Addressing tipping points for a precarious future

O'Riordan, Timothy

Lenton, Timothy

2013

Oxford University Press

This book places tipping points in their scientific, economic, governmental, creative, and spiritual contexts. It seeks to offer a comprehensive set of interpretations on the meaning and application of tipping points. Its contribution focuses on the various characterisations and metaphors of tipping points, on the scope for anticipating their onset, the capacity for societal resilience in the face of their impending arrival, and for better ways of communicating and preparing societies, economies, and governments for accommodating them, and hence to turn them into responses which buffer and better human well-being. Above all, the possibility of preparing society for creative and benign ‘tips’ is a unifying theme. The conclusion is sombre but not without hope. Thresholds of profound change can combine earth system-based relatively abrupt shifts with human-caused alterations of these disturbed patterns which, coupled together, produce more rapid onsets and greater tensions and stresses for governments and economies, as well as socially unequal societies. There is still time to predict and address these thresholds but too much delay will make the task of accommodation very difficult to achieve with relevant-scale community support. There are many examples of adaptive resilience throughout the world. These should be identified, supported, and emulated according to cultural acceptance and emerging economic realities. But there is no guarantee that the necessary adjustments can be made in time, as emerging patterns of outlook and governance do not appear to be conducive to manage the very awkward transitions of appropriate response.

Environmental Sciences

Economics

Sociology

Social Sciences

English

9780197265536 (print)

Addressing Tipping Points for a Precarious Future

Addressing Tipping
Points for a
Precarious Future
Edited by

Tim O’Riordan and Tim Lenton

Published for THE BRITISH ACADEMY
by OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP
© The British Academy 2013
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First edition published in 2013
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For our next generation
who will live through what we create for them
James, Zoë, Joseph, Esther, Edward and Sammy

Contents
List of figures and tables

xi

Foreword by Sir Crispin Tickell

xiii

Acknowledgements

xix

Preface

Notes on contributors
PART 1

Tipping points and critical thresholds

1.1 Metaphors and systemic change

TIM O’RIORDAN, TIM LENTON, AND IAN CHRISTIE

PART 2

xv

xxi
1
3

Earth system tipping points

21

2.1 Tipping elements from a global perspective

23

PART 3

47

TIM LENTON

The culture dimensions

3.1 Skittles
The story of the tipping point metaphor and its relation to
new realities

49

GILES FODEN

Commentary
3.2 Aligning contrasting perspectives of tipping points
MATTHEW TAYLOR

73

vii

Contents
PART 4

Food security, biodiversity, and ecosystems
degradation

4.1 Food security twists and turns
Why food systems need complex governance

77
81

TIM LANG AND JOHN INGRAM

4.2 Human resilience in the face of biodiversity tipping points
at local and regional scales
PATRICIA HOWARD

104

4.3 The Amazon in transition
The challenge of transforming the world’s largest tropical forest
biome into a sustainable social-ecological system

127

PART 5

149

TOBY GARDNER

The spiritual dimension

5.1 Contemplative consciousness
LAURENCE FREEMAN

Commentary
5.2 Faith and tipping points
DAVID ATKINSON

PART 6

Politics, the markets, and business

151

165
169

6.1 Sustaining markets, establishing well-being, and
promoting social virtue for transformational tipping points

173

6.2 Some socio-economic thoughts

188

6.3 Leadership for sustainability
The search for tipping points

194

TIM O’RIORDAN

PAUL EKINS

SARA PARKIN

viii

Contents
Commentaries
6.4 Leadership by business for coping with transformational
tipping thresholds

213

6.5 Private sector failure and risk management for tipping
points

220

6.6 Creating a roadmap for sustainable, transformational
change

223

6.7 Tipping points and ‘Too Difficult Boxes’

229

6.8 It tips both ways

233

6.9 Perspective of a global retailer

237

AMANDA LONG

KEITH CLARKE

JOHN ELKINGTON

CHARLES CLARKE

THOMAS LINGARD

MIKE BARRY

PART 7

Communicating tipping points and resilience

241

7.1 Media coverage of tipping points
Searching for a balanced story

243

7.2 Exploring adaptive governance for managing tipping points

258

JOE SMITH

EMILY BOYD

Commentaries
7.3 Reflections of a journalist

277

7.4 Making sense of the world

280

PAUL BROWN

CAMILLA TOULMIN

ix

Contents
7.5 Endgame

285

7.6 Beyond the linear
The role of visual thinking and visualization

289

JONATHAN SINCLAIR-WILSON

JOE RAVETZ

PART 8

A precarious future

299

8.1 Into a precarious future

301

8.2 Improving our chances of transition to sustainability
The role of values and the ethics of solidarity and sympathy

320

TIM O’RIORDAN AND TIM LENTON

ANDREW DOBSON

Commentary
8.3 Turning the tides?
Parallel infrastructures and the revolt of the corporate elites

327

Index

333

IAN CHRISTIE

x

Figures and tables
Figures
2.1
2.2
2.3
2.4
3.1
3.2
4.1
6.1
6.2
6.3
6.4
6.5
6.6
6.7
7.1
7.2
7.3
7.4

Map of potential policy-relevant tipping elements
The likelihood of tipping elements occurring
A ‘straw-man’ risk matrix for climate tipping points
A schematic representation of a system being forced past a
bifurcation point
Metaphoric and metonymic axes
The relationship between metaphor and metonymy
The food system, its external influences, and outcomes:
a flowchart
The approach to well-being in the context of evolving
natural and social capital
Conventional capitalism
Sustainable capitalism
Capital stocks and benefit flows
The infrastructure of responsibility: how individuals relate,
one to another, to create a strong society
A new model for collaborative engagement
A sample of the Knowledge Wall at the Breakthrough
Capitalism Forum
Visual thinking to understand multiple cause–effects
Visual thinking to understand multi-scale complexity
Visualization in communicating tipping point situations
Visualization for synergistic tipping point responses

26
32
33
37
58
60
98
181
198
200
203
208
215
224
292
293
294
296

xi

Figures and tables

Tables

4.1 Strands in the food security discourse
4.2 Examples of how food-chain activities affect key
environmental variables
4.3 Examples of ‘biodiversity’ tipping points in terrestrial
ecosystems

xii

84
97
110

Foreword

SIR CRISPIN TICKELL

‘Tipping points’ mean different things to different people. Most of them
with their implications are well explored in this book. For me a tipping
point is when an accumulation of small or even big changes suddenly
causes a critical change. Usually we cannot identify a tipping point until
we have passed it.
One of the best demonstrations of tipping points is in the behaviour of
ecosystems. Within the infinite complexity of living systems in which
different organisms depend on each other, one break in the chain or tipping
point can bring rapid change to the others linked within it. For some this
means disaster; for others it means rapid, perhaps favourable, change
within a new chain. This is part of the phenomenon of life.
We can see this in the history of the human animal. Tribes, cities, and
societies can rapidly crash or flourish. As ever, the tipping point could not
have been foreseen. Usually it was a combination of unusual circumstances.
Changes in patterns of rainfall came together with social and economic
difficulties to bring about the collapse of classic Maya society. The Black
Death coincided with the beginnings of the Little Ice Age to transform
mediaeval society. A new merchant elite was able to tip over the monarchies of King Charles I and later King James II, and thereby create the
circumstances of the industrial revolution in the following century.
We are certainly in turbulent times today. Our current epoch has been
labelled ‘the Anthropocene’ by many geologists: it marks the period since
the industrial revolution in which the human species has vastly increased
its numbers; exploited the natural, often irreplaceable resources of the
Earth; upset longstanding ecosystems, thereby destroying countless other
species; and changed the chemistry of the land, sea, and air of the Earth in
ways we have yet to understand. For example, we can observe the current
xiii

Foreword
destabilization of climate with prospects for global warming, but can only
guess at the consequences for future distribution of water and new means
for producing the energy which drives our society. Whereas in the past the
rise and fall of civilizations was something regional and distinct, we are
now more interconnected than ever before, and as the present economic
crisis demonstrates, what happens in one place immediately affects what
happens in others.
So what, if anything, can we do about all this? Can we discern future
tipping points? Which ways could they tip us? It is fair to say that the
conventional wisdom, which has led us to where we are, is under
increasing challenge. Some politicians may still call for more respect for
market forces, and argue about the effects of inflation or deflation, the
supply of money, and the need for growth, however defined. But others
are painfully aware of the wider issues: concern for the environment in all
its aspects, our unhealthy dependence on certain technologies, including
being locked into old ones, and human prospects in general. Are we
measuring the right things in the right way, in particular our wealth, health,
and happiness? Are our brains changing so that we see things in pictures
rather than think in words? Can we still see the wood for the trees? Does
globalization of society imply loss of local identity, or – worse – a return to
nationalisms and local rivalries, with lethal struggles over resources?
No one knows the answers. But it is clearer than ever that we need to
work globally, and above all identify the common interest in tackling the
problems of the Anthropocene. This may require an assembly of regional
interests, so-called ‘pluralities’, within a global framework, which reflect
the current changes in the balance of power. Change usually comes about
for three main reasons: leadership from those who effectively run our
society; pressure from ordinary people through the means at their disposal;
and occasionally from what I call ‘benign catastrophes’, when something
goes visibly and attributably wrong and thereby illustrates the need for
action. These will be the vital tipping points.
Above all we need to think differently. Only then will we be able to act
differently.

xiv

Preface
This book originates from a 2011 conference generously funded by the
British Academy and the Global Environmental Change Committee of the
Royal Society.
The aims of the conference were to address and answer three questions:
1.
2.
3.

Are we designing our governing institutions for sufficiently flexible,
yet equitable, adaptation and resilience in the face of possibly unknowable, but potentially catastrophic, events or combinations of events in
both Earth systems and social systems?
Are we creating, year by year, a set of governing arrangements that are
brittle, fragmented, and increasingly vulnerable, in the face of potentially convulsive change?
Is it possible, creatively and purposefully, to shape our governing
ways, our cultural mores, our economic approaches, and our commitments to long-term social justice, to prepare society for transformational tipping points in a benign and caring manner in sufficient time?

