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[Music] hello good afternoon everybody I'm going to start even people are still moving around so in the sake of time so welcome
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everybody I on behalf of the rout team I would like to warmly welcome Lisa yakobson program manager of Earth commission and she's based at Future Earth Global Hub in Sweden and the Earth
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commission future Earth is one of the conference co-hosts so I would like to thank future Earth and the Earth commission for putting this semi plenary together and also for contributing to
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build this conference so uh give Round of Applause to our co-hosts here thank you thank you so much Christina and thank you all for coming I'm thrilled to
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see so many here and I'm thrilled to be moderating this session social tipping points and living within just our system boundaries we have a number of very uh
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interesting speakers and discussant to to join us and I I want to say from future Earth and Earth commission we are really thrilled to be be co-hosts of this uh excellent conference especially
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since the theme is interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity which is our very close to our heart and um now I would like to start the slides
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please so future Earth is um a Global Research network with a mission to advance research in support of transformations to Global sustainability and it has a number of
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networks Works similar to uh the Earth system governance covering climate o oans biodiversity Etc human health and governance and I want you all to know that uh the Earth assistant governance
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network is is really a crucial part part of uh future Earth bringing your social science uh perspectives and one of the most uh important initiatives of future Earth in
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the last few years is the earth commission it's an interdisciplinary team of scientists in uh natural and social sciences working together to Define safe and just Earth system
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boundaries um and you will hear more about that in a minute from uh our first Speaker Professor J gapa then we will have uh a deep dive
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into tipping points we will have Tim Lenton from exiter joining us online uh talking about both um social and natural tipping points and uh after that we will
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have manana milate speaking about Tipping Point and governance uh after that we will have three discussions uh two of which are long-standing members of the earth
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system governance Community Chu okar and Diana liverman uh and we also have Jane uh maick here who is the executive director of global common Alliance and
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the Earth commission is part of this Alliance which is a trans disciplinary collaboration with actors from science ngos uh philanthropy business Etc so
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it's really uh a suitable bunch of people we have uh in this session so uh with that I would like to welcome J gapa she's a professor uh of environment and
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development of the global South at University of Amsterdam and she's also the co-chair of the earth Commission so please Jo take the floor slides please you can
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just um good afternoon everybody I'm going to tell you a little bit about the work that we have done so far because our project has reached maturity and basically what we are going to talk
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about are how are we going to try to live within these Earth system boundaries today and the role of tipping points but I will tell you what are these safe and just tipping points that we as scientists have proposed to you
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all for further discussion uh so basically what we did was we selected five domains to study aerosols climate biosphere water cycle and the nutrients
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cycle and in these five domains we first looked at what is safe in terms of at what point does the system begin to tip over so the safe B boundaries are meant
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to maintain resilience of the systems so what we did oh so what we basically did was we Tred to um have this multi-disciplinary
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team work on these different boundaries and since most of you are social scientists I won't bore you with all the details but for Global uh warming the target was 1.5° because beyond that um
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most likely four tipping points would be triggered uh for natural ecosystems I'll give you one example a safe boundary was um for every square kilometer we should
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try to make sure that 20 to 25% of that kilometer is devoted to Nature so similarly we had other boundaries on um groundwater you should
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not take out more water water than the water that is being recharged through the rainfall processes so these were the safe boundaries but the question that came up was are these boundaries also
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just so after a long debate and discussion between the entire group of 60 60 scientists in this process we tried to argue that we need a just uh
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understanding of justice and from that understanding of Justice we have to come up with just boundaries I I will sort of run through this because I presented this in Toronto as well so you many of you may know it basically Earth system
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Justice is based on recognition Justice and epistemic Justice so recognizing the most vulnerable and uh taking the science of the others it has uh three eyes inters species Justice and Earth
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system stability intergenerational Justice and intragenerational Justice and then we have a procedural story about Justice a substantive story story about Justice which focuses on access to
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minimum resources and allocation of the risks responsibilities and resources this is the narrative and this is then applied in terms of ends that is just minimum access and just no significant
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harm boundaries as well as means which is the transformation story which is still under review so let's go back to climate change at one point 5 degrees we
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found that 200 to 500 million people will suffer a lot from sea level rise and already at 1 degree Centigrade tens of millions of people will suffer from
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very high temperatures or what we call wet bulb temperatures and this basically means that if we agree to 1.5 or two we
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implicitly accept that millions of people worldwide will die die because of extreme weather events or um sea level rise or some other aspect of climate change and so therefore we propose that
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one degree is much more safe and just than two and the more stringent of the safe and just Target becomes our Target so this is one example of how we argued what is just climate change in
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terms of boundaries now boundary of course doesn't mean that the weight is achieved is just that's another part of the story so then to move to the next slide we Tred to look at all the proposed safe boundaries now the safe
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boundaries are given in green oh sorry the safe boundaries are given in red the just boundaries are given in blue and the safe and just boundaries are in green and the green area is the safe
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area and in three areas we have revised the proposed safe targets we revised it in relation to aerosols because 7 to9 million people die and mannually from air pollution and we felt that was very
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important to account for and in terms of nitrogen pollution we have tightened the boundary because UT tropication sets in uh later than the pollution in the water
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for drinking water purposes so these three we did but that doesn't mean that the rest is automatically just if you guys give us good reasons we will change it this is the first time we trying to do this so it was quite difficult um and
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then to move forward are we inside these boundaries or are we not as a global community and the yellow balls show you where we are and basically what you can see is we have breached seven out of
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these eight boundaries the only one we have not breached at Global level is aerosols so at the global level the aerosol boundary is not breached but it is breached almost everywhere in the
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world at a local level so if you look at the places the geographical location of where boundaries are also breached and this is part of the Justice narrative we can't just talk about one number we have to look at it in terms of spatial
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resolution then we find that at least two boundaries have been breached for uh more than half of the land surface of the Earth as well as affects more than 86% of the world's
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population so for us from a Justice perspective it's really urgent that we take action but the next question is can we actually live within these boundaries
