Related papers: Maintaining human wellbeing as socio-environmental…
In the past decades human activities caused global Earth system changes, e.g., climate change or biodiversity loss. Simultaneously, these associated impacts have increased environmental awareness within societies across the globe, thereby…
The emergence and impact of tipping points have garnered significant interest in both the social and natural sciences. Despite widespread recognition of the importance of feedbacks between human and natural systems, it is often assumed that…
Ecosystems can undergo sudden shifts to undesirable states, but recent studies with simple single species ecosystems have demonstrated that advance warning can be provided by the slowing down of population dynamics near a tipping point.…
Societal transformations are necessary to address critical global challenges, such as mitigation of anthropogenic climate change and reaching UN sustainable development goals. Recently, social tipping processes have received increased…
Nonlinear dynamical systems may be exposed to tipping points, critical thresholds at which small changes in the external inputs or in the systems parameters abruptly shift the system to an alternative state with a contrasting dynamical…
The theory of alternative stable states and tipping points has garnered substantial attention in the last several decades. It predicts potential critical transitions from one ecosystem state to a completely different state under increasing…
The realization that complex systems such as ecological communities can collapse or shift regimes suddenly and without rapid external forcing poses a serious challenge to our understanding and management of the natural world. The potential…
Ecosystems, which are intricate amalgams of biological communities and their surrounding environments, continually evolve under the influence of their myriad interactions. The world is currently facing intensifying environmental…
We identify the phase of a cycle as a new critical factor for tipping points (critical transitions) in cyclic systems subject to time-varying external conditions. As an example, we consider how contemporary climate variability induces…
In ecology, climate and other fields, (sub)systems have been identified that can transition into a qualitatively different state when a critical threshold or tipping point in a driving process is crossed. An understanding of those tipping…
Predicting fitness of biologically-active populations, communities or systems in fluctuating environments is a long-standing challenge. Phenotypic plasticity and bet-hedging strategy, two key evolutionary traits living systems harness to…
Ecosystems often undergo abrupt regime shifts in response to gradual external changes. These shifts are theoretically understood as a regime switch between alternative stable states of the ecosystem dynamical response to smooth changes in…
With rising global temperatures Earth's tipping elements are becoming increasingly more vulnerable to crossing their critical thresholds. The reaching of such tipping points does not only impact other tipping elements through their…
Technology is increasingly shaping our social structures and is becoming a driving force in altering human biology. Besides, human activities already proved to have a significant impact on the Earth system which in turn generates complex…
The early prediction of tipping points, distinguished by sudden and catastrophic shifts from stable states, poses a challenging task that would enable us to assess the impending threat across natural and engineered systems. This threat…
"Emergence", the phenomenon where a complex system displays properties, behaviours, or dynamics not trivially reducible to its constituent elements, is one of the defining properties of complex systems. Recently, there has been a concerted…
Social ecological systems are often difficult to investigate and manage because of their inherent complexity1. Small variations in external drivers can lead to abrupt changes associated with instabilities and bifurcations in the underlying…
The potential of extreme environmental change driven by a destabilized climate system is an alarming prospect for humanity. But the intricate, subtle ways Earth's climate couples to social and economic systems raise the question of when…
Global change is reshaping ecosystems and societies. Strategic choices that were best yesterday may be sub-optimal tomorrow; and environmental conditions that were once taken for granted may soon cease to exist. In this setting, how people…
Social behaviour models are increasingly integrated into climate change studies, and the significance of climate tipping points for `runaway' climate change is well recognised. However, there has been insufficient focus on tipping points in…