The conference was preceded by a scene-setting workshop held in the
British Academy in January 2011. This greatly clarified the issues, and
enabled the participants to feel a common purpose. It encouraged authors
to draft their initial contributions, and to sense the connections between
their arguments. It set the scene for the complete agenda for the subsequent
April conference held in the Kavli Centre and managed by the Royal
Society.
The great value of the Kavli conference was to bring together a wide
range of scientists, social scientists, and humanities specialists to combine
their experiences and expertise for understanding the many interpretations
of tipping points. These facets included:
•
•
•

the physical and dynamical properties of Earth system processes;
the scientific understanding of the early warnings of reduced resilience;
the social sciences of economics and governing which suggest how the
messy management of human affairs may reach brittle stress points;
xv

Preface
•
•

the liberating interaction of the two sets of stress-related physical and
social processes through the media of the arts and narrative;
the moral, spiritual and cultural dimensions of the scope for coping
with abrupt change.

One of the very rich aspects of the conference was the ways in which the
creative minds of the historian, theologian, and novelist can deal with
uncertain but possibly sudden shifts in these systems – the generation of
convulsive combinations of developments. This is the skill of those who
can craft deep metaphors and the ‘storyline’ – lessons from what has
happened before, and about the strength of moral positioning over how to
adapt fairly and securely.
The conference also received ideas and commentary from the worlds of
business, of media and communication, of diplomacy, and of governing in
the broadest sense. These perspectives added greatly to the richness of the
discussions and of the nuances of analysing both the contours of tipping
points and the answers to the questions of whether we are creating
inappropriate governance arrangements. Indeed, it is very likely we are
not prepared culturally or politically for adaptation to combinations of
tipping points, which could indeed be generated within a few decades. We
seem to be creating conditions of maladaptation and dangerous ‘lock-in’.
One outcome is that, unless the most successful experiences of adaptive
learning spontaneously and imaginatively arising from many parts of the
planet are fully reported and understood, humanity may not be able to
adapt with sufficient social justice to enable future societies to cope fairly
and tolerably with disruptive change.
This book is primarily designed to place tipping points in their scientific,
economic, governmental, creative, and spiritual contexts. Its contributions
cover the various interpretations and metaphors of tipping points, the
scope for anticipating their onset, and the capacity both for resilience in the
face of their impending arrival and for better ways of communicating and
preparing societies, economies, and governments for accommodating to
them and hence to turn them into responses which buffer and better human
well-being. Above all, the possibility of preparing society and its governing
institutions for creative and benign ‘tips’ provides a unifying theme for the
book.
The big lessons from the conference are these: that we can assess tipping
points and critical thresholds on many dimensions; that we can begin to
see the early warnings of their appearance; and that we do have time still
to attend to the conditions which answer Question 3. But at best, we only
xvi

Preface
have this decade to begin in earnest this comprehensive adjustment. This
volume is therefore very timely. The widespread dismay over the prevarication and seeming inability of world heads of state (many of whom did
not even attend) to address the plight of all peoples on this disrupted planet
at the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (‘Rio+20’, held in
Rio de Janeiro in June 2012) is leading many to the dangerous conclusion
that political leadership is unavailable. The ‘wicked problems’ of climate
disruption and unsustainable use of ecosystems simply defeat conventional
politics, whether of the democratic or autocratic worlds, dependent as both
are on evidently unsustainable patterns of growth and exploitation of
resources. Despite some recognition for a transition to a so-called ‘green’
economy, though not a sustainable one, there is every sign that the very
characteristics of markets, politics, and inequalities which have led to the
current global recession and social malaise are being blindly pursued,
apparently because there is neither vision nor the willingness to change
course. At an Oxford University conference in July 2012 on resource
security and sustainability, David Miliband MP, a former Secretary of State
for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in the UK, argued that we
must hold fast to faith in democracy as the best available political model
for achieving the transition to sustainability. But he was also driven to
admit that among the policymaking elites of the West there was still far too
little will-power, passion, or conviction behind sustainable development.
Too many politicians, he concluded, in their hearts and heads do not yet
accept the diagnosis of unsustainability and the approach of tipping points,
still less wish to act on it.
The book is divided into eight Parts, which consist of ‘chapters’ and
‘commentaries’, numbered sequentially. The fourteen main chapters were
all presented at one or other of the conference sessions, where they were
discussed in detail. The other contributions are designed as short commentaries. For the most part these were commissioned from people who
were not at the conference sessions. The text is edited to create cohesion
between the contributions so that the various nuances of science, social
science, and humanity perspectives are enabled to merge. The intended
readership is informed policymakers, policy analysts, researchers, and
those in the general public who seek to understand what possible future
outcomes they and their offspring may face before this current century
passes its halfway stage. The text is also shaped to offer a combination of
distress at what may happen if the warnings are not heeded, and hope that
there is time to change course, admittedly in an increasingly difficult
xvii

Preface
manner if conscious delay is continued, and that the ultimate prize is worth
sacrificing and fighting for. Humanity has triumphed over adversity,
though not always have earlier civilizations succeeded. What is special now
is that the whole of humanity faces the same awkward dilemmas, not just
the overambitious few. Having edited this book we are not confident that
there is a happy outcome, as the disruptive journey has not yet been
sufficiently altered to offer confidence that real learning is taking place.
Readers are encouraged to make up their own minds when reading the
pages that follow.
Tim O’Riordan and Tim Lenton
September 2012

xviii

Acknowledgements
We are especially grateful to the British Academy and to the Royal Society
Global Environmental Change Committee for having the faith in the whole
enterprise. We have been supported throughout by Fellows of both learned
Academies as well as by their very competent administrators.
About the cover art: still image from “Critical Transitions”
by Tone Bjordam
Norwegian artist Tone Kristin Bjordam works with video, animation films,
photography, painting, drawing and installation. Bjordam has for many
years been working on projects visualizing the movement and progression
of liquid color in fluids and unfolding organic forms in motion. She stages
controlled, yet playful experiments and creates imaginary landscapes.
The art video “Critical Transitions” was made in 2012, inspired by
discussions with scientist Marten Scheffer who studies the nature of change
in complex systems.
Climate, forests, coral reefs, financial markets and even our minds
occasionally reach a tipping point where they go through a radical
transformation. Foreseeing such critical transitions or even noticing that
they are unfolding is challenging as they are embedded in the omnipresent
permanent flow of change.
Dazzled by myriads of such minimal motions, how can we see that
they sometimes erupt into transforming change? Emerged in chaotic and
turbulent transformation how can we see where we are going? Science
seeks universal early warning signals for critical transitions, but often we
may only realize the world is not the same anymore in the hindsight.
For more information about this project: www.tonebjordam.com

xix

Contributors
Tim O’Riordan is Emeritus Professor of Environmental Sciences at the
University of East Anglia, Norwich. He is a Deputy Lieutenant of the
County of Norfolk, a Fellow of the British Academy, and received an OBE
in 2010. Email: t.oriordan@uea.ac.uk
Tim Lenton is Professor of Climate Change and Earth System Science at
the University of Exeter. He holds a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit
Award and is a Fellow of the Geological Society, the Linnean Society, and
the Society of Biology. Email: t.m.lenton@exeter.ac.uk

Sir Crispin Tickell GCMG KCVO, a former British Permanent
Representative to the United Nations, is a member of the Advisory Council
of the Martin School at Oxford University. He is the author of many papers
and books on environmental and international issues. Email: ct@crispin
tickell.net
David Atkinson retired as Bishop of Thetford in 2009. After doctoral work
in organic chemistry, he was ordained in the Church of England, then a
Fellow of Corpus Christi College Oxford, Canon of Southwark Cathedral,
and Archdeacon of Lewisham. He serves on the Board of Operation Noah.
Email: davidatkinson43@virginmedia.com

Mike Barry is Head of Sustainable Business at Marks and Spencer, helping
drive forward their sustainability plan, Plan A. He believes that business
is reaching a tipping point, where ‘less bad’ is no longer good enough. The
real, practical challenges of responding to resource competition, extreme
weather, new social expectations, greater transparency and new economic
models based around the sharing/circular economy mean that business
has to strike out and build a new, better approach, one that delivers social,
environmental and economic benefit in equal measure.
Emily Boyd is Reader in Geography, University of Reading.

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Contributors
Paul Brown is co-editor of the Climate News Network, an internet service
providing daily news of the science and politics of climate change for
journalists. He is a former environment correspondent of the Guardian and
Fellow of Wolfson College Cambridge. Email: paulbrown5@mac.com

Ian Christie is a Fellow of the Centre for Environmental Strategy,
University of Surrey, Guildford. He has worked for many years on
sustainable development and environmental issues in central and local
government, business consultancy, and think tanks in the UK.
Charles Clarke is a former Cabinet Minister. After 25 years in active
politics, he became a Visiting Professor in Politics at the University of East
Anglia, where he organised the ‘Too Difficult Box’ series of lectures (see
www.charlesclarke.org).

Keith Clarke is a qualified architect with nearly 50 years’ experience in city
planning and the design and construction of buildings and major
infrastructure throughout the world. Until recently he was the CEO of the
largest consulting engineering consultancy in the UK, WS Atkins, a FTSE
250 company.
Andrew Dobson is Professor of Politics at Keele University. Email:
a.n.h.dobson@keele.ac.uk

Paul Ekins is Professor of Resources and Environmental Policy and
Director of the UCL Institute for Sustainable Resources at University
College London. He received a UNEP Global 500 Award for ‘outstanding
environmental achievement’ in 1994 and was a member of the Royal
Commission on Environmental Pollution, 2002–2008.

John Elkington is co-founder and Executive Chairman of Volans (2008),
and co-founder of Environmental Data Services (ENDS) (1978) and
SustainAbility (1987). He is author or co-author of eighteen books, most
recently The Zeronauts: Breaking the Sustainability Barrier (Oxford:
Earthscan/Taylor & Francis, 2012).

