3: Governance of Earth system tipping points

Section lead coordinating author: Manjana Milkoreit
Reviewers: Magnus Bengtsson, Victor Galaz, Rachel Kyte, Harro Van Asselt

Key messages

Governance of Earth system tipping points is lacking and existing global governance institutions do not address the specific risks they pose.
Preventing the transgression of Earth system tipping points should become the core goal and logic of an urgently needed global governance framework. Such efforts need to pursue multiple objectives simultaneously, including risk minimisation, impact governance, justice and equity.
Current climate mitigation efforts, including governance of short-lived climate pollutants and carbon dioxide removal, need to be strengthened rapidly, and address non-climate drivers at regional and national scales.
Governance of Earth system tipping points should be based on existing principles of global governance and international law, such as precaution, equity and justice, including care for future generations and deep cooperation, with decision making guided by anticipatory approaches and systemic risk governance.
Governance of Earth system tipping points should be polycentric, distributing responsibility, authority and accountability across multiple scales and institutions, including at the regional scale of the tipping element.
Earth system tipping processes challenge existing governance structures, e.g., for climate change impacts, because of the expanded scope of change, the increasing speed of change, the potential for regional trend reversals, and the novel distribution of vulnerability.
Existing institutions for impact governance need to be adjusted to match the temporal patterns and spatial scales of different tipping systems to adequately anticipate, respond to, and mitigate their risks and impacts. In some cases, this might require new institutions or mechanisms.
The transgression of Earth system tipping points would significantly increase the need to address irreversible losses. Loss and damage mechanisms within and beyond the UNFCCC would have to be expanded.
Knowledge institutions need to be reformed to better support effective governance through solutions-oriented, context-specific, actor-relevant and anticipatory knowledge, while learning challenges must also be addressed.

Recommendations

Now is the time for governance actors, including UN bodies, international organisations, national governments and non-state actors, to engage in the process of learning, interest formation/positioning, coalition building, and agenda setting for the governance of Earth system tipping points.
Given that Earth system tipping points risks are already moderate at current levels of warming, and increase substantially above 1.5^oC above pre-industrial levels, countries need to reduce GHG emissions rapidly and dramatically in the near term and reach zero by mid-century to minimise the risk of transgressing tipping points.
Parties to the Paris Agreement should include Earth system tipping points in future Global Stocktake processes, assessing collective progress towards their prevention and impact governance.
Parties to the Paris Agreement should include a discussion of Earth system tipping points in future revisions of their NDCs and mid-century decarbonisation strategies, including an assessment of how the country contributes to tipping-points risks, how it will be affected by their impacts, and national measures and plans to prevent their transgression and to prepare for their impacts.
Parties to the Paris Agreement should initiate an evaluation of the adequacy of current mechanisms for addressing climate change impacts (e.g. adaptation, loss and damage, finance) in light of the specific risks posed by Earth system tipping points.
Countries within the geographic scope of a specific Earth system tipping element should consider the need for new initiatives for collective impact governance.
International organisations, national governments and science funders should foster urgent international research collaboration, especially in the social sciences and humanities, by promoting open, trans and interdisciplinary, solutions-oriented, networked knowledge systems focusing on Earth system tipping points.
Regional and national science and knowledge institutions and boundary organisations should foster anticipatory capacity building with participatory co-production processes involving policymakers, scientists, other knowledge holders, artists, and designers.

Summary

Governance efforts to address the specific and severe threats of Earth system tipping points (ESTPs) are currently lacking and urgently needed. A future governance framework for ESTPs should prioritise efforts to prevent tipping events, while also minimising impact-related harms, fostering adaptation and resilience, and facilitating knowledge co-production. Failure to prevent tipping would likely impede the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These objectives can only be reached together, through systemic changes that address the root causes of Earth system change with transformations to sustainable and just societies.

In all domains of governance (prevention, impact governance, knowledge production), the diversity of tipping processes (their timing, drivers and impacts) need to be carefully considered and used to inform approaches tailored to distinct ESTPs.

Governance of Earth system tipping points should be based on existing principles of global governance and international law, such as precaution, equity and justice, as well as care for future generations. The nature of threats presented by tipping dynamics in the Earth system challenges the common reactive and linear logics of decision making in global governance. Short-term decisions can have severe, even catastrophic, consequences over extremely long time horizons, potentially affecting life on Earth for several millennia, and future generations’ chances for survival and wellbeing. These extremely high stakes place a major burden of responsibility on the present generations and – unlike other global challenges – dramatically elevate the logic of precaution. Scientific uncertainty (for example, about how close we might be to a tipping point) should be reason for action, not delay, with anticipatory approaches and systemic risk governance of particular importance in guiding decision making.

Effective prevention strategies need to address the multiple, interacting drivers of ESTPs, which often operate at different scales. We distinguish primary (often global-scale) and secondary (often regional-scale) drivers to aid decision makers in devising multi-scale approaches and selecting appropriate governance venues. The primary driver in many cases is global temperature change, which makes accelerated mitigation of greenhouse gases the most important and effective prevention strategy. Rapid, near-term mitigation efforts should be combined with enhanced management of short-lived climate pollutants (SLCPs) and scaling efforts for sustainable carbon dioxide removal (CDR) to minimise the rapidly increasing risk of transgressing ESTPs. Solar geo-engineering approaches remain speculative and subject to concerns over side-effects and governance. For the time being, they are not available to support prevention efforts, although additional research is merited. Overall, effective prevention strategies need to address all drivers of diverse tipping processes with coordinated cross-scale approaches.

Global institutions across multiple domains, including climate change, development and international migration, need to consider the implications of tipping processes for their effective operation, adjusting existing frameworks, approaches and practices for governing the impacts of global environmental change.

A ‘polycentric’ architecture that would distribute responsibilities for prevention and impact governance across multiple sites and scales of action, and attend to linkages, coordination and effective information flows between different actors and institutions, is the appropriate model for governance. Important decisions concern the differentiation between global-scale tasks, especially mitigation of GHG to limit global temperature increase, and those at regional and national scales, such as addressing secondary drivers of specific tipping systems (for example, deforestation for Amazon dieback). Regional and national institutions with a direct geographic relationship to a tipping system could also have responsibility for impact management, such as resilience building, adaptation or managed retreat.

Figure: 3.0.1 — **Figure 3.0.1:** Polycentric Governance of an Earth system tipping point. Stylised depiction of polycentric governance for a tipping system, i.e., distributing and sharing responsibility for various tasks across multiple scales and institutions with multiple, networked actors at each scale and linkages (e.g., membership, information flows, coordination) across scales. The table summarises how key governance tasks could be distributed across scales for a specific ESTP. Not all relevant scales of governance are included; e.g., bi- and multilateral levels are missing.

There are well-developed global and national sustainability governance institutions that can and should adopt responsibilities for the governance of ESTPs. At the global scale, this includes the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). Existing governance expertise across scales is strongest regarding mitigation, and weaker regarding impact management. Existing institutions and measures need significant adjustments and strengthening in light of ESTPs, and we illustrate this need for reform specifically for the Paris Agreement (e.g. NDCs and the Global Stocktake, loss and damage). But many other institutions will need to reassess their efforts with regard to the risks of ESTPs. Governance capacity at the scale of specific tipping systems is currently limited (as in the Arctic and Amazon) or lacking (as in the tropical coral reefs, major ocean currents and monsoons). This is where most innovation and work is needed, including the consideration of new institutions or initiatives.