Arctic Climate Tipping Points

There is widespread concern that anthropogenic global warming will trigger Arctic climate tipping points. The Arctic has a long history of natural, abrupt climate changes, which together with current observations and model projections, can help us to identify which parts of the Arctic climate system might pass future tipping points. Here the climate tipping points are defined, noting that not all of them involve bifurcations leading to irreversible change. Past abrupt climate changes in the Arctic are briefly reviewed. Then, the current behaviour of a range of Arctic systems is summarised. Looking ahead, a range of potential tipping phenomena are described. This leads to a revised and expanded list of potential Arctic climate tipping elements, whose likelihood is assessed, in terms of how much warming will be required to tip them. Finally, the available responses are considered, especially the prospects for avoiding Arctic climate tipping points.     

Detecting and Coping with Disruptive Shocks in Arctic Marine Systems: A Resilience Approach to Place and People

It seems inevitable that the ongoing and rapid changes in the physical environment of the marine Arctic will push components of the region’s existing social-ecological systems—small and large—beyond tipping points and into new regimes. Ongoing changes include warming, freshening, acidification, and alterations to food web structure. In anticipation we pose three distinct but interrelated challenges: (1) to explore existing connectivities within components of the marine system; (2) to seek indicators (if they exist) of approaching regime change through observation and modeling; and (3) to build functional resilience into existing systems through adaptation-oriented policy and to have in hand transformative options when tipping points are crossed and new development trajectories are required. Each of the above challenges is scale dependent, and each requires a much deeper understanding than we currently have of connectivity within existing systems and their response to external forcing. Here, we argue from a global perspective the need to understand the Arctic’s role in an increasingly nonlinear world; then describe emerging evidence from new observations on the connectivity of processes and system components from the Canada Basin and subarctic seas surrounding northern North America; and finally posit an approach founded in “resilience thinking” to allow northern residents living in small coastal communities to participate in the observation, adaption and—if necessary—transformation of the social-ecological system with which they live.     

Towards a definition of climate science

The intrinsic difficulties in building realistic climate models and in providing complete, reliable and meaningful observational datasets, and the conceptual impossibility of testing theories against data imply that the usual Galilean scientific validation criteria do not apply to climate science. The different epistemology pertaining to climate science implies that its answers cannot be singular and deterministic; they must be plural and stated in probabilistic terms. Therefore, in order to extract meaningful estimates of future climate change from a model, it is necessary to explore the model's uncertainties. In terms of societal impacts of scientific knowledge, it is necessary to accept that any political choice in a matter involving complex systems is made under unavoidable conditions of uncertainty. Nevertheless, detailed probabilistic results in science can provide a baseline for a sensible process of decision-making.     

Small habitat matrix: How does it work?

We present herein our perspective of a novel Small Habitats Matrix (SHM) concept showing how small habitats on private lands are untapped but can be valuable for mitigating ecological degradation. Grounded by the realities in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo, we model a discontinuous “stepping stones” linkage that includes both terrestrial and aquatic habitats to illustrate exactly how the SHM can be deployed. Taken together, the SHM is expected to optimize the meta-population vitality in monoculture landscapes for aerial, arboreal, terrestrial and aquatic wildlife communities. We also provide the tangible cost estimates and discuss how such a concept is both economically affordable and plausible to complement global conservation initiatives. By proposing a practical approach to conservation in the rapidly developing tropics, we present a perspective from “ground zero” that reaches out to fellow scientists, funders, activists and pro-environmental land owners who often ask, “What more can we do?”     

Foreword

We provide an introduction to the volume The Arctic in the Earth System perspective: the role of tipping points. The terms tipping point and tipping element are described and their role in current science, general debates, and the Arctic are elucidated. From a wider perspective, the volume focuses upon the role of humans in the Arctic component of the Earth system and in particular the envelope for human existence, the Arctic ecosystems. The Arctic climate tipping elements, the tipping elements in Arctic ecosystems and societies, and the challenges of governance and anticipation are illuminated through short summaries of eight publications that derive from the Arctic Frontiers conference in 2011 and the EU FP7 project Arctic Tipping Points. Then some ideas based upon resilience thinking are developed to show how wise system management could ease pressures on Arctic systems in order to keep them away from tipping points.     