Giles Foden is a novelist (The Last King of Scotland, Turbulence) and
Professor of Creative Writing at UEA. He was rapporteur to workshops of
the European Commission’s Global Systems Dynamics and Policies coordination action (2008–2010).
Laurence Freeman is Director of Meditatio.

xxii

Contributors
Toby Gardner is a research fellow in the Zoology Department of the
University of Cambridge, as well as a visiting researcher at the Goeldi
Museum and the International Institute for Sustainability in Rio de Janeiro,
Brazil. At the time of writing Dr Gardner co-leads the Sustainable Amazon
Network (www.redeamazoniasustentavel.org), a multi-disciplinary
research initiative aimed at understanding challenges and opportunities
facing land-use sustainability in the Brazilian Amazon.
Patricia Howard is Research Professor in the Department of Social Sciences
at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, and Honorary Professor in
the School of Anthropology and Conservation at the University of Kent in
the UK, working on the relations between biodiversity and human wellbeing. She leads the Ecosystem Services and Poverty Alleviation (ESPA)
Project ‘Human Adaptation to Biodiversity Change’.
John Ingram is ‘Food Security Leader’ for the Natural Environment
Research Council, and is based in the Environmental Change Institute,
University of Oxford. His main interest is the interaction between food
systems and environment.

Tim Lang is Professor of Food Policy at City University London’s Centre
for Food Policy. The Centre studies food systems through the lens of public
health, environment, citizenship, and social justice, exploring whether and
how policy reflects these concerns. Email: t.lang@city.ac.uk

Thomas Lingard is Global Advocacy Director at Unilever. He also serves
on the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Governance
for Sustainability, the Oxfam Association, and the International Advisory
Committee of the STEPS Centre at the University of Sussex. He was
previously Deputy Director of the policy think tank Green Alliance.

Amanda Long is Executive Officer, Marketing, Membership and Media at
the East of England Co-Operative.
Sara Parkin is Founder Director of Forum for the Future, Board member
of the European Training Foundation, and former Co-secretary of the
European Greens. She was awarded an OBE for services to education and
sustainability in 2001. Her latest book is The Positive Deviant: Sustainability
Leadership in a Perverse World. Email: saraparkinoffice@forumforthe
future.org

Joe Ravetz is Co-Director of the Centre for Urban & Regional Ecology
at Manchester, and leads on sustainable cities and regions. A former
xxiii

Contributors
architect/planner, he is also a graphic facilitator, foresight trainer and
policy adviser. His books include City-Region 2020 and the forthcoming
Urban 3.0: Synergistic Pathways for a One Planet Century.
Jonathan Sinclair-Wilson was for 20 years Managing Director of
Earthscan, the leading English-language publisher on sustainable
development.

Joe Smith is Senior Lecturer in Environment at the Open University, and
works on environmental policy and communications. He has worked
extensively with the BBC since the mid-1990s and is also Director of the
historic clock-making company Smith of Derby Ltd. Email: joe.smith@
open.ac.uk

Matthew Taylor became Chief Executive of the RSA in November 2006.
Prior to this appointment, he was Chief Adviser on Political Strategy to the
Prime Minister, and Director of the Institute for Public Policy Research
between 1999 and 2003.

Camilla Toulmin is Director of IIED, the International Institute of
Environment and Development. An economist by training, she has worked
mainly in Africa on agriculture, land, climate and livelihoods, mixing
research, policy analysis and advocacy. She is Board chair of ICARDA,
Trustee of the Franco-British Council, and sits on the Advisory Boards of
the Grantham Institute London, and IDDRI Paris.

xxiv

PART 1
TIPPING POINTS AND
CRITICAL THRESHOLDS

1.1
Metaphors and systemic change
TIM O’RIORDAN, TIM LENTON, AND IAN CHRISTIE

Setting the scene
This chapter has its origins in an introduction to a seminar jointly convened
through the funding kindness of the British Academy and the Royal
Society. Its purpose was to explore the various meanings and possible
consequences of ‘tipping points’ over the coming decades. The seminar
took place in the spring of 2011 at the Kavli Centre run by the Royal Society.
It comprised ten speakers and twenty-five commentators. Participants
represented a wide range of backgrounds, covering Earth system science,
natural resource policies, economics, politics, media and communications,
international relations, business, literature, and religion. What was fascinating was their enthusiasm for the creative fusion of highly diverse
contributions and ideas. Participants embraced the wide range of meanings
associated with ‘tipping points’ and grasped the significance of the concept
for the disturbing age in which we find ourselves.
This introductory chapter surveys various ways of approaching and
interpreting tipping points, and explains the contexts in which the
contributions that follow fit into this framework. Thus, it seeks to provide
a perspective for the whole book.
We took as our starting point the idea that tipping points are perhaps
best understood as metaphors to help deal with uncertainty and complexity, wholeness, and the unpredictability of the future. Tipping points
are processes of discontinuous, and at times disruptive, change. Generically
they are critical thresholds, which offer various timescales of onset and
impact. These thresholds may manifest themselves across the whole globe,
or regionally, or locally. They can come in the form of planetary processes, of ecosystem adjustments, of military, terrorist, or convulsive

3

Tim O’Riordan, Tim Lenton, and Ian Christie
political action, or of profound shifts in economic performance, cultural
outlooks and social behaviour. Indeed, tipping points can arise out of
combinations of physical and social systems and the strains and stresses
affecting them, all working in complex loops of influence and impact. What
concerns us here, and in our concluding chapter (8.1), is that tipping points
may sit at the cusp of being transformational for the worsening or bettering
of human existence. ‘Tipping points’ in this book actually refer to a series
of transitions and transformations, some predictable and some unforeseeable.
Three ways in which tipping points can be characterized relate to:
•

•

•

The science of global physical systems, their measurement and
predictability, singly or in combination, as addressed by Tim Lenton
in Part 2;
The social science of governance through means of anticipating and
adapting to possible shifts in such system states, approached in Parts
4, 6, and 7;
The creative processes of constructing ways forward for society, which
contribute to betterment and accommodation, by procedures which
are socially fair, build resilience through adaptation, and reinforce the
fundamental integrity of the ecosystem life-support processes,
explored in Parts 5, 6, 7, and 8.

Lying behind this framing of tipping points are four sets of propositions.
The first is that we could be entering a time in which unintended worsening
of policy makes for a drastic worsening of environmental problems and
socio-economic conditions. By our particular ways of governing ourselves,
we may be creating conditions of economy, of decision bias, of social
conditioning, and of ethics which actually reinforce (lock in) the likelihood
of tipping points in both physical and social realms.
Second, we could be creating conditions of induced vulnerabilities – the
generation of further risks – through tendencies already apparent in policy,
production and consumption. The ways in which we seek to adapt, because
of this inbuilt tendency to create greater tensions (dependency, powerlessness, incapacity to adapt), can also lead to more intense and unanticipated
combinations of both social and physical/ecological stresses.
Third, the uncertainties surrounding the idea of tipping points and their
manifestations raise the problem of incoherence in communication and
response. We have yet to consider suitable means for explaining the various
narratives, or ways of visualizing and instilling meaning to tipping points
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Metaphors and systemic change
in all of their manifestations, which could lead to constructive adaptation
and collective mitigation (as examined in Part 7).
Our final proposition is that tipping points must be conceived not only
as risks and threats, but also as potential moments of restorative redirection.
It is still possible for a series of positive transformational tipping points to
be combined. These would prepare society for forms of governing, of
designing economies, and of creating the social conditions for combined
preventative action that can stave off the ‘malign’ tipping points, in favour
of robust, resilient and adaptive values and governing procedures. This
would be the creative and ‘super-adjusting’ tipping point, of which, at
present, we see only glimpses – in social movements of ecological localism,
and in many parts of developing economies where continuous resilience
and adaptation are essential.
Achieving restorative redirection presents an immense challenge, but it
is an experience which the planet has been through several times before,
admittedly without conscious steering (Duarte Santos 2011; Lenton and
Watson 2011). This particular transition will be hugely different. It will
involve both profound shifts in social outlooks and associated adjustments.
It will also require collectively agreed recognition and capacity to restore
and nurture life-support processes, often under conditions of unfriendly
and unbending economic incentives, and inbuilt vulnerabilities. Hence the
shift towards so-called ‘benign’ tipping points, as ‘malign’ tipping points
continue to engulf us, will neither be easy, nor in the absence of ingenuity
and extremely determined and creative leadership, democratically popular.
We only see tough times ahead.

Tipping points as metaphors
Metaphors can elicit new concepts by ‘throwing together’ pre-existing lines
of thought into fresh perspectives, as Giles Foden argues in Chapter 3.1.
Metaphors are conveyors of meaning and storytelling. Metaphors enable
imagery and ideas to fuse and to recombine, to unify through experimental
exploration. Shifts in manners of thinking and of meanings of values are
easier to explore through metaphor. They allow continuous rediscovery
from any starting point, especially where there are many possible endings.
Metaphors stimulate the imagination, and loosen the mental bounds that
restrict our perception of actual and potential realities. But metaphors can
also confuse, because meanings are not always aligned to appreciate their
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Tim O’Riordan, Tim Lenton, and Ian Christie
novelty. Metaphors may be contested and unruly, trampling on established
patterns of thought and analysis. As a consequence, the science of tipping
points (Part 2) and the politics (Part 6) are beset with conflicting interpretations as metaphorical pathways collide.
Metaphors may be created on the basis of past evidence, interactive
models, creative interpretations of futures, simplifications of complexity,
exploration of intriguing mathematical formulations, storytelling, and
popular, misguided and sloppy usage. All these devices are means for
characterizing, and giving shape to, uncertainty, interdependence, turbulence, and crises, and for unleashing the creative power of imagining.
Metaphors are employed to assist in the ordering of chaos, for carving out
meaningful narratives and stories from apparently seamless continuity, for
creating understanding through patterns of skilful construction, and for
firming up the shifting sands of unpredictability in order to obtain plausible
assurance about what could happen next.
Three classes of tipping point and related metaphors attracted the
attention of the seminar participants.