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now if we are already outside the boundaries then today it is impossible to meet the social goals of the sdgs without crossing the boundary because we're already outside the
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boundary and um what we did was we looked at the social sdgs we picked four social goals uh access to uh water food energy and infrastructure and we're
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really talking talking about really small sums so for energy we're talking about three bulbs and a refrigerator um for um home and infrastructure we're talking about a house the size of a parking lot so
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really tiny spaces for people that's the minimum and then what we did this is the result of a complicated analysis we calculated how much food you need in terms of calories that and what does
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that translate into a sort of a balanced diet what does the balanced diet mean in terms of how much land is needed how much CO2 is emitted how much water is needed Etc and that's what you can do when you have such an incredibly
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interdisciplinary team you can even calculate what the co temperature rise is going to be that part we haven't shown you here because that's in the bit that is not yet passed um peer
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review but what we can show you here is that the current uh pressures are in blue for the different domains if you provide people a dignified Life Beyond
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Survival that's very minimal then you go into the sort of yellowy orange Zone if you provide them a little bit more to escape from poverty then you go into the Pink Zone and you see on climate change
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that for the year 2018 or 19 if you wanted to meet the needs of people given the existing infrastructure you would have massively crossed the global boundaries and this means that if it's
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it's not a simple matter that I'm reach and I just need to give a little bit of money to people so that they can buy some food it's not like that we really have to drastically restructure the way we organize the world if you want to
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meet those basic needs so that's the message from this particular slide and basically what that all adds up to is if we want to live within the safe and just
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boundaries then a lot of justice issues will be will rise and one of the justice issues that I'd like to make more prominent for you is again the groundwater story uh groundwater is the bulk of fresh water for everybody on
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Earth and it is used extensively in agriculture but now if we tell people that they can only use as much groundwater as is being recharged this is going to be very painful for many
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countries in the world so there will be pain today and is that just and our argument was yes it's just because if you allow that houses can slip down so
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you can get land subsidence also tomorrow you may not be able to grow those same plants Le let alone uh few years later and the future generation so we took a lot of aspects into account to
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say this looks to us as a just storyline um but I'm pretty sure that many of you may come back and refine that particular story anyway so we are at that yellow spot outside
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um the red line is your safe boundary the blue line is the just boundary because the just boundary is more stringent in our cases than the safe
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boundary then how do we find a space because all of us are outside the boundary so what we did was a calculation of what would happen if we gave all of us rich and poor only three
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bulbs and a refrigerator a house the size of a parking lot etc etc so everybody in the world and that's your dotted blue line and that is what we have calculated in the paper that is currently under review and then you get
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a space so this is based on the prioritarian approach to justice that first basic rights and then sharing and the next part is how do we actually share the space this is all a theoretic
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exercise there's a long way to go before any of this can become practical but this is the introduction to the story about tipping points thank you so much J for this uh condensed overview of the earth
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commission work uh as you mentioned uh tipping points might be um needed somehow to um to accelerate these
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Transformations that we need uh we will hear now from Professor Tim uh he is chair in climate change and Earth system science at University of
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exitor he is um leading a report on global tipping points both in Social and um Earth Systems uh that will be uh launched at cop quite soon so you're
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working you you're a natural scientist but you're working very much in an interdisciplinary space so we really excited to hear from you a little bit more about social and natural tipping
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points welcome Tim thanks thanks Lisa um shout if you can't hear me but yeah I will pick up where joita left off but focus in perhaps on the climate boundary and on uh let me share my slides on what
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I'm calling uh some positive tipping points uh we might need to find and Trigger to avoid some climate tipping points that are profoundly unjust I'm sure we'll get into an exciting
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discussion later about the uh the how to make all of that happen in a just way so I'll Focus first on the bad tipping points but uh tipping points
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don't carry values in and of themselves I mean they're just a phenomena that can happen in many different complex systems which sometimes exhibit alternative stable States the two valleys here but
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I'm forcing this system that's in the left left hand state the blue ball rolling around towards the Tipping Point which means the balance of feedback in this system is shifting from damping feedbacks that maintain stability
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towards uh reinforcing feedbacks that Propel change and uh just at the Tipping Point there when we went from Blue to Red we had a situation where those amplifying reinforcing so-called positive feedbacks took over the
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Dynamics and propelled well an Abrupt change in this system but also one that's very difficult to Res reverse and quite a lot of the work we've done in uh one working group of
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the earth commission was map was refreshing a map I drawn 15 years ago of the different what I call tipping elements in the climate system updating the list or the map so that now we actually have two maps the first one
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here is of what we call the global core climate tipping elements the things that if we tip them we all know about it because they fundamentally change if you like the kind of operation of the climate system or some Global variables
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like the sea level the pattern of the climate the global temperature I'll come back maybe in a minute to say a bit more about the impacts of one of these the uh collapse of the Atlantic meridional
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overturning circulation but you see already on this map well some major I sheets West Antarctica and Greenland which as we'll see may we find it difficult to rule out that they're already at if not past their tipping
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points together hold enough ice to raise the sea levels of the World by over 10 m but we've also got major bits of the biosphere here like the Amazon rainforest or part of the Boreal permafrost then we have another map
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which we called Regional impact climate tipping elements because it wasn't so clear that if you tip these systems um it would change the whole nature of the global climate but my word uh many people would care about it so in
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the case of tipping um the the DI back of low latitude coral reefs uh as many of you already know at least half a billion people depend on those for their livelihoods and of course tipping a
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shift in the Sahel and the West African Monsoon would be a well would have profound humanitarian implications we also have some other parts of the high latitude biosphere here and the per Frost appears yet again
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because it has different kinds of tipping points anyway we this is from a synthesis of 230 OD papers that have been published in the literature over about 15 years looking in detail at
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these different systems um and I've arrayed all this information here by bold font is things that were on the first map and normal font things that were on the second map but we're arranging the
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systems um roughly in order of which they tip on a y AIS of the global warming from the zero pre-industrial level there here's the present level of warning marked
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um and you see some burning EMAs which are trying to express um the understandable uncertainty about where the Tipping Point is for any given system you know some models or past data suggests it's it's low maybe some other
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models suggest it's higher the burning embers are just trying to capture that uncertainty the dotted line is our best estimate of where the Tipping Point may be for each of these systems with with all due uncertainty if our best
