Looming Tipping Points Demand Rapid Transformative Change BY DAVID DUTHIE, BES-NET SENIOR KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT CONSULTANT

David Duthie is an environmental biologist with a doctorate in migration of insects. After a career as a tutor and environmental consultant, he joined UNEP in 2000 in the GEF Division and then the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity before retiring to Oxford, United Kingdom, in 2016.

This article is the second in a two-part series examining the complex interactions of climate change and biodiversity loss and looking at transformative solutions. Part 1 addressed how the two crises affect each other and underscored the need to invest in win-win-win solutions. This part addresses the interrelationships of environmental tipping points and examines what it takes to drive positive change.

Read part 1 here

The complexity of the interactions among biodiversity, climate change and society reminds us of Garrett Hardin's First Law of Human Ecology: ‘We can never do merely one thing. Any intrusion into nature has numerous effects, many of which are unpredictable’.

Any intervention designed to achieve climate/biodiversity goals will have a range of social impacts, including positive, negative and uncertain ones. These impacts will manifest in different ways among people and communities, now and in the future. If social safeguards are not established, interventions meant to reduce climate change and enhance biodiversity can cause asymmetrical social outcomes in places where political and economic elites control decision-making.

For example, an intervention to support tree cover in upland watersheds will offer water provisioning benefits downstream. However, upland farmers may oppose this intervention if afforestation — stopping tree removal — reduces the land’s agricultural productivity. In such a case, the intervening agency may need to use a mix of interventions to ensure equal distribution of benefits to stakeholders. One way agencies provide such equity is by entering payment for ecological services agreements with stakeholders. The UN REDD+ platform provides information on the outcomes of emission-reducing efforts[1].

To identify risks of crossing critical thresholds, we must jointly consider biodiversity, climate and the social dimensions of systems. A ‘tipping point’ is a critical threshold at which system feedbacks move the coupled system to a weakened state from which recovery is difficult. Tipping points are often associated with changes in function. Failure to keep biophysical systems below critical thresholds can diminish ecosystem functioning and regime shifts[2].

For example, there is evidence of crossing tipping points from recent work across Australia: out of 19 ecosystems monitored, all were experiencing six to 17 environmental pressures; 12 were experiencing 10 or more pressures, including multiple simultaneous pressures. Each of the 19 systems showed at least one collapse event in the past 30 years. Such biophysical tipping points can be relatively gradual, others more abrupt, and still others can fluctuate between transition states[3]. These geophysical and ecological cascades can have socioeconomic knock-on effects that can lead to social unrest and conflict.

However, not all tipping points are bad. In socioecological systems thinking, a social tipping point is a situation in which a small change triggers an accelerating positive feedback response, leading to a substantial and often irreversible change in the social system. Social tipping points are complex and context-dependent; while they result from issues such as social identity, power and inequality, agency and decision-making at individual and collective levels[4], they can lead to the kind of transformative change needed to meet pressing sustainability challenges[5].

Transformative change is the need of the hour

We are living through a social tipping point. The COVID-19 pandemic and the rehauling of the global economic system against the background of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) present a unique opportunity. Fulfilling the SDGs, meeting targets set by the Paris Agreement and tackling the post-2020 biodiversity agenda all at once will require rapid and far-reaching actions of a kind and scale never before attempted. In both the climate and biodiversity crises, the window to avoid irreversible impacts is closing unless we rapidly but carefully ramp up solutions that simultaneously mitigate climate change and conserve biodiversity. Not all solutions will be win-wins; trade-offs are inevitable.

The 2019 IPBES Global Assessment concluded that reversing processes of nature’s decline ‘may only be achieved through transformative changes across economic, social, political and technological factors, including paradigms, goals and values’[6]. The IPCC special report ‘Global Warming of 1.5°C’ likewise calls for ‘rapid and far-reaching transitions’ and warns that ‘economic, institutional and sociocultural barriers may inhibit these urban and infrastructure system transitions’[7].

Positive changes in human behaviour, such as sustainably intensifying agriculture and making cultural shifts towards sustainable diets, significantly conserve biodiversity and mitigate climate change while improving human health and well-being. Vested interests and entrenched societal preferences impede such improvements[8]. Transformation throughout these realms will require behavioural changes at the individual level as well as structural incentives and policy changes[9].

There are signs that humanity can achieve the necessary levels of integration and cooperative implementation. For example, the Kunming Declaration, signed at the 2021 Convention on Biological Diversity in Kunming, China, clearly recognizes linkages and trade-offs in the dual quest to mitigate climate change and conserve biodiversity, an important change from the historically more siloed advocacy of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Convention on Biological Diversity.

Improved mainstreaming of biodiversity and climate has been promoted as a way to achieve policy integration to move towards multiple goals. Post-COVID-19 recovery packages have emphasized that any recovery should be consistent with the Paris Agreement goals, thus mainstreaming climate into economic priorities[10]. Similar arguments have been made for integrating biodiversity in COVID-19 recovery plans[11].

Overall, some progress has been made on environmental policy integration in recent decades, particularly in reducing perverse incentives. However, barriers remain, including lack of simple indicators for biodiversity change, time-limited actions that do not build towards transformative change, and limited financing[12].