1. Threshold conditions, chaotic transformations,
bifurcations, and revolutions
These are qualities found in mathematics; risk theory; catastrophe theory;
abrupt change dynamics; the coupling of systems to sudden phase changes
in local environments, macro-scale Earth systems, and in geopolitical
outlooks. Such transformations take place in a variety of circumstances:
from stress points found in pathways of order and reason; to sudden shifts
of political arrangements; to new patterns of power; to innovative processes
of measurement and making choices. They are characterized by intervening
periods of adjustment, which eventually reach a stage where inbuilt procedures for accommodation, or protecting existing institutions of decision
taking, can no longer rely on ‘more of the same’. Things simply have to shift.
Physicists, mathematicians, ecologists, epidemiologists and sociologists,
in their various ways, have identified ‘bifurcations’. These are points where
a small additional ‘forcing’ or ‘nudge’ takes a complex system abruptly into
a qualitatively different state or into the orbit of another system or set of
properties in the environment, known as an ‘attractor’. The interesting
quality here is their apparent unpredictability, even though after a ‘change
event’, it may be possible to spot the clues of onset. In the arena of political
transformation, for example, the fall of communism in the early 1990s, and
6

Metaphors and systemic change
the ‘Arab Spring’ of 2011 have been analysed for their precursors in the
internal social and political dynamics of restless and networked societies,
and oppressive regimes. Tipping points are rarely wholly unpredictable.
There is currently much excitement about the prospects for early warning
of such ‘critical transitions’ in a range of complex systems (Scheffer 2009),
and perhaps even on the basis of identification of large-scale recurrent
patterns in social evolution and upheavals (Turchin and Nefedov 2009;
Turchin 2011).

2. Prediction, adaptation, resilience, accommodation, path
dependency, and tenacity in holding on to the familiar
These are all variants of responses to confronting or actually experiencing
such threshold conditions. Doing nothing is not considered a viable or
sensible option, but any sudden shifts of policy or behaviour carry all
manner of risks and potential casualties, and any new rules of decision
taking are usually unfamiliar and weakly formulated. Changing tardily
patterns of power, clinging on to conceptions of morality and fairness, and
relying on the process of ‘muddling through’, all play their part. So too
does the tendency to cling to existing commitments of political dependence,
or the failure to adapt because too much sunk investment is at stake.
One cause of the collapse of earlier civilizations might have been the
unwieldy scale of large urban complexes, and the associated stubborn
adherence to living with the ‘sunk costs’ of existing, costly, and inflexible
infrastructural investments (Scheffer 2009). But ‘sunk costs’ also apply to
political power structures, worldviews, and frighteningly interdependent
economic institutions. This applies today in cases such as the banks,
particularly in the Eurozone countries. A related but uniquely frustrating
phenomenon of ‘systems that fail to tip’ can be found in political and
economic crises where nearly everyone agrees that something has to give
(see Sara Parkin (6.3)). Tim Lang and John Ingram (4.1) offer an equivalent
perspective on the increasing elusiveness of food security.
The very nature of nascent tipping points makes it difficult to shift
attitudes, values and behaviour. Tipping points are visible clearly, if at all,
only in the historical record, and thus lack compelling force in the present.
The overwhelming temptation and pressures are to wait and see, to hope
that something turns up to eliminate the projected risk, and to enable
business as usual to persist, or to assume that we can always fall back on
adaptation.
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Tim O’Riordan, Tim Lenton, and Ian Christie
Note, however, that even adaptation does not always result in positive
coping. Ill-designed adaptation can reinforce vulnerability and the brittleness of power and authority, unsuited to emerging threshold conditions,
where established mechanisms for adaptation and adjustment can no longer
hold. Emily Boyd (7.2) points out that weak adaptation, even in the face of
crisis, may arise from the mixing of informal social preferences and cultural
norms with formal and less flexible political and economic institutions,
further muddled by clumsy media and communications misunderstandings. Adaptive governance, she notes, ‘consists of four fundamentals:
explicit understanding of the system; monitoring; flexibility in management
and administration through networks; and preparation for “surprise”’.

3. Social construction, opportunism, media formulation,
marketing, and organising bias
Tipping points are now invoked in all manner of publications, of
communications, of language and knowledge, almost whenever the notion
of threat, of crisis, of fear, of helplessness, and of a call for dramatic
transformational approaches to the messy governing of economies and
societies, is called upon. Here the notion of tipping points loses its shape,
tends to be overused and blurred, and hence can become unhelpful as a
narrative for coping. This is precisely the danger of metaphor which Giles
Foden counsels against in Chapter 3.1. The tendency for universality, for
sloppy comparison, and for meaningless preparation, may yet prove the
nemesis of the tipping point metaphor. Metaphors can guide, but they can
also muddle. This aspect is explored by Tim Lang and John Ingram (4.1),
and by Patricia Howard (4.2) in her various ecological, cultural and
linguistic interpretations of biodiversity. Tipping points, like the highly
necessary but deeply contested concept of sustainability, are already in
danger of being over-defined, chaotically misinterpreted, and chronically
abused by overreliance on ubiquitousness.

A sense of foreboding
Lying beneath these formulations of tipping points is a sense of foreboding.
We appear to be entering a stage in world affairs where rapid change,
spurred by instant communication and an overwhelming desire to dramatize events to gain competitive media attention, appears convulsive,
8

Metaphors and systemic change
cataclysmic, and beyond any sense of benign rational management. It is so
tempting to ignore warnings, to cling on to the familiar, to hold on to sunk
investments, and to seek pathways which are already damaged by
protective power and false promises. This is particularly so in the many
cases where the timing of possibly tragic outcomes is not provable, and is
subject to very wide variations in estimates. Denial, delay, and dissonance
capture the desperation of hanging on.
The emerging worlds of interconnected systems dynamics, and the
sweet fruits of interdisciplinarity, tempt thinkers to try and understand our
predicament by modelling it. Modelling with huge banks of data is now
possible on scales almost unimagined a decade ago. There seems to be no
limit to the scope for amassing meaningful patterns from seemingly chaotic
cascades of information, apart from the imagination needed to create and
make sense of these patterns. And the more the requirement to organize
and give meaning, the more there needs to be fusion of both a narrative for
creative exploration and a model for analytical ordering and forecasting.
Yet the very capacity of modelling nowadays draws our attention to the
significant voids in data arrays. For example, ocean acidification may or
may not be catastrophic, not just hazardous, for calcareous marine life: we
do not yet have the necessary instrumentation or the time series trends to
be sure.
Such modelling is now so sophisticated that it can encompass both
physical and social systems, and can combine the talents of academia,
business and government. So the scope for extraordinary integration
between disciplines, and means of shaping innovative decisions, is
becoming very exciting. Here the mathematics and the narrative can be
combined creatively. Tipping points could be expressions of wholly new
forms of reasoning and imagining, of cross-cultural communication, and
of preparing for fundamentally fresh ways to discover the ‘complete
human condition’ in an age of real threat to the betterment of all life on
this beleaguered planet. Novel forms of communication, such as those
advancing on social networks, offer ways to translate the metaphors of
thresholds and scenarios. Joe Smith (7.1) and Paul Brown (7.3) show that
there are fundamental difficulties in conveying the power and authority of
tipping points.
Furthermore, we may be experiencing in the emerging decade a new
kind of geopolitics. There is the prospect of a radically different world
order, a period of increasing instability for a growing number in unpopular dictatorships, of unprecedented growth of middle-class consumption
9

Tim O’Riordan, Tim Lenton, and Ian Christie
in the emerging economies of China, India and Brazil, of massive social
costs of ageing and concomitant under-representation of support workers,
and, in recent times, an unusual and possible dangerous decline of
accustomed affluence for many households in nations with established
democracies. The ever-widening gaps between economic and social
privilege and disadvantage, and the consequent deep democratic frustration combined with widespread sense of impotence – surely unwelcome
hallmarks of this decade – will add to this instability (Turchin 2011).
Lying behind our contemplation of tipping points could just possibly
be the most turbulent prospect facing the global human community in its
existence, as covered in Part 8. The futures hinted in the discourses of
tipping points could cover peaceful survival, completely new forms of
learning and understanding, quite radical forms of communicating, and
very different modes of enterprise and betterment for the whole of the
human family. Laurence Freeman in Chapter 5.1 introduces contemplative
consciousness as a means for combining wholeness with detachment, belief
and faith, science with ethics. He offers a simple but powerful meditative
framework for positive transitions.

On thresholds and bifurcations
For almost 200 years, classical physics, mathematics, and social sciences
seemed to accept that change was smooth. Yet underlying the notion of
continuity and positive readjustment, were formulations of exponential
growth, with its characteristics of doubling times and rapid alteration.
Mathematicians call the outcome a ‘singularity’, namely a point where the
equations give results that tend to infinity. This too has become a metaphor for a grand tipping point, that imagined by Kurzweil (2005) as the
transformation of human society and economy by mid-century through
what he takes to be exponential advances in technology, data-processing
power and artificial intelligence. The patterns of both smooth change and
disruptive discontinuity create unstable rhythms where the characteristics
of the system in question become radically different in function and
structure.
When a state departs from its predicted path, on to some other trajectory,
it is said to ‘bifurcate’. This notion has been used in chaos theory to show
that small shifts in initiating conditions, which may not even be observable,
can lead to radically different outcomes. Earth system dynamics, such
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Metaphors and systemic change
as those dictating monsoonal patterns, locations and timing, or abrupt
changes in forest water availability and drought-induced burning – all
these express disequilibrium, with hierarchies of dynamics and outcomes
which can be modelled, but where the modelling also requires large doses
of creative intelligence.
In ecological systems, such thresholds can be depicted as points, or as
zones of interruption in a prolonged transition. The ‘point’ notion is more
common, since there are many examples of sudden shifts in ecological
conditions arising from very small additional changes. One oft-quoted
example lies in nutrient enrichment or eutrophication of shallow lakes,
where a pattern of low-nutrient status with particular plant diversity can
switch abruptly to a high-nutrient low-diversity pattern. Many more
examples of ecological tipping points can be found in the recent literature
(Barnosky et al. 2012; UNEP 2012) and the Resilience Alliance and Santa Fe
Institute thresholds database (Resilience Alliance 2004).
‘Hysteresis’ is a term reflecting the level of dependence of any system
state on its history. It is possible for a change to be reversible, but the return
to the original state will almost always be at a very different point from the
initiating conditions of change. Thus coastal salt marsh, removed due to
the squeezing of the coastline caused by a combination of rising sea levels
and the construction of tide-protecting seawalls, is proving extremely
difficult to re-create. This is one of the factors behind the economics of
sharing with nature, namely the potentially huge cost of restoring lost ecofunctions, either by human-made arrangements or lengthy and expensive
repair.
‘Panarchy’ is one characterization of the relationship between thresholds
in natural states and adjustments in human management arrangements
(Gunderson and Holling 2002). Toby Gardner (4.3) considers how the
lengthening dry season in the Amazon rainforest could result in whole new
patterns of water resource care and reforestation, just to ensure that the
rainforest communities have sufficient water for human and commercial
consumption in the years to come. Meanwhile in the boreal forest, warming
and drying weakens the natural resistance of trees, rendering them
susceptible to pest infections. Pests are strengthened and more dispersed
due in part to climate change. These are instances of combinational
thresholds, which place special strains on the adaptive capabilities of
human response.
There is much interest amongst ecosystem modellers over the changing
rates of return to earlier population states following some disruption, such
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Tim O’Riordan, Tim Lenton, and Ian Christie
as drought or cold, or loss of feeding availability. It is possible to measure
patterns of ‘loss of resilience’ in some of these adjustments so that early
indicators of incipient stress can be identified and monitored. This is part
of the bifurcation approach to modelling, which relies on precursors to
possible thresholds of altered conditions. Research on the drying of the
Amazon rainforest, and associated incidence of ground-litter fires, is
making use of this approach, as Toby Gardner (4.3) notes. However, the
metaphor allusion is still relevant, as the range of data over time and space
may not be sufficient for reliable measurements to be made meaningful,
except through the metaphor process.
More attention needs to be paid to inter-linkages, to much more
interdisciplinarity between physical and ecological processes and human
interpretation and behaviour, and to localness of action. This is the message
of the Amazonian drying and burning, as pointed out by Toby Gardner
(4.3) and Patricia Howard (4.2). It is a function of accumulating local
decisions, connected to regional climate change effects, and it can best be
addressed through connecting local initiatives which are comfortable to
local cultures, even though the whole response needs to have the form and
shape of joint regional cohesion. Such arrangements are not easy to put into
effect, but will be given expression in our final chapter (8.1).

