BRIEF: Planning for Tipping points

Planning for tipping points and enhancing resilience in production landscapes

June 2017

A social-ecological system, which emerges when people interact with the natural environment, can cross a tipping point to a self-reinforcing degraded state, leading to substantial and immediate losses of ecosystem services.

Tipping points are not rare, isolated phenomena. On the contrary, they are common features of many social-ecological systems. Still, tipping points have proven difficult to predict.

Transitions to degraded states may be irreversible. However, for some systems, appropriate policies can either facilitate a shift to a new, desirable state or prevent change in the first place. Key leverage points exist at which small inputs can break feedback loops that generate transitions to new states or promote feedback loops that create desired transitions.

Adapting resource use to small-scale changes builds resilience against catastrophic tipping points. Adequate scientific monitoring and system-specific expertise are essential for successful adaptive management