Doing no harm: Mitigating risks and negative impacts in biodiversity conservation and climate action

Figure 7.2 from the IPBES-IPCC Science Scientific Outcome report provides a useful summary of how complex biodiversity policy interventions (protect, restore, manage, transform) and climate interventions (ecosystem, food, energy) can bring multiple benefits while avoiding negative impacts.

Avoiding negative impacts of biodiversity and climate interventions will require risk management and more attention to global socioecological complexity and interconnections (e.g., in telecoupling); cross-scale integration and feedbacks; and decision-making amid uncertainty[13]. At the same time, some trade-offs can be managed through well-designed interventions. For example, adverse impacts on biodiversity are reduced when renewable energy is deployed in the ocean, as offshore wind farms offer some protection for marine biodiversity. As the concessions are typically no-take areas for fisheries, this may improve fish stocks[14].

Policymaking benefits from a well-designed multi-objective strategy that delivers positive synergies and co-benefits in mitigating climate change, facilitating adaptation and meeting biodiversity goals[15]. For example, well-designed marine protected areas can increase fish biodiversity, conserve ocean carbon stocks that might be disturbed by seabed trawling, and promote food provisioning and livelihood support. Identifying these ‘triple-win’ solutions can help establish priorities[16].

Transformative change will require not only multiple goals but also the participation of a diverse range of stakeholders and actors, including the public and private sectors and all levels of government. A number of new coalitions of actors in the biodiversity-climate space have emerged in recent years, including the High Ambition Coalition (HAC) for Nature and People, the Nature-Based Solutions Coalition and the Soy Buyers Coalition. Civil society actors — such as the Science-based Targets Initiative, which encourages private companies to set sustainability goals using the Paris Agreement targets — are striving to bridge the NGO-private sector divide.

Transformative change will require not only multiple goals but also the participation of a diverse range of stakeholders and actors, including the public and private sectors and all levels of government.

Other solutions that value both cross-scale and cross-stakeholder models include ‘jurisdictional approaches’, which are defined as those ‘that promote sustainable resource use at the scale of jurisdictions through a formalized collaboration between government entities and actors from civil society and/or the private sector’[17]. Jurisdictional approaches can overcome weaknesses of previous approaches — such as lack of integration, bias towards voluntary measures (thus decreasing additionality), project level scale with little extended impact, and leakage — by scaling up efforts to incentivize regions or landscapes to move towards global goals. The success of these approaches depends on the engagement of multiple stakeholders, buy-in across policy scales to remove concerns of leakage, and efficiency of investments[18].

Overall, achieving transformative change will require identifying new pathways by understanding the key biophysical and socioeconomic drivers of change within systems; learning from examples of innovation and experimentation that have shifted systems dynamics towards sustainability; and identifying and promoting emerging policy responses.

References

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  2. Lenton, T. M. et al. (2019). Climate tipping points—Too risky to bet against. Nature, 575(7784), 592–595. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-03595-0.
  3. Bergstrom et al. (2021) Combating ecosystem collapse from the tropics to the Antarctic. Global Change Biol (2021) doi:10.1111/gcb.15539.
  4. Milkoreit, M. et al. (2018). Defining tipping points for social-ecological systems scholarship—An interdisciplinary literature review. Environmental Research Letters, 13(3), 033005. https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/aaaa75.
  5. Otto, I. M. et al. (2020) Social tipping dynamics for stabilizing Earth’s climate by 2050. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 117, 2354–2365.
  6. IPBES (2019) Global assessment report on biodiversity and ecosystem services of the Intergovernmental Science- Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. IPBES secretariat.
  7. IPCC (2018b) Global Warming of 1.5°C. An IPCC Special Report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty.
  8. Leclère, D. et al. (2020). Bending the curve of terrestrial biodiversity needs an integrated strategy. Nature, 585, 551–556; https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586- 020-2705-y.
  9. Chan, K. M. A. et al (2020). Levers and leverage points for pathways to sustainability. People and Nature, 2(3), 693– 717; https://doi.org/10.1002/pan3.10124.
  10. Hepburn, C. et al. (2020) Will COVID-19 fiscal recovery packages accelerate or retard progress on climate change? Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 36(Supplement 1), S359–S381. https://doi. org/10.1093/oxrep/graa015.
  11. McElwee, P. et al (2020). The impact of interventions in the global land and agri-food sectors on Nature’s Contributions to People and the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Global Change Biology, 26(9), 4691–4721. https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.15219.
  12. Karlsson-Vinkhuyzen et al. (2018). Identifying barriers and levers of biodiversity mainstreaming in four cases of transnational governance of land and water. Environmental Science & Policy, 85, 132–140. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2018.03.011.
  13. Essen, M., & Lambin, E. F. (2021). Jurisdictional approaches to sustainable resource use. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, fee.2299. https://doi.org/10.1002/fee.2299.
  14. Hooper, T. et al. (2017). The implications of energy systems for ecosystem services: A detailed case study of offshore wind. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 70, 230–241; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rser.2016.11.248.
  15. Popescu, V. D. et al. (2020). Quantifying biodiversity trade-offs in the face of widespread renewable and unconventional energy development. Scientific Reports, 10(1), 7603. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-64501-7.
  16. Sala, E. et al. (2021). Protecting the global ocean for biodiversity, food and climate. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03371-z.
  17. Essen, M., & Lambin, E. F. (2021). Jurisdictional approaches to sustainable resource use. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, fee.2299. https://doi.org/10.1002/fee.2299.
  18. Ibid.