The UN Summit of the Future – An Opportunity to Address the Risks of Earth System Tipping Points

Global Tipping Points

Manjana Milkoreit (University of Oslo); Yulia Yamineva (University of Eastern Finland); Laurie Laybourn (Chatham House, UK); Yevgeny Aksenov, (National Oceanography Centre, UK).

When the United Nations convenes the Summit of the Future this month, the international community will make decisions with major implications for the governance of Earth system tipping points. The Summit is the most comprehensive effort of multilateralism reform in decades, aiming to reset global governance institutions to better address the world’s increasingly complex challenges, and to supercharge the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda. Importantly, the Summit of the Future represents an effort to expand the relevant time horizon of global governance, bringing into focus the need to care for future generations, the long-term conditions on the planet, and the corresponding need for long-term thinking and anticipatory governance.

The Summit of the Future will likely create three central outcome documents, each containing value statements, principles and commitments for future action and institutional change. Among these three, the Pact for the Future and the Declaration on Future Generations are the most relevant for the governance agenda needed to address the risks of Earth system tipping points.

Earth system tipping points refer to major components of the Earth system, such as ice sheets, ocean currents, or forest biomes, which can experience non-linear and often irreversible shifts from their current state into a completely different one. The tipping point marks the moment such a shift is initiated, accelerates and becomes unstoppable due to self-reinforcing feedback mechanisms. Examples of such tipping processes include the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet, the dieback of the Amazon rainforest and the collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC).

Our Global Tipping Points Report 2023 assessed the risks and potential impacts of more than 20 of these large-scale tipping processes in the Earth system, concluding that they present some of the gravest dangers to humanity because they would severely damage our planet’s life-support systems and threaten the stability of our societies. The risk of triggering at least five of these systemic shifts (e.g., the dieback of the tropical coral reefs or the collapse of the North-Atlantic Subpolar Gyre – SPG) increases significantly at 1.5°C warming above pre-industrial levels. For example, the collapse of the SPG could occur within the next 15-30 years, and may have large-scale negative consequences for the global oceans, marine ecosystems and weather, e.g., increasing extreme weather and floods in Europe and North America, challenging agriculture and food security. Given that the world is rapidly approaching the 1.5°C mark, Earth system tipping is now a near-term, even immediate concern. Tipping risks deserve urgent attention if humanity wants to maintain a chance of avoiding them.

There are no existing global governance efforts responding directly to the severe, systemic and diverse risks associated with Earth system tipping processes. As we have argued in Section 3 of the GTPR 2023, relevant institutions, mechanisms, and science-policy interfaces, e.g., in the UNFCCC or CBD, urgently need to be reformed to account for the novel threats and challenges tipping points present. The action commitments and institutional innovations put in place during the Summit of the Future have a direct bearing on this task. Given the urgency, the Summit’s outcomes will matter especially for the international community’s chances of avoiding near-term tipping points in the Earth system.

To maximize our collective ability to prevent major tipping events, it is imperative that governments around the world strengthen and speed up their mitigation efforts and develop a razor-sharp focus on minimizing the extent and the length of temperature overshoot beyond 1.5°C. Not only our temperature goals, but our emission pathways matter greatly for managing tipping risks. If a tipping process is triggered during the temperature overshoot period, it will continue even when temperatures return to or below 1.5°C. Therefore the Pact for the Future should emphasize a collective commitment not only to transitioning away from fossil fuels – confirming and strengthening the Global Stocktake Decision at COP 28 – but to do so rapidly with due attention to equity and justice. It is of deep concern that climate-related language and action commitments have been weakened in the fourth revision of the draft Pact.

Some Earth system tipping processes take place over one or multiple decades (e.g., the dieback of the Amazon rainforest), and some can last several thousand years (e.g., the Greenland Ice Sheet). Regardless of their duration, each and every one of them shapes the conditions for life on Earth with implications for those alive today and for all future generations. The ambition of the Summit of the Future is to strengthen the voice of children, young people and future generations in governance institutions at the global, national and local levels, and to embed our duties to future generations firmly in the global governance architecture. The risks and potential impacts of Earth system tipping processes should be a core component of the agenda of the institutional arrangements that will be established with the Declaration on Future Generations, e.g., a report to the United Nations General Assembly, a UN Forum or a UN Special Envoy for Future Generations.

More generally, a longer-term perspective in global climate and biodiversity governance is urgently needed to assess and effectively respond to the risks of Earth system tipping points. Science-policy interactions need to be strengthened and reformed across multiple policy domains to ensure more dynamic, inclusive and effective knowledge co-production and to strengthen anticipatory capacities among governance actors. The Summit of the Future could initiate global governance reforms that foster such a future-oriented approach in multilateral institutions, leveraging science, data, and foresight for anticipatory governance, early warning systems, and systemic risk responses. To support all global governance actors in their efforts to understand and respond to the risks of Earth system tipping points, we believe a dedicated scientific body – a standing Science Panel on Earth System Tipping Dynamics – should be created with the mandate to continuously assess tipping-point science, inform decision-makers about the risks and policy implications of tipping processes in the Earth system in a timely fashion, and to support the development of governance solutions, including early warning systems for distinct tipping elements around the world.

Global Tipping Points

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