2.3 Negative social tipping points

Viktoria Spaiser, Jürgen Scheffran, Uche T. Okpara, Weisi Guo, Florian Krampe, Sara M. Constantino, Ricardo Safra de Campos, Patricia Pinho,
Taha Yasseri, Tabitha Watson, Daniel Godfrey, Hugues Chenet, Avit Bhowmik, John T. Bruun

Key Messages

  • Escalating Earth system destabilisation threatens to disrupt societal cohesion, increase mental disorders and amplify radicalisation and polarisation. It has the potential to escalate violent conflicts, mass displacement and financial instability.
  • Negative social tipping points would hamper collective mitigation efforts and capacities to respond effectively to Earth system destabilisation, thus impeding the realisation of positive futures.
  • If societies fail to re-stabilise the Earth system, we will not stay in a business-as- usual state. Rather, through mechanisms of negative social tipping, another social system state will emerge, likely characterised by greater authoritarianism, hostility, discord and alienation.

Recommendations

  • Increase efforts to close knowledge gaps on negative social tipping points. Current knowledge is very patchy and fragmented, with many estimations and models likely to be underestimating the effects of breaching Earth system tipping points. We also need a better understanding of the interplay between various ecological and social drivers for negative social tipping. 
  • Future loss calculations and risk assessments (including assessment of human and cultural loss) should be done in close collaboration with climate scientists and social scientists to ensure adequate representation of climate catastrophes. 
  • While the prospect of negative social tipping points coupled with the Earth system destabilisation is unsettling, societies can and should attempt to prevent these; related governance options and challenges are revisited in Section 3.
  • Focus on enabling positive social tipping and transformation processes (see Section 4) to help prevent the onset of negative social tipping.

Summary

This chapter describes to what extent Earth system destabilisation and tipping can trigger negative tipping in various social systems, which in turn can reinforce the destabilisation of the Earth system through reinforcing feedback effects, mainly by preventing climate action. Specifically, with the Earth system further destabilising, we are likely to see social cohesion breaking down, while mental disorders and deviant behaviours will increase, further undermining societies’ ability to respond to crises. We are also likely to see greater radicalisation of various groups and polarisation, making it harder to find collective solutions. 

Though not the only cause, escalating climate change will undermine human security through an array of indirect – at times non-linear – pathways, thereby increasing the risk of violent conflict, which in turn will undermine societies’ ability to cooperate on climate change mitigation. Further destabilisation of the Earth system is likely to trigger large-scale displacement, but also lead to trapped populations unable to leave increasingly inhospitable places. Displacement may increase ecological pressures within host communities, potentially adversely impacting the Earth system. Financial destabilisation is also likely to increase, diminishing the means to respond effectively to Earth system destabilisation.

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