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estimates are right then those four there AC Crossing um most likely to Cross or would be likely to cross a Tipping Point at 1.5° Centigrade of global warming and it was on that basis that we
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say um in our synthesis as the Earth commission that we're definitely leaving safe conditions for the kind of operation of the climate if you like if we if and when unfortunately when
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probably we go above 1.5 degrees Z of global warming still every 0.1 degre Centigrade of additional warming matters if you see how the the colors shift and then how more tipping points become
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plausible possible and then even likely as the temperature goes up and this this darker gray line if you're seeing my laser pointed with the uncertainty range around it is the 2.7 degrees of warming
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we should expect under current legally binding policies at which point if you count it up I think 13 of these systems would be at some level of risk including this big one the Atlantic meridianal
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overturning circulation which probably enters the r risk Zone here at around maybe I don't know 1.5 or 1.7 degrees Centigrade of warming and I'll just say a bit more about that one because it's
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the most studied and it's the one where we've done some work to map out what the impacts would be of um collapsing this major ocean circulation that redistributes heat around the planet if
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we if we imagine that happening on top of the what what unfortunately we should expect under current policies 2 and a half degrees Centigrade of global warming well we get some major temperature changes on the left but what really is going to hurt are the the
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things it will do to the water cycle it shifts the intertropical Convergence Zone which is kind of climate gobbley goop for big band of rainfall around the tropics uh southwards so it's getting a lot wetter in the blue areas here it's
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getting a lot drier in the red areas those red areas include South American monsoon region West African mons Monsoon region and the whole of the sahal Indian Monsoon region plus then major parts of
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the mid latitudes all major crop growing regions so we we've looked at how would that Tipping Point on top of global warming affect the viable area for growing the major staple crops of wheat
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Maze and rice rice is a mixed picture but the picture for wheat and Maze is overwhelmingly bad or purple on my color color scale which are reductions in suitability for growing these major
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stoal crops whereas green is improvements well the the take home message here is that both global warming has a very bad effect that we all probably hopefully already know about um for crop crop potential and productivity
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but so too with the Tipping Point and the effects are ad are more than additive actually so we see a reduction of more than 50% in the viable area for growing the major staple crops of wheat May
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due to that combined global warming and a Tipping Point which in short I would class as a major food security crisis or potential existential
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risk enough said really to emphasize the kind of degree of injustices and and risk we're running um on on the climate Tipping Point front which is why the
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basic message is we should be doing everything in our power to accelerate the decarbonization of the global economy they shutting down a fossil fuel burning and and some major transformations in food diet systems
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land systems and so on at the same time and I'm not alone obviously in saying that we need to think about the solution space in Tipping Point terms um we know
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basically we need to accelerate decarbonization by more than a factor of five now and the only way we're going to achieve that is if we can believe we can find and Trigger some strongly reinforcing feedbacks that self
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accelerate the change if you like so some social tipping interventions may help that and I'll just say a bit about some examples of positive tipping points that have happened at least at National
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scales so far um with all due caveats that electric vehicles are not a perfect solution but they're uh but this is the example of the Tipping Point to battery electric vehicles dominating the market
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in Norway Norway is about eight years if not 10 years ahead of the global average in terms of having this extraordinary Tipping Point in this technology and in a global context this
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is important um about maybe 8% of greenhouse gas emissions are linked to cars um and that fraction is considerably higher in richer countries including Norway there's a whole Brown
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area here of 20 odd years before anything happens but what's really important actually is that this Tipping Point the fact that it's happened in Norway first goes back actually before
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this graph starts to 1989 and actually surprise surprise goes back to social activists these characters here some of whom you may recognize who um set came up with a list of nine key policy
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demands to the Norwegian government that would incentivize a transition to electric vehicles and because this character here and his band are very famous Morton harit and aha they could use the fact that the media was
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following them around everywhere to effectively shed a shine light on their proposal draw get the Norge and Public's attention on the possibility of this technology shift and so on and so forth
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not time to walk you through the whole story but it's not it was led by social activism first policy followed and there and it's now a transition that is spreading globally this is the in the
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stack bar chart this is the the global Fleet of electric vehicles going up an exponential growth curve with a doubling time of about a year and a half at the moment and the reason it's an exponential growth is because we very
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very strong reinforcing feedbacks learning by doing economies of scale we would call them associated with the declining price of batteries which are these various dotted lines and the price on the left axis but batteries came down
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price about a factor of 10 in the last decade they then kind of stored with the war in Ukraine in price here but there's no sense that that's denting the growth of this um this technology and in fact
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the price is by all projections going back down again now for Batteries Now that might seem very technological but this is kind of important um not only for that chunk of
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greenhouse gas emissions but because of how chains can potentially Cascade from one jurisdiction to another but also from one sector to another so what we're kind of seeing already globally is other
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nations are following some of the leads of Norway with Progressive uh policies and thus bringing the Tipping Point to electric vehicles forwards the more that do that the stronger the reinforcing
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feedback gets to work of Bringing Down the price of batteries the more cars you make and this is crucial not just for tipping cars worldwide to a cleaner
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technology but also because then that opens up lots of avenues um cheap batteries enable electrifying good transport uh on the roads which is another 5% or something of greenhouse
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gas emissions uh this is the thing um that's already going to be causing stranding of fossil fuel assets and pushing the most expensive oil extractors if you like out
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of the marketplace um and in the bigger picture cheap battery are an absolutely key enabler of the biggest Tipping Point the one towards renewable energy because the
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biggest problem not the only problem but the biggest challenge to solve in a 100% renewable electricity future is balancing electricity um supply and demand because
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when you want to boil the kettle isn't necessarily when the Sun's shining or the wind is blowing so cheap batteries are understood now to be the key to unlocking um the renewable energy
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Revolution that happily is the other major example of a positive Tipping Point that's underway so this is the so-called cost curve or how the price of solar panels has come down the more
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solar panels on the x-axis uh have been have been made the more the pric has come down on the y-axis both on log scales come down an order of magnitude in price uh in the decade 2008 to
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2018 another great story behind this it all stems back to um people who wanted to create a better technology wanted to change the world for environmental and social reasons but it also comes down
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interestingly to a massive injection of capital into Chinese solar panel manufacturing startups effectively um before the global financial crash they
