For the past few years, I along with some lovely folk at the Stockholm Resilience Institute, and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, have organised a session at the annual European Geophysical Union Conference in Vienna. Last time I took the very splendid sleeper train that gets into Vienna main train station. This year the conference will be entirely online. But it will still be an excellent opportunity to meet up and exchange ideas.
This year we are exploring ideas of resilience of the Earth system and potential tipping points that may decrease and increase such resilience. It’s a bit of a smorgasbord of Earth science, dynamical systems, social science and much else. It’s the sort of interdisciplinary mash up that I love. If that sounds of interest, then read on and think about making a contribution.
CL3.1.10, Co-organized by BG1/CR7/NP8
Earth resilience and tipping dynamics in the Anthropocene
In 2015, the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement on climate recognised the deteriorating resilience of the Earth system, with planetary-scale human impacts constituting a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene. Earth system resilience critically depends on the nonlinear interplay of positive and negative feedbacks of biophysical and increasingly also socio-economic processes. These include dynamics in the carbon cycle, large-scale ecosystems, atmosphere, ocean, and cryosphere that can absorb geophysical shocks (e.g. volcanic eruptions), as well as the dynamics and perturbations associated with human activities.
Maintaining Earth in the Holocene-like interglacial state within which the world’s societies evolved over the past ~10,000 years will require industrialised societies to embark on rapid global-scale socio-economic transformations. In addition to incrementally increasing environmental hazards, there is a risk of crossing tipping points in the Earth system triggering partly irreversible and potentially cascading changes.
In this session we invite contributions on all topics relating to Earth resilience, such as assessing the biophysical and social determinants of the Earth’s long-term stability, negative feedback processes, modelling and data analysis and integration of nonlinearity, tipping points and abrupt shifts in the Earth system, and the potential for rapid social transformations to global sustainability.
https://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EGU21/session/40781