3.3.1.1 The rationale for ESTP impact governance

In many ways, ESTPs would exacerbate well-established climate change impacts, such as increasing global temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, creating sea level rise, and more frequent and intense extreme weather events. They would worsen the disruption already experienced by ecosystems and societies in all regions of the world today (IPPC, 2022a). However, the threats related to ESTPs are in important ways distinct from climate change impacts as we have come to understand them or alter these expected changes in surprising ways. These differences matter for how we think about dealing with impacts. In other words, the current logics, frameworks, plans, practices and resource allocation to policy domains like adaptation, international migration, disaster risk reduction, and loss and damage will have to change to account for ESTPs.

More specifically, important differences between general climate change impacts and the impacts of Earth system tipping processes concern (1) the magnitude (extent) of change, (2) the speed of change due to nonlinearity, (3) the permanence (irreversibility) of change, (4) novel types of impacts (e.g. loss of ecosystems), and (5) the global distribution of impacts, creating new vulnerabilities. There is also uncertainty about the timing of ESTPs and substantial variation in the temporal and spatial scales on which impacts are likely to unfold, ranging from 10 to 10,000 years and from local to global; see Table 3.3.1). These features stand in stark contrast with the short-term nature of political cycles and decision making, and the lack of political will and public support for precautionary action in contexts with substantial uncertainty and deferred impacts (see Chapter 3.1). The following section (3.3.2) explores these tipping point-specific issues in more detail, outlining how they challenge current approaches and institutions for governing the impacts of climate change and global environmental change more broadly.