On appropriate metaphors for social transformation
It is by no means so easy to follow the threshold/bifurcation metaphor for
social systems. Paul Ekins (6.2), Sara Parkin (6.3) and Tim Lang and John
Ingram (4.1) adopt this position. Social changes are not readily characterized by flows and patterns, as they are so infused with histories of
culture, power and institutional rigidities. Despite the wish of policymakers
and chief executives to imagine a world where it would be possible to
predict an outcome from a given set of causal agents and behavioural
variables, this is not in the socio-economic purview. (For a qualified defence
of the case for prediction in social science based on such modelling of
agents and variables, see Turchin 2011.) And there is no model of mass
action which can show that if sufficient people change their behaviour in
a certain way, then a predicable outcome, say for carbon reduction, or
household water consumption, will follow. This suggests that the tipping
point metaphor is inescapably qualitative, at least given our current and
prospective knowledge of ecosystems, economies and societal evolution,
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Metaphors and systemic change
and thus unsuitable for serious adaptation in governance, and all too
dependent on creative imagining and empathy. Such characteristics do not
commend themselves to policymakers and business leaders, who prefer
quantitative models, no matter how ill-founded or even bogus, with some
estimation of riskiness.
In the socio-ecological systems realm, therefore, it is naive to visualize
any possible transitional condition, or possible precursor bifurcation, as
having some kind of objective independent existence. Social phenomena
are shot through with learning and forgetting, commitments to existing
power and decisional arrangements, and plain cussedness. There is
therefore a deep conceptual weakness in the translation of ecosystem
analysis of threshold metaphors to governance generally, and to human
behaviour more typically.
Resilience seems to be a concept more attuned to ecosystems functioning. To transfer it to governing arrangements and social systems brings
in all manner of non-measurable phenomena such as equity, foresight,
learning capabilities, scales of action, path determinacy of previous
institutional commitments and ‘mindsets’, and wilful denial. Business and
market mindsets, and the political realities of grappling with ‘wicked
problems’, where the ‘boxes are too difficult to tick’ (see Charles Clarke
(6.7)), lead to insecure action and to mindful delay. Nevertheless, we live
in a coupled world of human–nature interrelationships (Ostrom 2009), so
there is still merit in assessing just how human aspirations in favour of
manageable survival and reduction of avoidable threat can be channelled
on to the threshold metaphor.
It is possible that the second group of tipping points (induced
vulnerabilities) is beginning to accelerate and amplify the onset and
severity of the first (unintended worsening). If so, human resilience and
acquired adaptive capabilities may not be sufficiently robust and flexible
to cope. Tim Lang and John Ingram (4.1), for example, in their exploration
of food security and attendant ecological ills, point out that the tipping
point metaphor is less apposite than studies of raw power: of huge
unaccountable corporations with limited foresight capacity; of complex
governing rules and regulations which disguise and promote overconsumption; of misappropriated production, and chaotic pricing patterns;
and where affordability and availability are working at cross purposes.
In their analysis, tipping points are not metaphors but dysfunctional system conditions. Emily Boyd (7.2) echoes this dysfunctionality of system
states. The economic/business/governance analysts led by Paul Ekins
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Tim O’Riordan, Tim Lenton, and Ian Christie
(6.2) also acknowledge the evident and pervasive failure to foresee the
foreseeable.
What emerges here is the notion of technological ‘lock-in’. This is the
tying down of technology and market forces into self-reinforcing patterns
of continuation, a syndrome of ‘path dependency’ based on sunk costs, fear
of stranded assets and unwillingness or inability to invest in major
infrastructural change. This is very evident in the failure to remove carbon from the global economy, and in myriads of tiny decisions, from
exploitation of new oil reserves in the warming Arctic, to the ‘fracking’ of
shale-based oil and gas, to the enormous difficulty in achieving electric/
hydrogen filling points for more ubiquitous low-carbon fuel availability.
The obverse of techno-lock is ‘social-unlocking’ – the scope for benign
transformation, rooted in changes in values and social organization, as
addressed in our final chapter (8.1).
More attention needs to be paid to the polycentric nature of responses
beyond the level of the nation state (alone or in concert) (Ostrom 2009a).
We need many kinds of sub-national and cross-sectoral responses, on the
basis of a number of nations and other actors, such as city governments,
NGOs, and corporations combining forces, creating the basis for networks
of action on many different timescales and levels (Carley and Christie 2000).
Addressing the ‘governing region’ in the evolving metaphor of tipping
points requires much more attention than is now the case. This would
apply to China and India and Brazil as well as the ‘soon to be water-poor’
neighbours of shrinking montane glaciers.
There may be an even greater need for preparing for tipping thresholds
in this combinational form at very local levels. This is the focus of Part 8.
There is much interest in the determinants of human behaviour and in the
scope for cultural shifts in both habit formation and group outlooks and
action. If we are eventually to get anywhere with adaptation and resilience
to such groupings of tipping points, then these seemingly intractable arenas
of imperfect learning and responsiveness will need to be addressed. As
Laurence Freeman observes in Chapter 5.1, ‘The virtue of hope is not
putting the best spin on bad news or fiddling while the planet burns. It is
a conviction that because of, and not despite the human element, an
eventually positive outcome is always possible.’

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On resilience, adaptation and adjusting to the
unfamiliar
If we can work through the various metaphors of thresholds, bifurcation,
and convulsion, we need to address the complementary thresholds of
adaptation, accommodation, and adjustment to the unfamiliar. In the
climate change world, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
regarded adaptation as having three purposes: to reduce exposure to
known or possible hazard; to develop a capacity to cope with unavoidable
damage (the costs which cannot be removed by reduced exposure); and to
take advantage of new forms of living and governing so as to seek to
redesign hazard or threat out of the system. The process of adaptation can
be spontaneous, namely autonomous and reactive; or planned and
managed through deliberate policy decisions and investments based on
reasonable precaution or prediction; or anticipatory, in that there is a longterm process of accommodation of human activity and behaviour.
Emily Boyd (7.2) adopts the notion of four phases to adaptation in an
adaptive cycle (Gunderson and Holling 2002):
•
•
•
•

rapid growth (r) typically characterized by pioneer species, innovators or
entrepreneurs;
conservation (K) where resources are increasingly available and locked
up in existing structures;
release (omega) often triggered by a disturbance (e.g. fire, flood, disease)
that exceeds the systems’ capacity for resilience;
reorganization and renewal (alpha) where invention, experimentation and
re-assortment are common.

According to Boyd, the adaptive cycle has two opposing ways of
operating. The rapid growth and conservation phases operate together as
the ‘front loop’, while the release and reorganization phases form the ‘back
loop’. The front loop characterizes the development phase, and features
activities such as the accumulation of capital, stability, accommodation and
improvement. Empirical studies of complex adaptive systems often focus
on gradual change, such as forest conservation operating on the front loop.
Tipping points work is looking at the back loops, where systems that are
undergoing shock may result in a reorganization that maintains the
essential character of the original system within the desired state, yet shifts
thinking to new ways of framing, adapting to and governing climate
shocks. Toby Gardner (4.3) on the drying of the Amazon provides an
example here.
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Tim O’Riordan, Tim Lenton, and Ian Christie
Of interest here is the scope for merging the metaphors of thresholds
with those of adjustment and anticipation. In almost all cases there is little
institutional clarity for any meaningful and comprehensive approach to
adaptation and the removal of vulnerability. Human patterns which rely
on large settlements, now the dominant norm, are thus vulnerable to the
confrontation of sheer inertia with the need for rapid adjustment. The
possibility of parts of the West Antarctic ice sheet collapsing over a period
of decades, with concomitant rises of sea level of a metre or more (unlikely
but not unimaginable) would place megacities such as Shanghai, Dhaka,
Jakarta and Mumbai in an adaptation crisis. There is at present no
institutional machinery for dealing with the provision of food, fresh water,
transport, or waste, to say nothing of relocation of many millions of people
in many forms of supportive or fragmented community structures, in the
timescale of a couple of decades. And to seek to do so whilst aiming at
giving everyone the opportunity of adopting sustainable livelihoods is
almost unimaginable.
The literature on collapse of earlier human settlement seems to focus on
the role of adverse events (even when predictable); the excessive size of
collapsing settlements; rapid population growth; competition for scarce
privilege amongst elites; and evidence of over-exploitation of resource use
immediately before catastrophic ‘system failures’. All of this suggests that
the metaphor of adjustment, either through planning/management, or by
anticipation and pro-activity, may be very difficult to implement for
resource-intensive, high-density, rapidly developing, increasingly unequal,
and information-technology-dependent societies. Yet these are the very
conditions being replicated on a daily basis.
So it is possible that we are creating the very elements of destabilizing
bifurcations in our maladjusted adaptive responses which carry within
them the seeds of tipping thresholds. The very act of simplification may be
leading to emergent conditions of behaviour (for example, denial or
resistance to innovation) which may lead to new unstable system states,
and which profoundly affect the connections with other adaptive systems.
This may be happening with the ‘green growth’ scenarios, where investments may not give rise to many new jobs because too many of the current
unemployed are not suitably trained for such employment. We return to
this in our final chapter (8.1).

