especially beef. Livestock uses 80% of agricultural land to provide a meagre 17% of calories and 37% of protein worldwide. This drives potent methane emissions, deforestation and associated CO2 emissions.

We need diets to positively tip towards less meat and more alternative sources of protein. Plant-based meat substitutes are already experiencing the reinforcing feedback of widening adoption driving down their price and improving their quality.

Tipping diets is the key to ending deforestation and liberating land to regenerating nature, removing excess carbon from the atmosphere and to adopting more sustainable farming systems.

Nature already has myriad built-in feedback loops, including some strongly self-amplifying ones. These are why ecosystems like coral reefs or biomes like the Amazon rainforest have tipping points. They are why the removal or reintroduction of one keystone species — like wolves in Yellowstone National Park — can transform a whole ecosystem.

Learning to work with nature’s feedback loops in the right way is the foundation that means we can positively tip the regeneration of degraded ecosystems and the creation of more sustainable farming systems.

There is a fundamental barrier to positive tipping points if we continue to use a narrow definition of growth as a measure of societal success. Seeking only to maximize short-term profit at company level and maintain growth of gross domestic product at national and international levels is destroying our life-support system.

Plenty of alternative valuation metrics are now available, including gross national happiness index or true cost accounting. These measure and value human and ecological health and wellbeing and seek to reduce damaging inequalities and injustices.

Adopting a new metric of progress would be a deep positive tipping point in cultural norms. It would act as a super-leverage point to trigger other positive tipping points of action.

The nature of social norms is that we often stay locked into detrimental ones because of the upfront cost for those who are first to deviate from them towards better norms. But once enough actors shift to the new norm, joining the change becomes more and more beneficial for those joining.

Getting things started is, of course, the hard part. It takes courage. Punishment can be strong if it harms short-term profits. Yet where increasing returns exist, those who are brave enough to start things — think of Vestas, Tesla or Bhutan — can become the biggest winners.

The dominant form of economic growth, and the ideology behind it, is clearly unsustainable. At the same time, we need to exponentially grow the numbers of wind turbines, solar panels, EVs and a whole new energy system. We also need to help ecosystems (re)grow in a very literal sense.

So, the question should be what kind of growth do we want? In the near term, at least, we need the self-propelling growth of positive tipping points.

This letter is co-signed by:

Alexa Firmenich, Principal, Ground Effect & Co-Director, SEED at Crowther Lab

Brita Staal, Climate Lead, Smart Innovation Norway

Caspar Coppetti, Co-Founder & Executive Co-Chairman, On

Christoph Gebald, Co-Founder & CEO, Climeworks

Isabel Hoffmann, Co-Founder, rePLANET

Jeremy Jurgens, Managing Director; Head of the Forum's Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, World Economic Forum

Johan Rockström, Director, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research

Kristian Parker, Vice-Chair of the Board of Trustees and member of founding family, Oak Foundation

Patrick Frick, Founder, Global Commons Alliance

Ramiro Fernandez, Campaigns Director, UNFCCC Climate Champions

Sandrine Dixson-Declève, Co-President, The Club of Rome

Simon Mulcahy, former President, Sustainability at TIME & CEO, CO2.com

Thomas Crowther, Professor of Ecology at ETH Zurich & Founding Chair of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration

Thomas Zurbuchen, Director at ETH Zurich Space, former Associate Administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA

Tobias Luthe, Program Director for Designing Resilient Regenerative Systems at ETH Zurich, Professor in Systems Design at The Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO) and Mountain Guide

Xavier De Le Rue, Big Mountain Snowboarder and Mountain Guide (4 x World Boardercross Champion & 3 x Freeride World Tour Champion)