Social tipping dynamics for stabilizing Earth’s climate by 2050
By I. Otto, Jonathan F. Donges, R. Cremades, A. Bhowmik, R. Hewitt, Wolfgang Lucht, J. Rockström, F. Allerberger, M. McCaffrey, Sylvanus S. P. Doe and 4 more. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020
660 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Significance Achieving a rapid global decarbonization to stabilize the climate critically depends on activating contagious and fast-spreading processes of social and technological change within the next few years. Drawing on expert elicitation, an expert workshop, and a review of literature, which provides a comprehensive analysis on this topic, we propose concrete interventions to induce positive social tipping dynamics and a rapid global transformation to carbon-neutral societies. These social tipping interventions comprise removing fossil-fuel subsidies and incentivizing decentralized energy generation, building carbon-neutral cities, divesting from assets linked to fossil fuels, revealing the moral implications of fossil fuels, strengthening climate education and engagement, and disclosing greenhouse gas emissions information. Safely achieving the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement requires a worldwide transformation to carbon-neutral societies within the next 30 y. Accelerated technological progress and policy implementations are required to deliver emissions reductions at rates sufficiently fast to avoid crossing dangerous tipping points in the Earth’s climate system. Here, we discuss and evaluate the potential of social tipping interventions (STIs) that can activate contagious processes of rapidly spreading technologies, behaviors, social norms, and structural reorganization within their functional domains that we refer to as social tipping elements (STEs). STEs are subdomains of the planetary socioeconomic system where the required disruptive change may take place and lead to a sufficiently fast reduction in anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. The results are based on online expert elicitation, a subsequent expert workshop, and a literature review. The STIs that could trigger the tipping of STE subsystems include 1) removing fossil-fuel subsidies and incentivizing decentralized energy generation (STE1, energy production and storage systems), 2) building carbon-neutral cities (STE2, human settlements), 3) divesting from assets linked to fossil fuels (STE3, financial markets), 4) revealing the moral implications of fossil fuels (STE4, norms and value systems), 5) strengthening climate education and engagement (STE5, education system), and 6) disclosing information on greenhouse gas emissions (STE6, information feedbacks). Our research reveals important areas of focus for larger-scale empirical and modeling efforts to better understand the potentials of harnessing social tipping dynamics for climate change mitigation.
Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7f45cdcf629668006973655fe5ee9615b7d723f4
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Citations in the corpus
- Levers and leverage points for pathways to sustainability (2020, background): “While there have been efforts to identify similar points of intervention for global climate solutions (Farmer et al., 2019; Otto et al., 2020; Tàbara et al., 2018), we know of no similar efforts for the biosphere including climate and aspects of sustainable development.”
- Dancing the Supply Chain: Toward Transformative Supply Chain Management (2021, background): “Stabilized by rigidity and inertia (Otto et al., 2020), the connectedness at the political-economic level might persist.”