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3.2 Prevention of Earth system tipping processes

Manjana Milkoreit, Jesse F. Abrams, David I. Armstrong McKay, Sara M. Constantino, Gideon Futerman, Timothy M. Lenton, Sean Low, Duncan P. McLaren, Marcia Rocha, Viktoria Spaiser, Claudia E. Wieners, Yulia Yamineva

Key Messages

Prevention of Earth system tipping processes should become the core goal and logic of the future ESTP governance framework. A short window for preventive action is open now and will close at different points in time for each Earth system tipping element – for some, as early as the 2030s.
Preventing the transgression of ESTPs requires:
- rapidly strengthening current mitigation efforts to minimise temperature overshoot beyond the global goals and the length of overshoot periods, by tackling both CO₂ emissions and emissions of SLCPs;
- increasing sustainable capacities for CO₂ removal as an addition to mitigation efforts, while seeking to minimise potential side-effects on other drivers of tipping processes;
- addressing non-climate drivers at regional and national scales, such as deforestation.
Speculative solar geoengineering approaches to prevention face deep ethical, technical and political uncertainties, and should not be considered technically available to use safely and swiftly within the coming decades. Such approaches could at most supplement, not replace, mitigation efforts.

Recommendations

UNFCCC member states should engage in the next Periodic Review process to assess whether the current long-term global temperature goal is adequate in light of current evidence of climate tipping points.
Parties to the Paris Agreement should include an assessment of collective progress towards preventing climate tipping points in future Global Stocktake processes.
Governments should immediately increase and accelerate near- and medium-term climate mitigation efforts, for example by pursuing a rapid phase-out of all fossil fuels globally, bringing forward their target year for reaching net-zero, increasing their mitigation ambition in NDC revisions, supporting the development of just and sustainable forms and levels of carbon removal, accelerating corresponding national policy measures, and through democratically validated efforts at social transformation.
Governments should ban commercial deployment of solar geoengineering, declare a moratorium on any other deployment, and develop a multilateral regime to regulate research and experimentation.

Summary

Preventing the transgression of Earth system tipping points (ESTPs) (hereafter ‘prevention of tipping points’) should become the central objective of this domain of global governance. This chapter addresses the question of how governance actors, especially governments, could achieve this objective.

ESTPs have multiple interacting drivers that operate at different scales. Effective prevention strategies need to address all drivers with coordinated cross-scale approaches (polycentric prevention). Many institutions, from the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) to the Arctic Council, can assume prevention responsibilities and will need to be involved in governance. Global temperature increase is the most common driver of tipping processes, making climate mitigation the most effective prevention strategy across the diverse set of ESTPs identified to date. Hence, we see important opportunities for UNFCCC to provide a context for preventive governance measures. Beyond strengthening mitigation efforts for long-lived GHG, we discuss the need to manage short-lived climate pollutants (SLCPs), and advance carbon dioxide removal (CDR). We also assess the potential contribution of novel kinds of climate intervention (geo-engineering), concluding that, for the time being, these are not available options to support prevention.

Non-climate drivers are diverse and specific to each (type of) tipping element – for example, deforestation as a driver of forest dieback, or pollution contributing to coral reef die-off. Given this diversity, each tipping system requires a tailored prevention approach, likely involving different constellations of regional and national actors and institutions, cooperating and coordinating their efforts across scales.

Many governments and other actors have not yet sufficiently engaged with the challenges presented by tipping points and still need to define national and organisational interests in this domain. Prevention efforts related to ESTPs are likely to be subject to political dynamics and contestations that mirror current global climate change politics, especially diverging interests regarding the speed, scale and responsibilities for GHG emission reductions.

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3.2 Prevention of Earth system tipping processes

Key Messages

Recommendations

Summary

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