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float they were offshor as it's called and floated on the US Stock Exchange that injection of capital kicked off The Amazing economies of scale that are seen here in the decline in price of solar
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panels solar panels now being among well cheapest form of power generation in L many parts of the world with wind power also the cheapest in other parts of the world and that's shown on this map from
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a recent study by fiser and my colleagues here who just published a week ago um a model analysis here where there are no further changes in policy this is just what the default model predicts for
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the cheapest form of levelized cost of electricity including battery storage um now if you like in the world and then looking ahead for the rest of this decade so there is very little coal gray
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on the Now map apart from Japan the cheapest source of power in most of the world is either wind and blue or solar in the ready pink already um this is a new for new comparison if you're curious so there's
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another tipping point if you like where you're trying to reach the point where new Renewables plus battery storage is cheaper than an existing Coal Fire pass station that's a little bit further into
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the future but not far only a few years behind this new for new Tipping Point and what you see here is solar is the one that's coming down in price the most and this model predicts already as you see solar dominating it's the cheapest
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form of New Power Generation by the end of the decade and it predicts that even without extra policy solar will be 56% of global power supply by 2050 and all Renewables will be more than 3/4s of
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global power supply in 2050 and all we need to do now is try to make that happen sooner and further and faster with extra policy anyway my time must be running out but let me get towards the
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end by emphasizing that we already see the evidence I tried to spell out that there's in there's positive interactions between sect of the economy here so the cheaper batteries enable the renewable
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energy transition hopefully I explained that one okay but also the renewable energy transition reinforces the transition to electrifying transport because it's giving us the cheapest form
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of electricity we've ever had and it's cheaper than fossil fuel electricity has ever been and that's an extra incentive to Electrify Mobility but then there I won't go through them all but there are
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lots of other persuasive rein forcing feedbacks between other sectors of the economy and therefore um if you're thinking in governance term or you're trying to imagine giving advice to
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policy makers you can identify um policies that would be super effective not just at bringing forward what I'll call a positive Tipping Point in a given sector but can also trigger what I'd
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call cascading positive tipping points across sectors and we identified three of those policy interventions in a report we did earlier this year with systemic um but we already I can give
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you the simple version that we already know that it's no low or no cost policy options like for example mandating that a certain amount of the ammonia in future fertilizers should be green
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ammonia that's produced from um using renewable electricity to split water to get the hydrogen in the ammonia if you mandate that you know x% of and fertilizers should be green ammonia in
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2025 and then that should rise to y% in 2027 and so on and so forth we know that that kind of policy is in our models at least one of usually the the most effective at forcing Innovation and
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change within a sector anyway enough said I think I've tried to give you a bit of the evidence that there are important positive tipping points out there there are more that could be triggered there's ways of thinking in
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system that can help us see what they should be there's a whole lot to discuss about the Justice dimensions of those technology shifts but it's all motivated by wanting
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to reduce the absolutely gross injustices of letting um climate change continue um and yeah we we're producing an update on the global tipping points
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shortly and Manana who's up to speak next is is leading a whole chunk one of the four major chunks of this report on okay how do we govern the Earth system tipping points and Lara Pereira and
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others have also got a chunk in the report about okay what are the governance challenges in the positive Tipping Point narrative because there's plenty there thanks a lot thanks a lot Tim uh the Tipping
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points in the climate system and their potential Cascade aing effects are certainly quite frightening uh the Tipping the Tipping points in Social systems are raising a little bit of Hope
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but uh it's not so straightforward it's also about Norms values behaviors and governance and Manana milate is a postdoctoral fellow at um the department
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of sociology and Human Geography at University of Oslo she has worked on global climate change governance and science policy interface for the last
00:35:32
decade um as well as on social tipping points and governance of the earth system system tipping points uh her recent focus is on
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imaginaries and anticipation of climate Futures which we heard about this morning which is really interesting and she is as Tim said also leading a chapter in This Global tipping points
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report so very welcome Manana please take the [Applause] floor thank you very much uh for the
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invitation to be here I would love to tell you about this chunk of the report that I'm writing but I have been invited to talk about social tipping points so let me do that
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um so my topic is social tipping points as governance so Tim just walked you through a bit of the history uh the background on climate tipping points and we have about 15 years of uh solid solidifying uh
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research on climate tipping points or now Earth system tipping points uh and we have about five years of research on what we call social tipping points to counter those climate tipping points so
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Tim has given you the the logic for those but we have seen uh a ground swell and a growth of social science work in this particular on this particular concept that is still pretty new and as you can see from these headlines that
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I'm putting up here all of this work or most of this work on social tipping points that has uh grown up over the last five years is really tightly uh connected to climate change and framed
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and presented as a potential solution to climate change in particular to the idea that we're going to have nonlinear climate changes in the form of tipping points so the idea here is that if we can have nonlinear changes in the
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climate well hopefully we can have nonlinear rapid changes in Social systems that might counter some of these um effects we will see or more simply accelerate our governance response that
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so far might have been insufficient to climate change so we really see the idea that social tipping points could be a governance tool the language being used is that of identifying activating
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creating or fostering so social tipping so that we can move our current social systems and the way they are configured towards a new configuration on alternative state that might be decarbonized or Greener or more
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sustainable more generally right so that's the idea that we can actually look at Social tipping processes as a tool in our governance toolbox maybe across scales uh but that raises of
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course a whole bunch of questions of very interesting questions and challenges and we're only beginning to scratch the surface on the social science of what we need to ask here but key in this work that thinks about social change processes as potential
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nonlinear tipping processes is that it totally switches the assumptions from the Natural Sciences and climate tipping in at least three fundamental ways so one is we're starting to think about
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many or maybe even all social systems as potential tipping candidates that they can tip so far we haven't thought about our social social systems that way we even think about actually not that many natural systems that way we think that
00:39:00
tipping in natural systems is a rather rare occurrence thankfully it happens under specific circumstances not very often but now we are hoping that social systems uh can be tipped and that's our second one we think social tipping
00:39:14
points can be done deliberately can be intentional actor-driven so not something that happens to us like climate tipping points are kind of a very negative side effect of other things we're doing not intentional we
00:39:26
now we know now that collectively we are contributing to their causes but we don't want to create those social tipping points we want to create those at least that's the Assumption of lots of this work and the third really
