Tipping elements and climate–economic shocks: Pathways toward integrated assessment

By Robert E Kopp, R. Shwom, Gernot Wagner, Jiacan Yuan. 2016

137 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The literature on the costs of climate change often draws a link between climatic “tipping points” and large economic shocks, frequently called “catastrophes.” The phrase “tipping points” in this context can be misleading. In popular and social scientific discourse, “tipping points” involve abrupt state changes. For some climatic “tipping points,” the commitment to a state change may occur abruptly, but the change itself may be rate‐limited and take centuries or longer to realize. Additionally, the connection between climatic “tipping points” and economic losses is tenuous, although emerging empirical and process‐model‐based tools provide pathways for investigating it. We propose terminology to clarify the distinction between “tipping points” in the popular sense, the critical thresholds exhibited by climatic and social “tipping elements,” and “economic shocks.” The last may be associated with tipping elements, gradual climate change, or nonclimatic triggers. We illustrate our proposed distinctions by surveying the literature on climatic tipping elements, climatically sensitive social tipping elements, and climate–economic shocks, and we propose a research agenda to advance the integrated assessment of all three.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e238d0e9fad14f06d458e09cb1c3920652fdefae

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Global and Planetary Change

1. Wolfgang Lucht
2. Michael Schoon
3. Delavane Diaz
4. J. Rocha
5. F. Moore
6. J. Rockström
7. Chris Hope

In Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis

1. Delavane Diaz
2. F. Moore

Citations in the corpus

• Quantifying the economic risks of climate change (2017, background): “(2012), Lemoine and Kapnick (2016), and Burke, Hsiang and Miguel (Burke, Hsiang, & Miguel, 2015) all examine the reduced-form relationship between temperature shocks and economic growth.”
• Defining tipping points for social-ecological systems scholarship—an interdisciplinary literature review (2018, background): “…of the tipping point concept in both scholarship (Russill and Nyssa 2009) and political and social discourse (Russill and Lavin 2012), combined with increasingly diverse conceptualizations of tipping points across multiple disciplines (Kopp et al 2016), currently limit its scholarly utility.”
• Exceeding 1.5°C global warming could trigger multiple climate tipping points (2022, unknown): “Other authors require a tipping point to produce abrupt change (30) thereby excluding events such as ice sheet collapse.”
• Social tipping dynamics for stabilizing Earth’s climate by 2050 (2020, background): “In this paper, we examine a number of potential “social tipping elements” (STEs) for decarbonization (27, 28) that represent specific subdomains of the planetary social-economic system.”