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Workshop Synthesis, Themes, and Closing Thoughts

SYNTHESIS OF WORKSHOP DISCUSSIONS

Kristen St. John, James Madison University, provided a summary of the workshop presentations and discussions. She shared that the research directions on tipping points, cascading impacts, and interacting risks that were presented and discussed aligned with the five aspects of the vision for the Next Generation Earth Systems Science at the National Science Foundation (NASEM, 2022) consensus report:

• Taking integrated approaches for research on tipping points, impacts, and associated risks
• Giving equal importance to natural and social systems/processes
• Exploring essential interconnections and feedbacks
• Working across a wide range of scales
• Valuing diversity, equity, and inclusion in the full research process

St. John stated that the workshop opened with a discussion of the definitions for tipping points. She noted that operational definitions for tipping points span many different scales, from fundamental global physical elements to extremely localized social impacts. She highlighted that considering tipping points as crossing a threshold, followed by abrupt change, was a general theme throughout the workshop discussions. The concept of reinforcing feedback mechanisms was not as common a thread across discussions, St. John added, despite the importance of this concept to both the social and natural science literatures around tipping points. St. John also highlighted that abrupt change means very different things at different temporal scales, creating challenges for thinking about scaling in terms of tipping points, and that some terminology around tipping points (such as “bomb cyclone” and “atmospheric rivers”) have implications for public understanding. She stressed that regionally focused narratives have the potential to add tangible meaning to discussions around cascading impacts and interacting risks and noted that this may be a critical approach for communicating about these issues and facilitating effective decision-making.

St. John then highlighted some “general rules.” First, she pointed out that societal tipping points tend to occur faster than physical tipping points, while ecological tipping points are intermediate in time. Second, she explained that physical and chemical processes

tend to have more linear relationships, but biological physiological rate laws tend to build more complex relationships. St. John added that these more complex, parabolic relationships are useful for understanding the complexities of the system and how they give rise to alternative stable states, bridged by a tipping point.

HIGH-LEVEL WORKSHOP THEMES

St. John framed her following discussion around the high-level themes that emerged from the workshop presentations and discussions. She explained that these themes (described below) are organized around questions derived from the workshop Statement of Task.

Theme 1: Lessons from Historical Analysis

What can be learned from historical analysis of past physical and social tipping points to inform understanding, prediction, and preparation in the future?

St. John highlighted a takeaway theme from workshop discussions that conducting tipping points research at and across different scales is critical, because different scales provide useful lenses for understanding the impacts of people on climate. She shared examples from both ends of the temporal scale spectrum, including using the paleoclimate record to identify the state of the climate prior to human civilization and historical records from ancient to recent history. St. John noted that these lenses provide critical insights for understanding risks to the human system. She highlighted that several participants wondered whether the dynamics of social systems have changed fundamentally in the relatively recent past, creating challenges for learning from recent history.

Theme 2: Outstanding Research Questions

What are the key outstanding research questions on physical and social tipping points, the interacting risks of these tipping points, and their cascading impacts?

St. John emphasized a series of questions and themes related to these points. The first point highlighted the benefits of integrating natural and social process research with the understanding that physical tipping points will likely have a variety of currently unknown social impacts. She stressed the need to better understand, measure, model, and visualize the coupling between nonlinear physical changes and subsequent impacts on humans and society.

She discussed the need to better understand interactions between tipping points and their cascading impacts across scale. She noted the importance of studying the teleconnections of physical changes across spatial and timescales, where tipping points in a particular region or point in time contribute as inputs to tipping points in other regions at other times. She emphasized discussions around the work still needed to learn more about physical tipping points themselves.

On social tipping points, St. John highlighted several areas where current understanding is incomplete, such as how to account for agency, adaptation of social systems, and potential mitigation in social tipping points. She pointed out the large quantity of relevant research across economic and social sciences but noted that the lens of social tipping points was rarely used to frame the results of that research. St. John highlighted a discussion theme around early warning signals for tipping points. She explained that several generic signs across tipping elements act as early warning signals that a tipping point is approaching. However, she also noted open questions about how to apply those warning signals to regional and local scales, where most decisions that govern services to address outcomes (e.g., medical and social services) will be made.

Finally, St. John emphasized discussions on acceptable levels of risk and uncertainty when conducting tipping points research.

Theme 3: Barriers and Opportunities for Progress

What are major barriers and opportunities to accelerate progress to advance these areas of research?

