Navigating multiscale social tipping dynamics to stabilise Earth’s climate

Mounting evidence that human activities are driving Earth’s climate toward dangerous tipping points has raised the question of whether these may be averted by quickly reaching tipping points in human societies. Prior work on social tipping dynamics has focused mainly on defining its key features, identifying and characterising important social tipping elements, and operationalizing interventions for triggering individual elements. However, the success of climate-stabilizing interventions will depend on their timing and coordination across multiple tipping elements that operate on different characteristic time scales, and these coupled dynamics are currently not understood. In this work we explore the challenges of intervention timing and the potential to coordinate subsystem tipping cascades in a multiscale system to achieve a timely whole-system transition. We develop a stylized model in which the changing climate is coupled to a network of social tipping elements such as public support for climate action, political policymaking, financial investment in energy technologies, and energy infrastructure substitution, each with its characteristic dynamics and time scales. We study how intervention timing interacts with tipping cascades between subsystems and derive principles for navigating the system to the desired state. Additionally, we analyze the effects of `windows of opportunity’ - unpredictable system shocks that are likely to become more frequent as climate change intensifies - on our model transformation pathways, and ascertain how these may be exploited to disrupt system-stabilizing feedbacks and synchronize subsystem changes. Our findings emphasise the importance of a complexity-based understanding of human agency and governance of the world-Earth system.