Abstract
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.
Highlights
We provided our respondents with a written definition of a STE, most of the online survey participants referred to what we define as social tipping interventions” (STIs)
The critical threshold of the control parameter needed to be crossed in order to trigger the tipping process was in most of groups not quantified by the experts but described qualitatively
The experts referred to the social tipping points (STPs) that would be achieved if the price of fossil-fuel–free products and services falls below that of those products and services based on fossil fuels
Summary
Limiting global warming to 1.5 °C as stipulated in the Paris Climate Agreement [5] scientifically implies a complete net decarbonization of the world’s energy and transport systems, industrial production, and land use by the middle of this century In their “roadmap for rapid decarbonization,” Rockström et al [6] highlight that rapid increase of the share of zero-carbon energy within the global energy system would be needed to achieve this objective, likely alongside a considerable strengthening of terrestrial carbon sinks. Carbon emissions that are currently still on the rise at rates of 0 to 2% per year, despite decades-long efforts in international climate negotiations, would thereby need to pivot to a rapid decline of 7% per year and more These emission reduction rates would surpass by far even those experienced only during periods of massive socioeconomic crisis in the 20th century, such as World War II and the collapse of communism (Fig. 1). It is increasingly recognized that business-as-usual technological progress and carbon
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