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On social construction and opportunism
The third framing device we can use for approaching tipping points is that
of social construction, the meaning and purpose of entertaining the
concept at all. Here we enter the world of creative imagination and of new
forms of constructing social relations and outlooks. Giles Foden (3.1)
reminds us that stories are segments cut into the flow of time, sections of
continuity which convey order and structure into what otherwise is chaos.
This helps to bring the dimensions of space and time and causality to
tipping points.
So another way to consider the metaphor is to think of tipping
landscapes – of terrain where many different explorations of possible future
states can take place, and where creativity and not just modelling from
datasets can be fused with rational enquiry. This would require more
training and exposure to many different models of learning. Game-playing,
storytelling, scenario-exploring, new forms of measuring betterment,
justice, and adaptation will be needed in the design of business management, public service training, and schooling. Being more comfortable
with the unfamiliar will become very important, as will cooperating in
groups under circumstances of the unexpected and the removal of bias
associated with sunk costs dependencies.
This will require a new approach to communicating future conditions.
If people can begin to have the tools to imagine ‘beneficial tipping
landscapes’ which reveal the strength of change and adaptation, but which
are also underpinned by empathy, compassion, and virtuous responsibility
(see Tim O’Riordan (6.1) and Joe Smith (7.1)), we may begin to create
cultures of communication over tipping point metaphors which offer the
incentive of hope, and hence the incentive for creative change.
This transformation may not be possible in present arrangements of
social existence and economic development. Maybe current models of
governing, of power relationships, of path dependency and of markets,
convey inbuilt structures which critically impede such transformational
narratives (Rist 2011). For us to be sure, we need to uncover the essence
of governance and of markets, of cultures, and of diversity of living
patterns, which can reveal just what bifurcations can be anticipated and
designed, at least experimentally, just to see what is possible even in a
world of impossibilities. These aspects are addressed in Part 6, both from
a philosophical viewpoint of market immoralities, and from the hardheaded pragmatics of the business and political worlds.
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Tim O’Riordan, Tim Lenton, and Ian Christie
This will require leadership of quite an unusual kind. Leadership which
is deviant from normal managing styles, where social enterprise of the
more imaginative and experimental kind is permitted to emerge and to be
tested and supported. Sara Parkin (6.3), Amanda Long (6.4) and John
Elkington (6.6) give this aspect prominence in their contributions.
Leadership means a willingness to accept the learning and adaptiveness of
failure, both on an individual and collective level. This means making
much more use of the modern communicating technologies of social
networking so that people can talk to each other with inventiveness,
imagination and experimentation, as suggested by Matthew Taylor (3.2).
It is just possible that the technology of the emerging age will enable
‘localism’ within mega-structures to flourish, so that communities can
design their capabilities and renewal in the spaces of their familiarity and
comfort zones. The ‘urban village’ could come of age.

Good news stories
In all our consideration of the threats, risks and foreboding inherent in the
study of tipping points, we may lose sight of the myriad ‘good news stories’
which are shining beacons across the face of the planet. We certainly need
to hear of these and to learn from their successes and capacities for
furtherance and repetition. Businesses are learning and responding, and
we need to know more of these adventures. Communities are managing
under the most amazingly adverse circumstances to create economic,
ecological, and social resilience, and we need to know more of their
achievements and why they persevere.
One such example is the aftermath of the 2010 Pakistan floods which
afflicted over 20 million people and some 1.7 million homes. Emily Boyd
(7.2) reveals the huge challenges of combining many aid and relief efforts
with infrastructure and social capital investments on a vast scale. She
concludes that there is no guarantee that even the combined weight of the
international development banks, the various aid streams, and the
resources of the aid charities can bring about sustainable livelihoods in the
coming years. Responses in the aftermath of disaster may inform us more
of better preparedness for adaptation to tipping points.
One optimistic arena is the emergence of the social entrepreneur with
the capacity to make profit from socially and ecologically sustaining
business. We certainly need to hear more about such entrepreneurs and
18

Metaphors and systemic change
what forms of governing and market conditions, on a suitable geographical
and cultural basis, might offer the best scope for their flourishing. John
Elkington (6.6) has made a specialization of studying and advocating for
this fascinating business niche. This in turn suggests a discussion on the
appropriate models for businesses in facing tipping points/thresholds,
again in a regional/local setting. There may well be a case for a more
integrated approach to public/private/civil connections in future business
models, with appropriate regulatory incentives to support them.
Laurence Freeman (5.1) reminds us that we are fearful of our mortality,
that we do care about contributing knowingly to calamity, and that we can
connect to the long term through devices such as meditation and opening
of the mind. The ultimate metaphor may be what Freeman terms the ‘inner
eye’. This is the element of our imagination and awareness which transcends our normal reasoning. Triggering the inner eye may be the precursor to triggering the benign elements of addressing tipping points. This
is a profound feature of anticipation, of alertness, and of recognizing the
scale of the complexities before us.
Humble meditation may offer the beginning of visualizing the new
horizons. Anthony Seldon (2011), Master of Winchester College, has
initiated a period of stillness throughout his school for all beginnings of
classes and meals. He regards stillness as a means to help young people to
avoid responding to impulses. Pupils see immediate gains, but not the
long-term consequences of their choices. Learning to be still, to cultivate
mindfulness – and to think before acting – is thus not only a desirable, but
also a key responsibility for education.
We cannot cope with tipping points with the outer eyes we use every
day. Paul Ekins (6.2) shares this view. The markets and the financial arrangements do not appear to have an inner eye. Keith Clarke (6.5), speaking from
a business perspective, says there is no far-sight in business unless it is
regulated for. The critical elements of the modern economy do not yet
contain this critical inner eye. Amanda Long (6.4), also a chief executive, is
more optimistic. There is a glimmer of the creative visioning of the inner
eye in the best of business leadership. Such ‘good news stories’ should be
discovered and amplified. There is still just enough time to do this, as we
explore in our final chapter (8.1).
So we begin our journey. Arguably critical thresholds are what spur
us on. There is a long history of belief in catastrophic convulsions
and ecological ‘die-outs’ in the planetary evolutionary journey. And the
science of risk is peppered with associations of learning from hazard and
19

Tim O’Riordan, Tim Lenton, and Ian Christie
precaution. So we may have to experience the onset of tipping points
simply to be ‘shocked and awed’. This should not stop us right now from
at least recognizing our follies and our institutional deficiencies. This is the
context in which the chapters and commentaries unfold.

References
Barnosky, A.D., Hadly, E.A., Bascompte, J., Berlow, E.L., Brown, J.H., Fortelius, M.,
et al. (2012), ‘Approaching a State Shift in Earth’s Biosphere’, Nature, 486 (7401):
52–58.
Carley, M. and Christie, I. (2000), Managing Sustainable Development (London:
Earthscan).
Duarte Santos, F. (2011), Humans on Earth: From Origins to Possible Futures (New
York: Springer).
Gunderson, L.H. and Holling, C.S. (eds) (2002), Panarchy: Understanding
Transformations in Human and Natural Systems (New York: Island Press).
Kurzweil, R. (2005), The Singularity is Near (New York: Viking).
Lenton, T.M. and Watson, A.J. (2011), Revolutions That Made the Earth (Oxford:
Oxford University Press).
Ostrom, E. (2009), ‘A General Framework for Analyzing Sustainability of SocialEcological Systems’, Science, 325: 419–23.
Ostrom, E. (2009a), A Polycentric Approach for Coping with Climate Change
(Washington DC: World Bank Policy Research Working Paper No. 5095).
Resilience Alliance (2004), ‘Thresholds and Alternate States in Ecological and SocialEcological Systems’, http://www.resalliance.org/index.php/thresholds_
database.
Rist, G. (2011), The Delusions of Economics: The Misguided Certainties of a Hazardous
Science (London: Zed Books).
Scheffer, M. (2009), Critical Transitions in Nature and Society (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press).
Seldon, A. (2011), ‘Stillness in Schools’, Resurgence, 269: 18–20.
Turchin, P. (2011), ‘Social Tipping Points and Trend Reversals: A Historical
Approach’ (Mt Pilatus, Switzerland: Tipping Points Workshop, http://clio
dynamics.info).
Turchin, P. and Nefedov, S. (2009), Secular Cycles (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press).
UNEP (2012), Geo-5: Global Environment Outlook: Environment for the Future We Want
(Nairobi: United Nations Environment Programme).

20

PART 2
EARTH SYSTEM TIPPING POINTS

2.1
Tipping elements
from a global perspective
TIM LENTON

The aim of this chapter is to provide an overview of potential tipping points
in the Earth system, which we may cross this century, due to our collective
impact on the planet interacting with its natural patterns of variability. I
take a risk-assessment approach, summarizing existing information on the
likelihood and impacts of tipping different elements of the Earth system,
and using that information to produce a tentative assessment of the relative
risks that they pose. Then I consider the prospects for early warning of
approaching tipping points, as a means of helping manage the risks. The
chapter is structured around a series of simple questions about Earth
system tipping points: What are they? Where are they? How close are they?
Which carry the greatest impacts? What is the worst case scenario? What
early warning signs should we be looking for? When can we get reliable
predictions? How should we respond?
At the start let me pin my colours to the mast, and defend my use of the
term ‘tipping point’. Distaste regarding it seems to stem from two main
concerns. One is the over-liberal or uncritical application of such physical
science concepts to social systems, containing actors with an element of
both free will and reflection, who continually shape and reshape the
systems of which they are a part. I can sidestep this, because my primary
focus here is on our planet and its physical sub-systems, and I have no
qualms about applying physical theories there. The definition I propose
below is intended for physical systems, and I do not claim that it can be
applied to social ones.
The second concern is psychological; talking about damaging tipping
points is perceived as alarmist and likely to breed hedonism, despair or
other maladaptive responses in the population. This line of argument I find
morally challenging, because as a scientist I am trained to ‘tell it like it is’,
23

Tim Lenton
as clearly as I can. The argument that the evidence and modelling I will
discuss carry distasteful messages, and therefore their presentation should
be adjusted, is not one I can accept. (That said, I realize we live in an era of
‘post-normal’ science, in which the objective and the subjective are always
entwined (Stirling 2003).)