Regarding this theme, St. John listed seven barriers that were highlighted during the workshop:

• Challenges working across scales of time, space, and social organization
• Challenges in forming and organizing transdisciplinary research teams
• Tension between economic goals and those of Earth systems in support of human well-being
• Barriers in implementation of research outcomes, especially where there is a range of ability and/or agency for individuals to address risks and outcomes from climate change
• Lack of standards and baselines for important concepts such as resilience
• Methodological gaps between different disciplines/scales of study
• History of inequity and exclusion of underrepresented groups (e.g., people of color, indigenous communities, low-income communities) from scientific discourse

St. John also highlighted five opportunities for transdisciplinary research discussed during the workshop:

• Quantifying the economic and social costs of extreme weather events can provide a useful mechanism for communicating about the outcomes of climate tipping points.
• Social responses to extreme weather events can serve as useful sources of evidence for the dynamics of social climate tipping points.
• Designing climate adaptation options provides opportunities to make design choices to make progress toward environmental justice goals simultaneously.

• Enthusiasm in the research community (and workshop participants) for transdisciplinary research
• Growing awareness of the benefits and importance of engaging with indigenous stakeholders and knowledge producers at all stages of the research process

Theme 4: Diverse, Equitable, and Inclusive Tipping Points Research

How can tipping point research priorities be identified, studies be conducted, and response strategies be designed in a manner that is inclusive and equitable for a diversity of participants and engaged stakeholders? What additional perspectives and considerations could be incorporated into the understanding of interaction risks?

St. John emphasized several themes centered on inclusion and equity. She highlighted discussion about including from the initial stages those who are most vulnerable to the outcomes and consequences of climate tipping points in the research process. She noted discussions about indigenous perspectives and the science of coordination to apply knowledge gained from research and to support intersectional coalitions. She pointed out the importance of combining funding streams from government research and non-governmental trusts and foundations to diversify the perspectives being addressed in the research space.

Theme 5: Building Integrated and Practical Understanding

How can advances across the natural, social, computational, and engineering sciences be integrated to build practical understanding of tipping points, cascading impacts, and interacting risks?

St. John highlighted discussion around several key points, including providing incentives for transdisciplinary research in circumstances where such research practices would be beneficial. She underscored the importance of engagement with non-academic and non-scientific audiences early in the process, as well as engaging in co-production to build practical understanding around tipping point issues as a mechanism for creating change. She noted that there was a diverse range of perspectives included in the workshop, but that most were from academia, and underscored that broader outreach outside of academic audiences is important for practical understanding. St. John also highlighted the importance of monitoring and assessment mechanisms for research, particularly for small but scalable research projects that could be adapted at broader scales. St. John added how important communications research is to contribute to the practical understanding of critical elements to tipping points research and engaging with stakeholders and decision-makers in the broadest, most effective ways.

Theme 6: New Capabilities for Transformational Advances

What new capabilities—computational, experimental, organizational, etc.—would lead to transformational advances in the understanding and prediction of tipping points, cascading impacts and interacting risks?

St. John listed four areas that emerged from workshop discussions where new capabilities could be helpful for tipping points: organizational, conceptual, computational, and observational.

Under organizational capabilities, St. John highlighted the need for approaches to efficiently connect people who do not typically communicate with one another. She noted that planning grants at multi-institutional levels can help achieve this.

For conceptual capabilities, St. John provided the example of systems visualizations to help conceptually link social and natural processes. She highlighted the example of recent IPCC reports using storylines to communicate about connected processes and suggested that such connections can impact both how research is conducted and how it is communicated.

For computational capabilities, St. John noted the potential of machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques to aid in modeling of tipping points and to support early warning capabilities.

For observational capabilities, St. John noted three key areas—advancing the use of existing remote sensing capabilities, deploying additional remote sensing capabilities where necessary, and developing new observable proxy factors to stand in for other challenging-to-measure properties of tipping systems.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

St. John ended her remarks by highlighting possible framings and opportunities to propel future research. She emphasized the importance of designing strategies that enhance transdisciplinary connections, using social science to help build successful transdisciplinary research teams, and expanding the inclusion of historically marginalized stakeholders and groups. She noted the potential impact of elevating discussions around regionally scaled tipping points, with opportunities that focus on regional boundary conditions and the risks and impacts associated with regional tipping factors. St. John also highlighted earlier discussions on communication on positive tipping points and stressed the potential to manage the risks around negative tipping points in a more positive framing. St. John encouraged exploration of the opportunities or risks presented by triggering positive tipping points. Finally, she highlighted two potential adjustments in participants’ thinking: (1) broadening the vision of society to identify potential change agents within existing systems, including drawing on social science and indigenous knowledge and (2) focusing on the most vulnerable regions, ecosystems, and communities for prioritizing tipping point research while documenting outcomes and inequities in those systems.