00:39:38
important assumption that I have lots of concerns about is the one that we can manage and control social tipping processes we can guide them in a certain direction so that they have positive or desirable outcomes it's often these
00:39:52
headlines I show you talk about positive tipping right in a warming world so these assumptions drive this work and they're flipping the climate Tipping Point narrative right so we're
00:40:03
countering something negative here with something positive here very important the appeal of course is and why there is so much interest in this work by the way I noticed that none of the authors of the papers I've put up
00:40:16
are here I don't know if there's a reason that this is disconnected from our community conversation or maybe some of the authors are more hidden in in other papers and you are here but uh I haven't seen the major authors in this
00:40:28
field at their system governance conference so the appeal of the social Tipping Point concept is first of all speed right so we're really I think ex excited about the idea that we can
00:40:39
create nonlinear rapid social change because we're feeling of course the increased pressure of doing something rapidly we've been so far behind the curve and it's it's a growing discomfort and anxiety that comes with the changes
00:40:52
we are seeing now on top of that we hear the the potential of of soon tipping major climate elements um that we want something to happen rapidly right so here's something that gives us hope we
00:41:04
can do it fast and there's the additional notion that maybe this is easy right the soci The Tipping Point narrative says you need usually a small nudge just a small change that can make
00:41:16
a big difference because it triggers these self-amplifying feedback processes that then take over and rapidly create this change so it's fast and it's easy meaning a lot of bank for your
00:41:28
transformational book right possibly don't take me too literally on this but this is kind of why why lots of people I think are starting to latch on to this idea and and look into it as a possible solution set but there are problems with
00:41:41
this and hopefully in five minutes when I'm done here you'll understand that it might be neither fast nor easy so there are lots of challenges that come with this idea I think the fundamental question is then how can we make this
00:41:53
happen if you assume we can make it happen that it is possible right that social systems tip we can create the agency for it and we can figure this out uh there is still a set of challenges that comes with this and I'm listing a few of them I have no answers or
00:42:07
solutions to any of these we have hardly any research on any of this but this is a big invitation for all of you to start looking with me and this this growing field of Scholars into these questions so a challeng of here is that when we're
00:42:19
doing social tipping we are actively engaging in undoing social stability and that by the way is the same thing we're trying to do for Trans Transformations right we're wanting to undo current systems that are very stable in place
00:42:31
and very resistant to change we want to undo those and create a different kind of social State um when you take the idea of complex social system seriously though these kinds of chain processes
00:42:42
are not necessarily uh knowable and predictable in a certain way complex change processes are to some extent uncertain emergent and have surprises so there's uncertain there is very
00:42:54
certainly going to be um there will be side effects results or end points that we did not predict and did not foresee so how do we deal with the fact that there's maybe a limited dimension of manageability or controllability then
00:43:07
like any social change we have to deal with resistance possible turbulence maybe even violence especially when you push fat uh rapid change rather than you know our current change efforts that we already trying have been trying to
00:43:20
generate they create resistance too in many ways so when you do it faster put more pressure on a system you're likely going to create more of this kind of resistance and that's tied to the idea that any change process will have
00:43:33
winners or losers so no matter how uh we Define positive tipping or desirable tipping this will change these processes change conditions for people and some of these changes will not be positive from
00:43:45
the perspective of some some of the um affected populations so what is positive who defines it uh and who then has the authority or legitimacy to initiate this
00:43:57
kind of process or to drive it if anybody is in the driver's seat for a complex process like this so how do we think about Democratic foundations for social tipping if we think we should be engaging in Social tipping as
00:44:11
governance so we as I said we don't know a whole lot uh about how social tipping works and who can make it happen and how but some of the emerging work uh is addressing key two key questions and I want to briefly touch upon those one is
00:44:24
enabling conditions and the other one is Agent see so enabling conditions speaks a bit to the question of um is it really easy so there's the assumption that you just need a small nudge to push a system
00:44:36
over the edge here this is this kind of common U depiction of tipping processes and this stability landscape where you have two valleys that represent two possible stable States and the system can move from one to the other um and
00:44:49
then the system though has to be pushed up all the way to this hill there to to actually start uh its process of rolling into the other stability domain if you will right and
00:45:03
that work of getting the system up to that point where it is actually ready to tip or in a condition to tip that is hard work right so it's not actually that only this last bit of nuding that
00:45:15
puts it over the edge is relevant for the Tipping process but all this work into it goes into these enabling conditions and Tim earlier mentioned this uh example of the EV in in Norway and he said you know that process
00:45:28
started in the 1980s and it took decades to create the enabling conditions and that's true for probably any social tipping process you might want to create there's a lot of work that goes into making putting the
00:45:41
system into a condition a set of conditions where another little nudge initiates these self-amplifying feedback processes so this is not necessarily easy there's also this way
00:45:53
of looking at it that you cannot just try to to push hard on the system Itself by uh interfering with it or creating disturbances but by starting to um erode the current stability Basin it is in by
00:46:06
changing the structural conditions so that you need less of a nudge to get it over the hill again creating uh enabling conditions is is hard social work and might be very different for the system you're talking about like for example if
00:46:17
you want to CH change meat eating in Texas or if you want to create EVS in London very different things you got to do to create the enabling conditions for tipping process how much time do I have
00:46:30
left two three minutes two three minutes okay good um so then let me talk a bit about this idea of agency if we want to create you know enabling conditions that is of course one domain of of agency but you might already understand that
00:46:42
creating social tipping processes is a very complex process and usually involves multiple actors this is not something one actor or even type of actor can do but often involves actors across different spheres like policy
00:46:56
makers industry and Technology Civil Society so lots of different types of actors who have to do things somehow in sequence without necessarily knowing each other often so we have a big
00:47:08
question of interplay and sequencing of different actors in this in this change um process uh and as I said all kinds of actors could be involved without necessarily being an interaction with
00:47:20
each other and without having a clear idea where the system is at in terms of what is needed how close are we to the Tipping Point this is often completely unknown or hard to read and hard to
00:47:31
gather data about in a social system and then one really important thing that is uh I think to consider is that Agency for social tipping has to consider in what stage of the process uh
00:47:44
the tip or tipping process you find yourself in So currently since we're thinking we have to uh try to trigger tipping points or move systems towards tipping points we're focusing very much of this like how do you create these
00:47:56
enabling conditions what do we do to uh to make uh a system more likely to tip and that might as I said involve very different things depending on what kind of actor you are uh but then there of course other phases of the Tipping
00:48:09
process once you are Beyond The Tipping Point itself and the self-amplifying feedbacks kick in and change accelerates if you will things can become more turbulent change sets in maybe side
00:48:22
effects show up that you didn't expect so how do you manage the turbulence of the change process itself very different skills activities capacities and decision-making approaches will be probably necessary in that phase of the
00:48:35
change process compared to this uphill process let's call it that way and then a third phase is of course once you reach this new stable hopefully state that you are that you're moving your system towards um that might not be the
00:48:48
one you expected but the one you end up in uh there's new work needed to stabilize conditions to create then uh uh the the Norms the the institutions or the stable patterns that you want to be
00:49:00
stuck in for another while and there might be real limits to that in Social complex systems in terms of what is uh what is possible what is predictable what is manageable and at several points I've already mentioned that there are of
00:49:15
course uh significant risks uh ethical Injustice concerns not just in terms of trying to avoid harm but the kinds of harm you might be or risks you're creating with this process of social
00:49:27
tipping itself so it might be a tool that has its own Justice implications that you want to probably think about and here I just mentioned a couple of those so again the direction and outcomes of Rapid change its intended or
00:49:39
unintended consequences might not be predictable from the beginning so you got to think about that uh Who's involved so positive tipping for whom who should be the populations that should have a say in this how do you