What and where are tipping points?
Little things can (sometimes) make a big difference, as Malcolm Gladwell’s
book that popularized societal tipping points argues (Gladwell 2000).
Mathematicians, with their concept of a bifurcation point, have known
this for centuries, as have physicists fascinated by phase changes of matter.
More recently ecologists have borrowed from bifurcation theory to
describe ‘regime shifts’ in ecosystems. Gladwell takes his cues from
epidemiology, and the theory of infection spread, which has different
underlying mathematics. Dynamical systems theory encompasses these
and other classes of physical phenomena, which all share a common
feature: a small change within, or from outside, a system can cause a large
change in its future state. It seems natural to me to use the term ‘tipping
point’ to describe this group of phenomena, and to communicate about
them to non-scientists.
Thus, a tipping point is a critical threshold at which the future state of a
system can be qualitatively altered by a small change in forcing (Lenton
et al. 2008). Tipping points can conceivably occur in any spatial scale of
system which has strong non-linearity in its internal dynamics. Here I
focus on large-scale tipping points in the physical, chemical, and biological
make-up of our planet. A tipping element is a part of the Earth system (at
least sub-continental in scale) that has a tipping point (Lenton et al. 2008).
Policy-relevant tipping elements are those that could be forced past a
tipping point this century by human activities. In the language of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), they are called ‘largescale discontinuities’ (Smith et al. 2009), and are one type of dangerous
anthropogenic interference in the climate system. Abrupt climate change is a
subset of tipping point change which occurs faster than its cause (Rahmstorf
2001). Tipping point change also includes transitions that are slower than
their cause (in both cases the rate is determined by the system itself). In
either case the change in state may be reversible or irreversible. Reversible
means that when the forcing is returned below the tipping point the system
24

Tipping elements from a global perspective
recovers its original state (either abruptly or gradually). Irreversible means
that it does not (it takes a larger change in forcing to recover). Reversibility
in principle does not mean that changes will be reversible in practice.
Previous work (Lenton et al. 2008) has identified a shortlist of nine
potential policy-relevant tipping elements in the climate system that could
pass a tipping point this century and undergo a transition this millennium
under projected climate change. These are shown with some other candidates in Figure 2.1, where the tipping elements are grouped into those that
involve ice melting, those that involve changes in the circulation of the
ocean or atmosphere, and those that involve the loss of major biomes.
We should be most concerned about those tipping points that are
nearest (least avoidable) and those that have the largest negative impacts.
Generally, the more rapid and less reversible a transition is, the greater its
impacts. Additionally, any amplification of global climate change may
increase concern, as can interactions whereby tipping one element
encourages tipping another, potentially leading to ‘domino dynamics’.
The leading candidates are now briefly summarized, with an emphasis on
recent behaviour, and what the nature of the underlying mechanisms
means for the reversibility and rapidity of any future transitions (for more
details, see recent reviews (Lenton et al. 2008; Lenton 2012)). In later
sections, the proximity of individual tipping points and their impacts are
expanded upon.

Ice melting
The Arctic sea-ice underwent a new record summer loss of area in 2012,
breaking the previous record set in 2007 and reaching around half of the
area it had in the summers of the late 1970s, when the satellite record began.
Projections are for the complete loss of ice in summer within decades.
Whether this will involve an underlying bifurcation is debated (Abbot et
al. 2011; Eisenman and Wettlaufer 2009) because ice re-grows in each dark
polar winter, i.e. the loss is reversible in principle (Notz 2009). But already
the changing ice cover is changing atmospheric circulation patterns
(Overland and Wang 2010; Wu and Zhang 2010), with knock-on effects that
extend to mid-latitudes, including contributing to cold winter extremes
over Europe (Petoukhov and Semenov 2010).
The Greenland ice sheet (GIS) may be nearing a tipping point where it is
committed to shrink (Kriegler et al. 2009; Lenton et al. 2008). Record seasonal melting occurred in summer 2012, probably associated with record
25

M

Melting

M
Instability of West Antarctic
Ice Sheet

B
Amazon
Rainforest
Dieback

C

Circulation Change

West African
Monsoon Shift

C Sahara Greening?
C
Dust Source C Sahel Drying?
Shut-down?
C

C
Atlantic
Thermohaline
Circulation

B
Cold Water
Coral Reefs?

M Arctic Sea-Ice

B

M
Yedoma
Permafrost

M
Himalayan
Glaciers?

Biome Loss

B
Marine Biological
Carbon Pump?

C
Indian
Summer
Monsoon

B
Boreal Forest
Dieback

B
Tropical
Coral Reefs?

M
Ocean
Methane
Hydrates?

Figure 2.1 Map of potential policy-relevant tipping elements in the Earth’s climate system. Question marks indicate systems
whose status as tipping elements is particularly uncertain (Lenton 2012).

C
Change in ENSO
Amplitude or Shift in Location

C
SW North
America Drying?

B
Boreal Forest
Dieback

M
Greenland
Ice Sheet

Tipping elements from a global perspective
Arctic sea-ice loss, as it was in 2007 (Mote 2007). Extraordinary warmth
around 12 July 2012 saw thawing across almost the entire ice sheet surface,
which would have lowered the albedo (reflectivity), further amplifying the
melt (Box et al. 2012). Once underway the transition to a smaller ice cap will
have low reversibility, although it is likely to take several centuries (and is
therefore not abrupt). The impacts via sea-level rise will ultimately be large
(around 7 m) and global, but will depend on the rate of ice sheet shrinkage.
There may be several stable states for ice volume, with the first transition
involving retreat of the ice sheet on to land and around 1.5 m of sea-level
rise (Ridley et al. 2010), up to 50 cm of which could occur this century
(Pfeffer et al. 2008).
The West Antarctic ice sheet (WAIS) is currently assessed to be further
from a tipping point than the GIS, but this is more uncertain (Kriegler et al.
2009; Lenton et al. 2008). Recent work (Schoof 2007) has shown that multiple
stable states can exist for the grounding line of the WAIS, and that it has
collapsed repeatedly in the past (Naish et al. 2009; Pollard and DeConto
2009). It has the potential for more rapid change and hence greater impacts
than the GIS. Current models (Pollard and DeConto 2009) put the threshold
for WAIS collapse when the surrounding ocean warms by around 5°C, and
expert elicitation concurs that if global warming exceeds 4°C, it is more
likely than not that the WAIS will collapse (Kriegler et al. 2009). The WAIS
has the potential to cause sea-level rise of the order of 1 m per century and
3–4 m in total.
The Yedoma permafrost (perennially frozen soil), in north-eastern Siberia
(150–168°E and 63–70°N), has an extremely high carbon content (2–5 per
cent) and may contain up to 500 PgC (billion tonnes of carbon) (Zimov et
al. 2006). It could tip into irreversible, self-sustaining collapse, due to an
internally generated source of heat released by biochemical decomposition
of the carbon, triggering further melting in a runaway positive feedback
(Khvorostyanov et al. 2008a; Khvorostyanov et al. 2008b). This would
produce emissions of 2–3 PgC yr-1 (equivalent to about a third of current
fossil fuel burning). Tipping this system requires an estimated >9°C of
regional warming (Khvorostyanov et al. 2008a), and may also be rate
sensitive (Wieczorek et al. 2011). Although this seems far off, during the
sea-ice retreat of 2007, Arctic land temperatures jumped (Lawrence et al.
2008) around 3°C.
Ocean methane hydrates may store up to 2000 PgC beneath the seafloor
(Archer et al. 2009), and as the deep ocean warms, this reservoir of frozen
methane could be destabilized, perhaps triggering submarine landslides
27

Tim Lenton
(Kayen and Lee 1991). However, an abrupt massive release of methane into
the atmosphere is very unlikely (Archer 2007).
The Himalayan glaciers could lose much of their mass this century
(Ramanathan and Feng 2008), and this will likely involve self-amplifying
processes whereby dust accumulation and the exposure of bare ground
lower the surface albedo and accelerate melt (Oerlemans et al. 2009; Pepin
and Lundquist 2008). However, it is unclear whether there is a large-scale
tipping point for this particular montane ice melt.

Biome loss
The Amazon rainforest experienced widespread droughts in 2005 and 2010,
which turned the region from a sink to a source of carbon (0.6–0.8
PgC yr-1) (Phillips et al. 2009). If anthropogenic-forced (Vecchi et al.
2006) lengthening of the dry season continues, and droughts increase in
frequency or severity (Cox et al. 2008), the rainforest could reach a tipping
point resulting in dieback of up to 80 per cent of trees (Cook and Vizy 2008;
Cox et al. 2004; Salazar et al. 2007; Scholze et al. 2006), and its replacement
by seasonal forest (Malhi et al. 2009) or savannah. This could take a few
decades, would have low reversibility, large regional impacts, and knockon effects far away. Widespread dieback is expected in a >4°C warmer
world (Kriegler et al. 2009), and it could be committed to at a lower global
temperature, long before it begins to be observed (Jones et al. 2009). Toby
Gardner (4.3) considers the social and economic implications of these
forecasts for the region.
The boreal forest in Western Canada is currently suffering from an
invasion of mountain pine beetle that has caused widespread tree mortality
(Kurz et al. 2008a) and has turned the nation’s forests from a carbon sink
to a carbon source (Kurz et al. 2008b). More widespread future dieback has
been predicted at >3°C global warming (Kriegler et al. 2009; Lucht et al.
2006) (7°C regional warming), through a mixture of heat stress, increased
vulnerability to disease, decreased reproduction rates and more frequent
fires, all increasing mortality. The forest could be replaced by open
woodlands or grasslands, in turn amplifying summer warming, drying and
fire frequency.
Tropical coral reefs have recently experienced widespread and detrimental bleaching events as the ocean warms, and may be nearing a ‘point
of no return’ (Veron et al. 2009). Ocean acidification (due to rising atmospheric CO2) may also contribute to threshold-like changes (Riebesell et al.
28

Tipping elements from a global perspective
2009) particularly for cold-water corals that grow down to 3000 m depth.
Up to 70 per cent of them could be in corrosive waters by the end of this
century (Guinotte et al. 2006). However, it is unclear whether there is a
large-scale tipping point in the offing.