Nature and COVID-19: The pandemic,the environment,and the way ahead

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought profound social, political, economic, and environmental challenges to the world. The virus may have emerged from wildlife reservoirs linked to environmental disruption, was transmitted to humans via the wildlife trade, and its spread was facilitated by economic globalization. The pandemic arrived at a time when wildfires, high temperatures, floods, and storms amplified human suffering. These challenges call for a powerful response to COVID-19 that addresses social and economic development, climate change, and biodiversity together, offering an opportunity to bring transformational change to the structure and functioning of the global economy. This biodefense can include a “One Health” approach in all relevant sectors; a greener approach to agriculture that minimizes greenhouse gas emissions and leads to healthier diets; sustainable forms of energy; more effective international environmental agreements; post-COVID development that is equitable and sustainable; and nature-compatible international trade. Restoring and enhancing protected areas as part of devoting 50% of the planet’s land to environmentally sound management that conserves biodiversity would also support adaptation to climate change and limit human contact with zoonotic pathogens. The essential links between human health and well-being, biodiversity, and climate change could inspire a new generation of innovators to provide green solutions to enable humans to live in a healthy balance with nature leading to a long-term resilient future.     

Earth stewardship: Shaping a sustainable future through interacting policy and norm shifts

Transformation toward a sustainable future requires an earth stewardship approach to shift society from its current goal of increasing material wealth to a vision of sustaining built, natural, human, and social capital—equitably distributed across society, within and among nations. Widespread concern about earth’s current trajectory and support for actions that would foster more sustainable pathways suggests potential social tipping points in public demand for an earth stewardship vision. Here, we draw on empirical studies and theory to show that movement toward a stewardship vision can be facilitated by changes in either policy incentives or social norms. Our novel contribution is to point out that both norms and incentives must change and can do so interactively. This can be facilitated through leverage points and complementarities across policy areas, based on values, system design, and agency. Potential catalysts include novel democratic institutions and engagement of non-governmental actors, such as businesses, civic leaders, and social movements as agents for redistribution of power. Because no single intervention will transform the world, a key challenge is to align actions to be synergistic, persistent, and scalable.     

The Role of Social and Intergenerational Equity in Making Changes in Human Well-Being Sustainable

A sustainable world is one in which human needs are met equitably and without sacrificing the ability of future generations to meet their needs. Human well-being is described by four primary elements—basic human needs, economic needs, environmental needs, and subjective well-being. These elements can interact in a myriad of ways to influence overall well-being. What makes changes in human well-being sustainable for a population or a nation? Two major interactional concepts can push changes in human well-being toward a sustainable state in space and time—social equity and intergenerational equity. The concept of social equity distributes well-being over space, ensuring the fair treatment of all members of society promoting spatial sustainability of a well-being decision. The concept of intergenerational equity distributes well-being through time, ensuring the well-being of present and future generations of a population or nation, promoting temporal sustainability of a well-being decision. The roles of social and intergenerational equity in terms of their influence on human well-being are examined with a focus on more sustainable decision-making.     

Towards a Tipping Point in Responding to Change: Rising Costs,Fewer Options for Arctic and Global Societies

Climate change incurs costs, but government adaptation budgets are limited. Beyond a certain point, individuals must bear the costs or adapt to new circumstances, creating political-economic tipping points that we explore in three examples. First, many Alaska Native villages are threatened by erosion, but relocation is expensive. To date, critically threatened villages have not yet been relocated, suggesting that we may already have reached a political-economic tipping point. Second, forest fires shape landscape and ecological characteristics in interior Alaska. Climate-driven changes in fire regime require increased fire-fighting resources to maintain current patterns of vegetation and land use, but these resources appear to be less and less available, indicating an approaching tipping point. Third, rapid sea level rise, for example from accelerated melting of the Greenland ice sheet, will create a choice between protection and abandonment for coastal regions throughout the world, a potential global tipping point comparable to those now faced by Arctic communities. The examples illustrate the basic idea that if costs of response increase more quickly than available resources, then society has fewer and fewer options as time passes.     

Nexus on climate change: agriculture and possible solution to cope future climate change stresses

The changing climate scenarios harshen the biotic stresses including boosting up the population of insect/pest and disease, uplifting weed growth, declining soil beneficial microbes, threaten pollinator, and boosting up abiotic stresses including harsh drought/waterlogging, extremisms in temperature, salinity/alkalinity, abrupt rainfall pattern)) and ulitamtely  affect the plant in multiple ways. This nexus review paper will cover four significant points viz (1) the possible impacts of climate change; as the world already facing the problem of food security, in such crucial period, climatic change severely affects all four dimensions of food security (from production to consumption) and will lead to malnutrition/malnourishment faced by low-income peoples. (2) How some major crops (wheat, cotton, rice, maize, and sugarcane) are affected by stress and their consequent loss. (3) How to develop a strategic work to limit crucial factors, like their significant role in climate-smart breeding, developing resilience to stresses, and idiotypic breeding. Additionally, there is an essence of improving food security, as much of our food is wasted before consumption for instance post-harvest losses. (4) Role of biotechnology and genetic engineering in adaptive introgression of the gene or developing plant transgenic against pests. As millions of dollars are invested in innovation and research to cope with future climate change stresses on a plant, hence community base adaptation of innovation is also considered an important factor in crop improvements. Because of such crucial predictions about the future impacts of climate change on agriculture, we must adopt measures to evolve crop.

