Dynamic system strategies for climate social tipping points

Society is currently struggling to manage a complex set of socio-ecological challenges related to climate change. Solutions range from reducing our consumption to novel technology used to decouple the economy from its impacts. Regardless of the
strategy, materialising the green transition into a low carbon society means crossing a social tipping point (STP).
An STP occurs when the collective action of a population reaches leads to wide-ranging systemic change. STPs can be triggered by bottom-up approaches like consumer boycotts, or top-down interventions like policies, tax disincentives, and
trade agreements. The problem is that, so far, STP have only been described qualitatively and the mechanisms beyond their emergence remain poorly understood. The overall project goal is to provide a deeper understanding of which types of change allow society to move towards a more sustainable status, specifically by unveiling the role of social tipping points in reaching sustainability.
The project will use system dynamics (SD) to study social tipping points quantitatively. SD is a modelling approach to simulate feedback loops between variables in a system. SD is a perfect fit to the quantitative study of STPs for two reasons. First, it is a flexible tool to model coupled human and natural systems (CHANS), whereby ecological processes exhibit changes over time under the influence of human drivers. Second, it allows one to determine when changes in elements of the system lead to the crossing of a tipping point and to a different system configuration.

The project is funded by a MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships
(HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships)