3.2.1 Prevention as a governance goal

The rationale for prevention

We ground the proposal to make prevention the central objective of tipping point governance in (1) the nature of tipping point impacts (severity and permanence), (2) their cascading potential, (3) the precautionary principle, and (4) the specific intertemporal nature of decision making.

(1) Impacts: ESTPs present a variety of severe risks. They imply that the current climatic or biospheric conditions in large parts of the world will effectively be permanently lost, threatening the lives of people, the survival of species and ecosystems, the livelihoods and cultural identities of communities, the stability of local and national economies, and even the existence and sovereignty of some states (see Section 2). 

(2) Cascades: Many ESTPs have some potential to contribute to tipping-point cascades, i.e., they increase the likelihood of additional tipping processes being triggered (see Chapter 1.5). That implies the potential to create additional, more distributed harms beyond the scale of the tipping system and wider Earth system destabilisation (see Chapter 2.4).

(3) Precaution: Some of the harmful impacts of crossing ESTPs can be predicted with confidence (such as sea level rise from ice-sheet disintegration), but many others (such as the impacts of ocean convection collapse) warrant further research. Estimates of the probabilities of triggering tipping points on any given timescale are uncertain and include an element of irreducible uncertainty. Conventional methods of policymaking and risk management that rely on quantified estimates of impacts and probabilities are therefore inappropriate (Stirling, 2007) in the context of ESTPs. Rather, we require tools for responding in the face of deep uncertainty. These include the widely adopted precautionary principle (Jordan and O’Riordan, 1999), systemic risk governance, and anticipatory governance (Guston, 2013).

(4) Intertemporality and committed change: Importantly, due to their specific causal dynamics (internal self-amplifying feedback mechanisms), for most tipping systems, the change process becomes effectively unstoppable once a tipping point has been reached – i.e. a causal process set in motion in the coming years and decades, such as ice-sheet melting, would continue to unfold over decades, centuries, or millennia even if global temperatures are successfully reduced back to current levels, or if other causal drivers are returned to pre-tipping conditions (see Chapter 1.2 for delayed activation). It is useful to distinguish realised and committed change related to a tipping point at any particular moment in time. At the time the tipping point is crossed and amplifying feedback loops are set in motion, the system will inevitably move to a new state – it is committed to change, although none of those impending changes might be observable yet. The actual change might take a long time – decades, centuries, or even millennia –to become noticeable and disruptive. For example, it is possible that the Greenland tipping point will be crossed later this century, committing the entire ice sheet to disintegration. The melting process, however, could take several thousand years and most impacts would occur beyond the year 2100 (though would still amplify sea level rise to some extent before this). Policymakers have to consider their responsibility for future impacts that only they are able to prevent. Such long-term and intertemporal decision making faces significant practical challenges given dominant decision-making logics and policy practices, such as cost-benefit-analysis, cost-efficiency maximisation, and discounting (leading to the ‘tragedy of the time horizon’) (Morgan, 2021; Granoff, 2023).