     

Impact of future climate changes on high pollution levels

Changes in climate variability as well as changes in extreme weather and climate events in the 20th century, especially those that took place during the last two to three decades of the 20th century, have been discussed in many recent scientific publications. Attempts to project the results of such studies in the future have been made under different assumptions. In this paper, we have chosen one of the well-known scenarios predicting changes of the climate in the world during the last 30 years of the 21st century. This scenario is used, together with several general predictions related to the future climate, to produce three climatic scenarios. The derived climatic scenarios are used to calculate predictions for future pollution levels in Denmark and in Europe by applying the Unified Danish Eulerian Model (UNI-DEM), on a space domain containing the whole of Europe.     

Recognizing Indigenous peoples’ and local communities’ rights and agency in the post-2020 Biodiversity Agenda

The Convention on Biological Diversity is defining the goals that will frame future global biodiversity policy in a context of rapid biodiversity decline and under pressure to make transformative change. Drawing on the work of Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars, we argue that transformative change requires the foregrounding of Indigenous peoples’ and local communities’ rights and agency in biodiversity policy. We support this argument with four key points. First, Indigenous peoples and local communities hold knowledge essential for setting realistic and effective biodiversity targets that simultaneously improve local livelihoods. Second, Indigenous peoples’ conceptualizations of nature sustain and manifest CBD’s 2050 vision of “Living in harmony with nature.” Third, Indigenous peoples’ and local communities’ participation in biodiversity policy contributes to the recognition of human and Indigenous peoples’ rights. And fourth, engagement in biodiversity policy is essential for Indigenous peoples and local communities to be able to exercise their recognized rights to territories and resources.     

The Quadruple Squeeze: Defining the safe operating space for freshwater use to achieve a triply green revolution in the Anthropocene

Humanity has entered a new phase of sustainability challenges, the Anthropocene, in which human development has reached a scale where it affects vital planetary processes. Under the pressure from a quadruple squeeze—from population and development pressures, the anthropogenic climate crisis, the anthropogenic ecosystem crisis, and the risk of deleterious tipping points in the Earth system—the degrees of freedom for sustainable human exploitation of planet Earth are severely restrained. It is in this reality that a new green revolution in world food production needs to occur, to attain food security and human development over the coming decades. Global freshwater resources are, and will increasingly be, a fundamental limiting factor in feeding the world. Current water vulnerabilities in the regions in most need of large agricultural productivity improvements are projected to increase under the pressure from global environmental change. The sustainability challenge for world agriculture has to be set within the new global sustainability context. We present new proposed sustainability criteria for world agriculture, where world food production systems are transformed in order to allow humanity to stay within the safe operating space of planetary boundaries. In order to secure global resilience and thereby raise the chances of planet Earth to remain in the current desired state, conducive for human development on the long-term, these planetary boundaries need to be respected. This calls for a triply green revolution, which not only more than doubles food production in many regions of the world, but which also is environmentally sustainable, and invests in the untapped opportunities to use green water in rainfed agriculture as a key source of future productivity enhancement. To achieve such a global transformation of agriculture, there is a need for more innovative options for water interventions at the landscape scale, accounting for both green and blue water, as well as a new focus on cross-scale interactions, feed-backs and risks for unwanted regime shifts in the agro-ecological landscape.     

Global change: state of the science

Only recently, within a few decades, have we realized that humanity significantly influences the global environment. In the early 1980s, atmospheric measurements confirmed basic concepts developed a decade earlier. These basic concepts showed that human activities were affecting the ozone layer. Later measurements and theoretical analyses have clearly connected observed changes in ozone to human-related increases of chlorine and bromine in the stratosphere. As a result of prompt international policy agreements, the combined abundances of ozone-depleting compounds peaked in 1994 and ozone is already beginning a slow path to recovery. A much more difficult problem confronting humanity is the impact of increasing levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases on global climate. The processes that connect greenhouse gas emissions to climate are very complex. This complexity has limited our ability to make a definitive projection of future climate change. Nevertheless, the range of projected climate change shows that global warming has the potential to severely impact human welfare and our planet as a whole. This paper evaluates the state of the scientific understanding of the global change issues, their potential impacts, and the relationships of scientific understanding to policy considerations.     