00:49:51
organize that um yeah marginal marginalized communities representation and Power in these processes so lots of well-known issues to this community in governance processes across the board and they certainly exist in this domain
00:50:04
as well so we have to think about that I wanted us to maybe then think through uh what this might mean for tipping out of the fossil fuel economy State because that is you know this big paper that
00:50:16
motivated lots of this work tipping towards the decarbonized state of the the world or the economy motivates this but is this even is it reasonable think about the world like this can we really
00:50:27
think about the fossil fuel economy as you know a system that sits in a stability landscape that you could possibly uh push out of this current system in a in a rapid fashion and and here some ideas of which which
00:50:41
activities or things might have eroded the stability Basin for the fossil fuel economy already but there are of course also then activities that might push this system o up or down uh within the
00:50:54
current basin but this analysis is really difficult I'm not even sure it's it's uh useful to do this because it's so metaphorical in some sense but maybe it does help us to Think Through what what needs to be done and what sequence
00:51:07
and and how to do it so I would love to hear your thoughts about this in the Q&A uh but that's all for me thank you thank you so much for these insights Manana and this uh are really complex
00:51:26
issues that need some afterthought and to our help we have three discussions and then we want to open up the discussion with you all but I want to welcome on stage Professor Chu okar from
00:51:40
Alex Federal University in Nigeria uh and also uh Jane maick executive director of Global
00:51:53
Commons Alliance and former director of wetlands International so she has worked a lot with stakeholders on the ground um I
00:52:06
wonder if we can also put up on the screen our online speaker um um discussing Diana liverman uh she is Regions professor at University of
00:52:19
Arizona and also member of the earth commission and she has um um she has led the co-led the Transformations working group of the earth commission together with J gapa I
00:52:32
think actually we should bring up Jita and Manana on the chairs here so we can start the discussion but I wanted to start with you Diana
00:52:46
[Music] um uh yes you have worked a lot uh on just Transformations and also on climate adaptation within the
00:52:57
ipcc uh so I wonder what are your Reflections on what you have just heard what are the pros and cons with the concept of social tipping points and do you see a potential for social tipping
00:53:09
points to accelerate transformations to a safe and just Society Thank you Lisa I wish I was there in person um but uh my carbon
00:53:22
footprint is lower uh it's very early in in the morning so excuse me if there is uh dog barking or coyote howling or other Dawn uh greetings to you um so let
00:53:37
me just make a few Reflections uh that really um could be in response to any one of the talks um
00:53:47
so my biggest concern with the Positive stories about social tipping points is the question of scale um and you know I think perhaps if
00:54:02
Tim had different sorts of axes uh we might see that and um I took a look at the extent to which Renewables
00:54:15
have been adopted around the world as of 2022 and the rate of adoption yes it's impressive but the scale of adoption is still still pretty pathetic um overall
00:54:28
Renewables are only 14% of global energy use and half of that is hydro and if you look at the adoption of solar PV I think the data shows it's about 6% in China uh
00:54:44
8% in the EU it's only 5% of the US so um whilst we can celebrate the uh spread of Renewables how do we actually get it
00:54:57
to scale and uh Tim had a model that uh suggested we could but uh I wasn't convinced that we can uh scale up th
00:55:10
that particular positive Tipping Point fast enough to avoid the Earth system uh tipping points and my second uh comment
00:55:21
would be with regard to Justice um and uh Manana sort of hinted at this in her last slide which is who actually has
00:55:33
access to these um Technologies or other um incentives uh that can be seen part of social tipping points towards sustainability and I think particularly
00:55:48
um in um the us about the ability of the poor and even um sort of uh people with a middle level income to access solar PV
00:56:04
um I have people say oh but you get these great tax breaks well if you're poor you're not paying taxes you don't have The Upfront costs and the ability to promote adoption um of uh Renewables
00:56:19
amongst the poorest populations is extremely challenging the inflation reduction Act tries to help but it really isn't going to reach uh for example many of the
00:56:31
people who are renting so the the question of equity in who uh actually benefits from the social tipping points is um extremely important and of course
00:56:44
it interacts with uh joa and um our analysis of uh what happens if you bring uh 700 million people out of poverty the 10% of the world's population who
00:56:58
doesn't have access to electricity how do we ensure that their they can escape poverty in a way that is low carbon and
00:57:10
what social tipping points really allow that uh to happen it's not going to be electric vehicles it might be uh Renewables a couple of other um points
00:57:23
um for me um transformative social tipping points can't be rely on individual
00:57:34
Behavior or even just on some Technology Innovation it's got to rely on system change and that requires that we address questions of global political economy
00:57:47
which in a way uh mana's last figure showed with the fossil fuels versus sort of uh citizens move movements but uh how do we actually shift Global political economy in a
00:58:01
realistic way for me that's the most important uh social Tipping Point and I also wonder whether we understand the role of electoral politics and elections
00:58:15
in promoting uh tipping points and I think about this when people talk about the successes of the inflation reduction Act under Biden which will apparently result in a
00:58:29
50% cut emissions in the US well that sounds good but it's not enough given the US's hisorical historical responsibility and then the final Point
00:58:41
um which is made in some of the papers that uh Tim and Manana and um people like Laura Perera uh involved in um is about the risks of the Tipping Point
00:58:55
discourse and here I think particularly about a panic about the Earth system tipping points leading to dangerous experiments with
00:59:07
geoengineering and how does sort of governance balance the extreme risks that Tim uh discussed with a rush to geoengineering solutions that may have
00:59:22
severe Justice negative Justice uh consequences so I'll leave it there so that there's time for audience discussion thank you thank you Diana um I want to turn to
00:59:41
to Chucks um you are working in Nigeria with uh many kinds of actors so I wonder what are your perspectives on this do you see any possibilities to
00:59:55
to nudge social tipping in your part of the world thank you very much Lisa um Diana has stolen A lot of my tunder but I I do
01:00:07
not have any um um yeah I I I will um I wouldn't begrudge her uh but I can emphasize a little bit of what she has said uh drawing from my
01:00:21
perspective as he just said working very much on the ground with policy actors and citizens in developing countries and especially Nigeria and so one of the key points I wanted to draw out is that uh
01:00:36
the presentation of the Tipping the social Tipping Point especially as something that is positive I share some dimensions of that but we should also be very aware and conscious that you can socially tip a
01:00:49
system to create another set of really ugly a unjust system and so the presentation for example uh from Mayana about the fossil fuel is where I would
01:01:03
like to start so I have done an analysis now that shows that many states in Nigeria will lose as much as uh 40% of
01:01:14
their revenue loss uh Revenue when or if Nigeria makes a transition out of the dominant source of income which is current fil Fuel and that many of them will not be
01:01:28
able to meet basic Social Services pay salary per pension Etc um and this number goes to a much higher percentages in some Northern
01:01:41
countries sorry notthern parts of Nigeria and so unless we pay uh attention to the issues of Justice we could be tipping one bad system and
01:01:56
creating another set of bad circumstances and that's really why I liked joetta's emphasis on ensuring not just a safe but a just
01:02:08
boundary and I cannot uh overemphasize the need for a Justice dimension in Africa more broadly many of them whom I have tried to persuade to take climate
01:02:20
action are coming back and really pointing their fers as if I have deceived them they say we have drafted robust plan uh we have made uh a lot of
01:02:34
Investments of our own to move out of uh to move towards the low carbon system but we are poorer for attempting so our debt is increasing we cannot borrow money at the S at the scale or rate of
01:02:46
interest like many poor countries uh many rich countries and we are still very uh being pushed and pressured to adopt Net Zero targets so it is distinctively possible to imagine a
01:03:00
Greener Africa that is poor poorer than it is now when all the importation of the EVs and the solar panels that Tim has talked about comes from China or from
01:03:12
Germany sorry uh or Netherlands and um but Africa will have had to have given up their oil uh uh uh to leave their oil on the ground so then they have to find extra
01:03:26
sources of revenue to import all these really green uh sources of energy uh and then they become poorer for it and so we need to really pay attention to the issue of Justice uh yesterday uh Connie
01:03:40
was talking about new regimes unilaterally imposed by the EU on African countries regarding Forest certification which shows that many of those R rules are creating more poverty
01:03:54
especially among small scale holder farmers and I can go on and on about how a range of different uh rules created by the northern institutions in the pursuit
01:04:08
of a Greener future is creating poverty on the ground so we must really emphasize the Justice Dimension but now when I turn to the Justice there are a lot of questions I
01:04:23
have the issue of dignity for example how do you define dignity uh what is minimum for a group of people may not be minimum for another group of people um so defining what is a dignified life I
