Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene

By Will Steffen, J. Rockström, K. Richardson, T. Lenton, Carl Folke, D. Liverman, C. Summerhayes, A. Barnosky, S. Cornell, Michel Crucifix and 6 more. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2018

2,342 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We explore the risk that self-reinforcing feedbacks could push the Earth System toward a planetary threshold that, if crossed, could prevent stabilization of the climate at intermediate temperature rises and cause continued warming on a “Hothouse Earth” pathway even as human emissions are reduced. Crossing the threshold would lead to a much higher global average temperature than any interglacial in the past 1.2 million years and to sea levels significantly higher than at any time in the Holocene. We examine the evidence that such a threshold might exist and where it might be. If the threshold is crossed, the resulting trajectory would likely cause serious disruptions to ecosystems, society, and economies. Collective human action is required to steer the Earth System away from a potential threshold and stabilize it in a habitable interglacial-like state. Such action entails stewardship of the entire Earth System—biosphere, climate, and societies—and could include decarbonization of the global economy, enhancement of biosphere carbon sinks, behavioral changes, technological innovations, new governance arrangements, and transformed social values.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e39d8c18ef28ac627799e8a97a7d2a844a96d2ad

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Citations in the corpus

Viewpoint – Ocean Plastic Pollution: a convenient but distracting truth? (2019, neutral): “the 'complacency' view, at a crucial window in time for the more radical actions that are urgently needed to mitigate climate change [26, 27].”
A Global Deal For Nature: Guiding principles, milestones, and targets (2019, neutral): “Additionally, human migrations, triggered by climate change–induced droughts and sealevel rise in combination with extreme weather events, could displace more than 100 million people by 2050, mostly in the southern hemisphere (12, 13).”
Social tipping dynamics for stabilizing Earth’s climate by 2050 (2020, background): “P dangerous climate change and its devastating consequences is a defining task for humanity (1, 2).”
Network resilience (2020, background): “As humans increase their pressure on the planet, regime shifts are likely to occur more often, and more severely, and more broadly [182, 183, 184, 185].”
Dancing the Supply Chain: Toward Transformative Supply Chain Management (2021, background): “Ice core data reveal that for the last 10,000 years, planet Earth has remained in a relatively stable climate, an era labeled the Holocene (Folke et al., 2010).”
Status and perspectives on 100% renewable energy systems (2019, background): “The total cumulative emissions up to that time represent a key to achieving this target and it has been estimated that stabilizing atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations would result in continued warming [1,3].”
Equity, climate justice and fossil fuel extraction: principles for a managed phase out (2020, background): “Though ambitious, even 1.5-2°C may pose catastrophic risks, such as from ice-sheet collapse causing sea level rise of many meters (IPCC 2018), or from tipping the earth into an unstable state of upward-spiralling feedbacks (Steffen et al. 2018).”
Exceeding 1.5°C global warming could trigger multiple climate tipping points (2022, neutral): “In the worst case scenario, interactions might produce a global CTP ( 3 ).”
Uncertainty of climate policies and implications for economics and finance: An evolutionary economics approach (2019, background): “fat-tailed distribution of impacts (Weitzman 2009, Ackerman 2017) and the non-linearity between anthropogenic action and ecosystems’ reaction, potentially leading to tipping points and domino effects, with catastrophic and irreversible effects (Steffen et al. 2018; Lamperti et al. 2018a).”