A transformative mission for prioritising nature in Australian cities

Australia is experiencing mounting pressures related to processes of urbanisation, biodiversity loss and climate change felt at large in cities. At the same time, it is cities that can take the leading role in pioneering approaches and solutions to respond to those coupling emergencies. In this perspective piece we respond to the following question: What are the required transformations for prioritising, valuing, maintaining and embracing nature in cities in Australia? We adopt the mission framework as an organising framework to present proposed pathways to transform Australian cities as nature-positive places of the future. We propose three interconnected pathways as starting actions to steer urban planning, policy and governance in Australian cities: First, cities need to establish evidence-based planning for nature in cities and mainstream new planning tools that safeguard and foreground urban nature. Second, collaborative planning needs to become a standard practice in cities and inclusive governance for nature in cities needs to prioritise Aboriginal knowledge systems and practices as well as look beyond what local governments can do. Third, for progressing to nature-positive cities, it is paramount to empower communities to innovate with nature across Australian cities. Whilst we focus on Australian cities, the lessons and pathways are broadly applicably globally and can inspire science-policy debates for the post COP15 biodiversity and COP26 climate change implementation processes.     

Interdisciplinary science for future governance and management of forests

The sustainable use of forests constitutes one of the great challenges for the future due to forests’ large spatial coverage, long-term planning horizons and inclusion of many ecosystem services. The mission of the Future Forests programme is to provide a scientifically robust knowledge base for sustainable governance and management of forests preparing for a future characterized by globalization and climate change. In this introduction to the Special Issue, we describe the interdisciplinary science approach developed in close collaboration with actors in the Future Forests programme, and discuss the potential impacts of this science on society. In addition, we introduce the 13 scientific articles and present results produced by the programme.     

Social factors mediating human–carnivore coexistence: Understanding thematic strands influencing coexistence in Central Romania

Facilitating human–carnivore coexistence depends on the biophysical environment but also on social factors. Focusing on Central Romania, we conducted 71 semi-structured interviews to explore human–bear (Ursus arctos) coexistence. Qualitative content and discourse analysis identified three socially mediated thematic strands, which showed different ways in which perceived interactions between people, bears and the environment shape coexistence. The “landscape-bear strand” described perceptions of the way in which the landscape offers resources for the bear, while the “landscape-human strand” related to ways in which humans experience the landscape. The “management strand” related to the way bears was managed. All three strands highlight both threats and opportunities for the peaceful coexistence of people and bears. Management and policy interventions could be improved by systematically considering the possible effects of interventions on each of the three strands shaping coexistence. Future research should explore the relevance of the identified thematic strands in other settings worldwide.

Electronic supplementary material

The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s13280-015-0760-7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.     

A reflection on four impactful Ambio papers: The biotic perspective: This article belongs to Ambio’s 50th Anniversary Collection. Theme: Climate change impacts

Climate change represents one of the most pressing societal and scientific challenges of our time. While much of the current research on climate change focuses on future prediction, some of the strongest signals of warming can already be seen in Arctic and alpine areas, where temperatures are rising faster than the global average, and in the oceans, where the combination of rising temperatures and acidification due to increased CO₂ concentrations has had catastrophic consequences for sensitive marine organisms inhabiting coral reefs. The scientific papers highlighted as part of this anniversary issue represent some of the most impactful advances in our understanding of the consequences of anthropogenic climate change. Here, we reflect on the legacy of these papers from the biotic perspective.     

Integrated Ocean Management as a Strategy to Meet Rapid Climate Change: The Norwegian Case

The prospects of rapid climate change and the potential existence of tipping points in marine ecosystems where nonlinear change may result from them being overstepped, raises the question of strategies for coping with ecosystem change. There is broad agreement that the combined forces of climate change, pollution and increasing economic activities necessitates more comprehensive approaches to oceans management, centering on the concept of ecosystem-based oceans management. This article addresses the Norwegian experience in introducing integrated, ecosystem-based oceans management, emphasizing how climate change, seen as a major long-term driver of change in ecosystems, is addressed in management plans. Understanding the direct effects of climate variability and change on ecosystems and indirect effects on human activities is essential for adaptive planning to be useful in the long-term management of the marine environment.     

Solutions-oriented research for sustainability: Turning knowledge into action: This article belongs to Ambio’s 50th Anniversary Collection. Theme: Solutions-oriented research

In this perspective, we reflect upon the question: what processes may help transition scientific insights on sustainability issues into practice and thus contribute to tackling the complex, systemic sustainability problems of today? We use five forerunners in the field of providing and brokering knowledge for science informed real world solutions, all published in Ambio and highlighted in this Anniversary collection, as our starting point. We discuss how the authors present solutions, whom they tried to reach, and what was suggested—implicitly or explicitly—as the potential uptake processes for turning scientific knowledge into practice. With this as the starting point, we discuss how sustainability science, as a field vowed to action, has evolved in its views of actors, pathways for impacts, and the potential roles of research and researchers to promote sustainability transformations.