01:04:37
think is still one area where we could make a lot of uh uh progress and I wanted to also EO the fact that there is a sense in which this a fatalistic uh
01:04:48
approach to uh painting the picture uh can lead to you know uh uh a raise to solar GE engineering which is also a topic that we have just covered or other
01:05:01
ways of trying to address the system that again creates more Injustice but otherwise this are fantastic uh research and uh I really want to salute you and thank you for all the excellent work
01:05:13
that you have [Applause] done thank you Chuck uh I think you you raised many questions that we should discuss together in a little while but I
01:05:29
want to give the word to to Jane matwick you have also been working on the ground with stakeholders more in the Wetland water um area but I know you're also
01:05:41
very um um interested in how can we work with social and ecological challenges in conjunction so do you want to say a bit more about that yeah yeah thanks Lisa um
01:05:55
yeah I'm really a believer that it's possible to bring about transformation that um benefits nature and natural systems alongside social economic
01:06:07
systems and in a socially just way because I've seen it in many Landscapes around the world where a systems approach has been taken where the local communities and Indigenous communities
01:06:20
have been put in the driving seat but they given the advantage of um Cutting Edge science and and sharing that knowledge and enabling change so I've
01:06:31
seen real shifts in resilience over decades however I've also realized that that resilience um what's an oxy to say resilience is fragile but it's
01:06:43
undermined um by external pressures and as as Tim's presentation pointed out everything is connected um so you can't solve everything in a land Cape you know that's why I was very interested to work
01:06:56
for the Global Commons Alliance which is driving forward Collective action uh for a safe and just Planet so this is Citizens um including local and
01:07:08
Indigenous communities but also big business cities countries Etc and it is going to take all um to to move system change that is safe and just and I
01:07:22
suppose one that's going through my head through all the presentations is um the slide of of the safe and just uh boundaries Earth system boundaries now there are many uh lines in there and the
01:07:37
point is we need to act on all of them it's not going to be enough just to tackle climate for many people in the world they think the only environmental problem is the climate but unless we
01:07:48
restore the biosphere sufficiently um you know any effort on reducing parts per million of CO2 is not going to be enough we need the Earth Systems back in
01:07:59
place now equally it's not enough to um improve nature and natural systems um if we do this without addressing the social inequity we will
01:08:14
fail if we try and T tackle climate without nature and without social Equity we will fail again so the really big challenge is to tackle all of these together um and therefore on the social tipping
01:08:27
points um my question would be how does this connect with the ecological tipping points I mean I've seen this stable States uh picture many times before it's also an ecological truth that you shift
01:08:42
uh ecosystems into a stable state which is negative for people and nature but I've also seen it's possible to push it back again um with the right measures so
01:08:55
I think we need to really um think how are we going to connect these ecological and social tipping points um in this in the Science World but far beyond that I
01:09:09
think we have a massive institutional challenge um because the nature people they sit in one camp and they push push a nature positive the climate people they're they're not so fond of
01:09:22
the nature people either and they push for for climate Solutions and then there are many more actually pushing for social justice which is great but unless these work
01:09:34
together in a connected way we are all going to fail so we need Partnerships we need governance systems um and we need the science to develop connected
01:09:46
models uh as well as connected methods connected indicators um that can be used at different scales if we're going to succeed we're far from that um but I do
01:10:00
believe it's possible and just one example um when I worked for Wetlands International actually triggered by some natural disasters um the Red Cross and oxfarm
01:10:12
organizations like this they reached out to my organization and we worked together for 10 years in 10 developing countries to combine knowledge uh and
01:10:24
approaches from local to Global to see if we couldn't by working together bring a better uh outcome in terms of resilience of people to to natural disasters and we really
01:10:37
succeeded um in those 10 countries so and it took a lot of change it took a lot of understanding between the different uh parties we all speak different languages operate at different
01:10:51
scales um have different methods which we fond of so actually bringing these together was not easy it took years but when we did that it really opened the door to radical collaboration and better
01:11:04
outcomes it's just one small example but I do believe that that is the way we need to go um so it it's all about uh connectivity and lastly I'm I'm hanging
01:11:16
on to Tim's words about cascading positive tipping points across sectors I mean this is the ultimate dream um the question is how do we get there um and I
01:11:30
as I say I think it's it's radical collaboration that is needed at the start [Applause]
01:11:43
thanks thank you so much Jane I wonder if we can put up uh both Diana and Tim on on the screen so we can start a disc discussion also with the the audience uh
01:11:56
I thought we can start with uh three questions from the audience and uh please state your name and affiliation and try to keep the question short so we
01:12:07
can U have several uh I think uh you with a red pen was first Philip yeah great hey Philip pck um really great very stimulating
01:12:24
presentations and comments and I'm I'm really happy we have this debate so I have three broad observations or yeah critical Reflections and the first is I think um it was mentioned that no one or few maybe of the authors of this sort of
01:12:37
tipping debate are here and I was wondering maybe there are more natural scientists but my point is that we in the social sciences have a very rich body of theory about change and it seems
01:12:48
to me that we don't leverage that enough we always look at oh tipping points that's a cool idea but we have have a lot of scholarship that talks about how we actually change and why it's difficult and I think we should really look a bit into our own U scholarship
01:13:02
and learn from that that's my first comment the second is I think we have a interesting debate because apparently we talk about very different systems so the system of prices of batteries is a different system than actually the
01:13:13
political system that to a large degree determines the price of batteries through decisions right and um sectoral systems are different again from political systems and so I think we need to clarify that and maybe just to give
01:13:25
you an example um very quickly Norway EV financed by their fossil fuel Revenue right um yeah is a really interesting question what is the system that you but I don't see any tipping there I just see
01:13:39
you know pushing smoking has decreased in the west and in the North High income countries it has increased in low and middle income countri so what is the system and my third Point how do you
01:13:51
actually govern emerging properties because these are all sort of really complex social systems coupled systems and we talk about them as if you can manufacture the French Revolution and you really can I think and so I would be
01:14:05
interested to to hear your thoughts thanks a lot that was actually three questions in one so maybe we we can uh have a little bit of responses um
01:14:24
canoose okay so I'm sorry I didn't see who was next can you raise your hands again we have a question from the back and then a question here in the
01:14:50
middle yeah thanks Noella anango Vantin from vagan University and my question is to you actually Tim and it's just a simple question I'm sure you have a great answer to this it's a question that I'm asking you it's a question I
01:15:04
was asked by many people I'm looking at energy transition in South Africa and they say okay so good about talking about electrical vehicles or about solar panels and so on and so forth but where
01:15:16
do they come from what are the critical minerals if we close the coal plants what are we opening what kind of minds are we opening so it's just replacing one problem for another problem so is
01:15:28
this really transformation if you look at the Life Plan of the product for example at the end of the life of a solar panel where does it go where does it end up when you have new technologies
01:15:41
that are coming up what happens to the technologies that have passed are they being dumped into Africa so that the West can move on to use the newer Technologies in the advancement so I I think uh these a question questions that
01:15:54
I'm raising to you was asked by many people and I hope you give me a good answer that I can send [Applause] back thank you now to the gentleman in the
01:16:13
middle okay I am Eduardo Viola from the University of s PA brail and I I I would like to say that I agree fully agree with uh the comment of Diana in which we
01:16:25
need to consider much more deep struct structural International political economy uh Dimensions but I would like to add another dimension that is very I
01:16:37
think very very important is that the what about the increased geopolitical confr confrontation that we are leaving and is H certainly we have a a a some
01:16:53
kind of impact probably undermining the so the potential of social tipping points thank you these are really tough questions so I wonder if um if Tim would
01:17:08
like to start yeah I can tackle noella's question because it's an important really vital one and it also touches on some things Chuck said as well I think
01:17:20
because like no other and Chuck I think there's an actually I think there's there's an enormous opportunity space for the renewable um energy revolution in subsaharan Africa especially for that
01:17:34
chunk of the population without access to electricity but like all um social technological ecological Transformations there's going to be some other um governance issues that come up that have
01:17:47
