Climate change is projected to result in an increase in extreme and compound weather events, which pose a growing threat to human well-being and the achievement of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Further warming is also projected to reduce the efficacy of carbon sinks acting as negative feedbacks on warming and increase the risk of crossing tipping points and triggering cascading changes in the climate and ecosystems. These processes may reduce the Earth system’s resilience, which has the potential to further amplify climate change and extremes and worsen societal impacts.

Maintaining Earth in the Holocene-like conditions that have enabled the development of the world’s societies will require better understanding of feedbacks and tipping dynamics in both the human world and the biophysical Earth. Societies will need to embark on rapid socio-economic and governance transformations in order to both reduce the risk of triggering tipping points and to improve societal resilience to increasingly likely extreme events. Earth resilience brings the complex dynamics and perturbations associated with human activities into Earth system analysis, and increasingly captures socio-economic as well as biophysical dynamics.

In this session we welcome transdisciplinary and cross-scale contributions relating to climate extremes, tipping dynamics, and Earth resilience, covering topics ranging from the cascading impacts of extreme and compound events, key feedbacks and tipping points in both biophysical and human systems, enhancing societal resilience to extreme events, and the potential for rapid social transformations to global sustainability.