to be managed and no you're right we see some of that right now because you have a the well publicized case of U Cobalt mining in Democratic Republic of Congo by itinerant miners in poor conditions
01:18:00
for batteries for electric vehicles so I'm completely with the fact that we've got to think carefully about the governance challenges that get generated by a big energy transition proposition
01:18:15
but I would urge um kind of uh balance Justice thinking about the whole situation because if we think about okay taking Chuck's point there are some African countries that are net fossil
01:18:29
fuel exporters not just Nigeria Algeria Libya Angola but the great majority of South subsaharan and Africa or Africa as well as the 80% of the world's population in total are living in
01:18:43
countries that are net fossil fuel importers and that is costing that 80% of the world's population and it's it's bad for their balance of trade if you want to think of it like that so I think there's an enor and I don't hope I'm not
01:18:56
alone in thinking there's an enormous opportunity space for most of Africa and most of the most of the global South in shifting to Renewables because at least you won't be paying um the considerable
01:19:10
amount you're currently paying to import fossil fuels now then it comes to okay where is the technology being made and is it still being imported well on that
01:19:22
note I would urge people to look at companies like zembo or four others I could list that are within Africa countryes companies sorry startups that are making for example um swappable
01:19:36
battery electric motorbikes uh for motos for for motorbike taxis uh the more we see of from within Africa green Innovation like that the better because of course that
01:19:48
will further improve balance of trade and overall uh should we call it simple economic situation if if not only are you not importing fossil fuels you're not importing the things to run either
01:20:02
fossil fuels on or power with electricity as for the end of life question I'm better um I know more about the situation with batteries which I think is the bigger the big big concern
01:20:15
there recording stop um but the good news with end of life of a battery and say an electric motorbike in wherever you want to think of it Kenya or wherever is once it's not so useful for
01:20:29
transport um those batteries are still very useful for uh either on or off grid energy storage they're useful until they get down to about 30% of their original capacity whereas for for most um
01:20:43
transport uses you'd probably you know stop after 70 or 80% capacity so a bunch of stuff there which I hope helps slightly and I'd also urge those that
01:20:55
don't know about it to look at startups like bbox doubleb X which is all about bringing off-grid um solar and battery storage to those who don't have access to electricity particularly in sub
01:21:08
Sahara and Africa and doing so with a kind of pay as you go model that makes it affordable and accessible um so yeah hope that helps thanks I wonder if anyone of the
01:21:23
panelists want to yeah Manana sure why don't want take a couple of those so let me start with U Philip's questions uh as a combined package just as a reminder it was about uh leveraging the existing social science of change uh clearly
01:21:37
defining what system you're talking about because they are so different and how to govern emerging properties um so these are all connected and speak very much to concerns I have and i' I've try to um make some of these arguments in a
01:21:49
in a paper I published recently so I can point you to that um but in essence you're right I think we are we're missing out or we're not leveraging actually lot of lots of the theories that we have instead we have a bit of a
01:22:00
jump towards this new idea of the social Tipping Point but uh existing theories might actually explain a lot of the phenomena we're interested in so we can use those uh and we need to be very careful in in determining and defining
01:22:13
and bounding the system we're interested in and that is actually a really tough challenge because complex systems are very hard to understand to kind determine from a researchers perspective what should be in and out how do I draw
01:22:26
these boundaries and how do I get data about this specific system to really show what is happening in it at what speed how to track change that that is tough I don't have a good response to how to govern emerging properties but I
01:22:38
guess uh diversity in governance would be a good start one other thing I wanted to pick up on is the is the idea of the structural uh political economy changes
01:22:49
that uh were discussed or asked about and couple of the the points made earlier um and I want to link that to the way we're discussing uh social tipping points so far which is very much
01:23:01
in terms of Technologies technological replacement and technological adoption curves that is I I think a too narrow conception of what social tipping could be uh also if we broaden the idea of
01:23:16
what it could mean to tip a social system we might want to think more about the more found pieces in our social systems that our belief and value systems they're much harder to grasp
01:23:28
maybe harder to study and also maybe harder to change but if we can really figure out how to reconfigure the fundamental values that are actually structuring our political and Economic Institutions including how we think
01:23:41
about GDP and the pursuit of growth as a fundamental um objective of governments and a measure of success right this is rooted in understandings of how the world ought to be so our
01:23:55
ideologies our Our World Views if we can figure out how to tip those and get rapid adoption of different kinds of value and belief systems that might lead to the kind of or might help with a
01:24:08
process of restructuring institutions um maybe not as fast as we want them to be but I think thinking about social tipping and those that say softer social dimensions and again social systems we would have to think
01:24:22
hard about what's the system we're thinking about than belief systems in what country or in what community or even globally uh but but I think that is a powerful domain of potential change that we need to understand much
01:24:35
better thank you for that uh Manana I wonder if Jo want to come in with some comments about the geopolitical the the question about geopolitical uh conflict
01:24:48
I could come on that I wanted to begin with the social uh one example I think of a social Tipping Point in uh sanitation is human right to water and sanitation and that began I think early
01:25:01
discussions began in the middle of the 19th uh 20th century and it slowly developed and developed and developed and I think now most countries in the world are trying to get together some kind of Sanitation system it took a bit of a time but you're seeing a tippling
01:25:14
point because sanitation was such a huge problem for 2 billion people worldwide so that was the first point I wanted to make I wanted to make another point I don't know whe it answers your question question but it sort of tries to address the question of north south issues in
01:25:26
relation to climate change and uh 32 years ago when I began the research uh the rich countries were telling me the same question same thing that you are telling me now CH uh they were saying we're too uh Pro the problem is that if
01:25:39
we stop using fossil fuels now we're going to use lose massive uh income and then how will we Finance your University how will we Finance Medical Care and so on and so forth and that has been the argument that many rich countries have
01:25:50
used to postpone own decision making on uh reducing their own fossil fuels um developing countries have also used the same arguments all through the years and so I've I've lost sympathy with both rich countries and poor countries
01:26:04
because I think both countries should have had a plan B in their drawer and I've heard that the Netherlands has no plan B uh so we were not ready to deal with the um the Ukraine war and have a
01:26:17
we didn't have any ideas how to get off fossil fuels fast and the problem I see in many develop countries is they haven't moved forward with that thinking process and so I have a feeling that what is more important getting uh higher
01:26:30
GDP in Nigeria and in some of the other developing countries I'm not going to name or being able to cope with the impacts of climate change right now um
01:26:43
and my gut feeling says and that comes back to your question GDP GDP is the problem for rich countries is a problem for poor countries and it's very difficult but we do need to First address Global debt and I don't know
01:26:55
whether that to some extent addresses your issue of about geopolitics I've seen Global debt being uh canceled year over year after year after year and it wasn't really canceled it was recreated renamed
01:27:08
reorganized so I think we have to get rid of global debt as a part of the story reduce interest rates it's really a big problem that we have to deal with but somehow we have to find a way out of
01:27:20
this crisis together thanks we one way out of the yes of course but then we need to stop because we're on time like you have I can said that I've also lost
01:27:33
patience how about a way out being to let developing countries do what they want that's fine that would suit the Hindu mind very well because we'll come back well that's not consistent with all
01:27:47
the targets that have come from the rich countries and been imposed on developing countries so I would put it differently I think um it may be look seen as imposition but I
01:27:58
think if I mean let's talk about Indian Scholars who are engaged in ipcc most intellectuals in India know how serious the problem is so do we wait for a north south debate to get resolved
01:28:12
or we try to get to zero as quickly as possible so that our kids don't have a problem in the meanwhile it will require a sacrifice from both North and South this does not mean that you have to give up on your Justice ideas in relation to
01:28:23
loss and compensation debt cancellation and other types of finances from north to south that's the I mean I can't see any other solution otherwise everybody will just give up that's my fear unfortunately it's my task to say
01:28:38
that time is up and uh but I hope you can continue in the in the corridors I I wanted to thank the speakers uh online and
01:28:51
here I also wanted to thank all the participants and also our funders um so thank you so much for for
01:29:08
[Applause] [Music] coming
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