Circulation change
The Atlantic thermohaline circulation (THC) could be shut down if sufficient
freshwater enters the North Atlantic to halt density-driven deep water
formation there (Hofmann and Rahmstorf 2009; Peng 1995; Stommel 1961).
This probably needs >4°C warming this century (Kriegler et al. 2009),
although existing models are systematically biased towards a stable THC
(Drijfhout et al. 2011). Still, as the THC weakens (IPCC 2007) it may pass a
nearer tipping point in which deep water stops forming in the Labrador
Sea region (to the west of Greenland) and switches to only occurring in the
Greenland-Iceland-Norwegian Seas (to the east of Greenland) (Born and
Levermann 2010; Levermann and Born 2007). This would increase sea level
down the north-eastern seaboard of the USA by around 25 cm (in addition
to a rise in global mean sea level) (Yin et al. 2009).
The Sahel and the West African Monsoon (WAM) have experienced rapid
but reversible changes in the past, including devastating drought from the
late 1960s through to the 1980s. Forecast future weakening of the THC
contributing to ‘Atlantic Niño’ conditions, including strong warming in the
Gulf of Guinea (Cook and Vizy 2006), could disrupt the seasonal onset of
the WAM (Chang et al. 2008) and its later ‘jump’ northwards (Hagos and
Cook 2007) into the Sahel. Whilst this might be expected to dry the Sahel,
models give conflicting results. In one, if the WAM circulation collapses,
this leads to wetting of parts of the Sahel as moist air is drawn in from the
Atlantic to the west (Cook and Vizy 2006; Patricola and Cook 2008),
greening the region in a rare example of a positive tipping point.
The Indian Summer Monsoon (ISM) is already being disrupted (Meehl et
al. 2008; Ramanathan et al. 2005) and rice harvests impaired (Auffhammer
et al. 2006) by an atmospheric brown cloud (ABC) haze that sits over the
sub-continent and, to a lesser degree, the Indian Ocean. The ABC haze
comprises a mixture of soot, which absorbs sunlight, and some reflecting
sulphate. It causes heating of the atmosphere rather than the land surface,
weakening the seasonal establishment of a land–ocean temperature gradient which triggers monsoon onset (Ramanathan et al. 2005). Conversely,
greenhouse gas forcing is acting to strengthen the monsoon as it warms the
29

Tim Lenton
northern land masses faster than the ocean to the south. In some future
projections, ABC forcing could double the drought frequency within a
decade (Ramanathan et al. 2005) with large impacts, although it should be
highly reversible.
The El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) has recently produced severe
El Niño events (e.g. in 1983 and 1998), and their pattern has arguably
changed towards ‘Modiki’ events where the warm pool shifts from the west
to the middle (rather than the east) of the equatorial Pacific (Ashok and
Yamagata 2009; Yeh et al. 2009). Models disagree over the sign of future
changes in El Niño amplitude (Collins et al. 2010) but generally give no
change in frequency. Some models simulate increased El Niño amplitude
in future (Collins et al. 2010; Guilyardi 2006), but ENSO is unlikely to either
vanish or become overly strong this century (Kriegler et al. 2009; Latif and
Keenlyside 2009). Whether there is any underlying tipping point is highly
uncertain.
Southwest North America (land within 125–95°W, 25–40°N) is probably
already in transition to a drier state ‘unlike any . . . we have seen in the
instrumental record’ (Seager et al. 2007), which may link to increased
flooding in the Great Plains (Cook et al. 2008). However, a tipping point is
again unclear.

Other stressors
Of course human activities could trigger large-scale tipping points that are
unrelated to climate change. Humans are stressing the planet in a variety
of ways, including profound changes in land-use, an order-of-magnitude
increase in soil erosion rates (and associated sedimentation in marine
margins) and widespread reductions in biodiversity. As humans progressively eliminate the links in complex food webs, and introduce new
links in the form of invasive species, there will likely come points at which
the underlying network structures and the functioning of the corresponding ecosystems must be fundamentally altered. Meanwhile the
widespread erosion of the soils is depleting stores of essential nutrients and
the storage capacity for water, upon which ecosystems (including
agricultural ones) depend. The transfer of fertilizer nutrient inputs and
eroded soil to the ocean, either washed through freshwaters, or carried in
dust and gases through the atmosphere, then tends to fuel the depletion of
oxygen in coastal waters, and ultimately the open ocean. Toxic algal blooms
can be triggered in coastal waters. In the open ocean, oxygen minimum
30

Tipping elements from a global perspective
zones (or ‘dead zones’) at depth are already spreading (Stramma et al. 2008)
and causing essential nutrients to be released from the sediments, in a
positive feedback loop that is thought to have driven much of the ocean
anoxic in intervals of Earth’s past (Handoh and Lenton 2003).

Risk assessment
The prospect of having to deal with high-impact but uncertain events,
including a strong element of unpredictability, is not new. Think of earthquakes or hurricanes making landfall. Systems exist for dealing with such
events, and they hinge around a risk management approach. Although
these are relatively short-timescale ‘events’, some of the risk management
principles may be usefully mapped over to climate tipping points. Risk, in
the formal sense, is the product of the likelihood (or probability) of
something happening and its (negative) impact. So a meaningful risk
assessment of tipping elements would demand careful assessment of the
likelihood of passing various tipping points (under different forcing
scenarios), as well as the associated impacts.

How close are tipping points?
It is natural to try to locate tipping points in terms of global mean
temperature change (‘global warming’), although the connection is always
indirect, often difficult to make, and sometimes not meaningful. Recent
efforts suggest that 1°C global warming (above the 1980–1999 mean) could
be dangerous as there are ‘moderately significant’ (Smith et al. 2009) risks
of large-scale discontinuities (i.e. tipping points). Also, Arctic sea-ice and
possibly the Greenland ice sheet would be threatened (Hansen et al. 2007;
Lenton et al. 2008). Warming of 3°C is clearly dangerous as risks of largescale discontinuities are ‘substantial or severe’ (Smith et al. 2009), and
several tipping elements could be threatened (Lenton et al. 2008). Under a
2–4°C committed warming, expert elicitation (Kriegler et al. 2009) gives a
>16 per cent probability of crossing at least one of five tipping points, which
rises to a >56 per cent probability (i.e. more likely than not) for a >4°C
committed warming. Considering a longer list of nine potential tipping
elements, Figure 2.2 summarizes recent information on the likelihood of
tipping them, under the IPCC range of projected global warming this
century.
31

Year 2100 range (IPCC 2007)

Yedoma permafrost

West African Monsoon

El Niño Southern Oscillation

1

Boreal forest

2

Amazon rainforest

3

Greenland ice sheet

4

West Antarctic ice sheet

5

Atlantic thermohaline circulation

6

Arctic summer sea-ice

Global warming above 2000 (°C)

Tim Lenton

0

1

Certain
More likely than not

0.5

As likely as not
Less likely than not

0

Won’t happen

Figure 2.2 The likelihood of tipping different elements under different degrees of
global warming (Lenton and Schellnhuber 2007), updated, based on expert
elicitation results (Kriegler et al. 2009) and recent literature.

Current assessments suggest that Arctic tipping points involving ice
melting are probably most vulnerable, with the least uncertainty surrounding this (Lenton et al. 2008). However, the greater uncertainty
surrounding other tipping points allows for the possibility that some of
them may be close as well. More detailed information can be found in the
expert elicitation results (Kriegler et al. 2009).

Which tipping points carry the greatest impacts?
Passing a climate tipping point is generally expected to have large negative
impacts, but these have only begun to be quantified for some elements and
scenarios (Lenton et al. 2009a), notably a collapse of the THC (Arnell et al.
2005; Higgins and Vellinga 2004; Link and Tol 2004), where questionable
(Shearer 2005) extrapolations have been made to national security concerns
(Schwartz and Randall 2003). To translate climate tipping points into
societal impacts typically involves several intervening steps and variables.
Underestimation problems arise because studies tend to only consider a
subset of consequences or impacted sectors (e.g. insurance (Lenton et al.
2009a)). Still, estimated impacts are already large for several tipping points
(Lenton et al. 2009a). For a THC collapse this has been contested (Link and
Tol 2004), although one is tempted to quip that only an economist could
come to the conclusion that rearranging the large-scale ocean circulation
would be beneficial to societies. Such disagreement (Arnell et al. 2005; Link
and Tol 2004) is to be expected, as impacts depend on human responses
32

Tipping elements from a global perspective
and are thus more epistemologically contested than assigning likelihoods
to events (Stirling 2003).
With these caveats in mind, a ‘straw-man’ tipping point risk matrix is
presented (Figure 2.3). Here tipping elements from the original shortlist
(Lenton et al. 2008) where a threshold can be meaningfully linked to global
temperature change are considered (thus excluding the Indian Summer
Monsoon). Relative likelihoods and impacts are assessed on a five-point
scale: low, low-medium, medium, medium-high, and high. Information on
likelihood is taken from review of the literature (Lenton and Schellnhuber
2007; Lenton et al. 2008; Lenton 2012) and expert elicitation (Kriegler et al.
2009). Impacts are considered in relative terms, based on limited research
(Lenton et al. 2009a) and my subjective judgement. The bold ring indicates
the one system where impacts have been considered in several studies
(Arnell et al. 2005; Higgins and Vellinga 2004; Lenton et al. 2009a; Link and
Tol 2004), which thus forms a reference point. Impacts depend on timescale
and here the full ‘ethical time horizon’ of 1000 years is considered (Lenton

West
African
monsoon
shift

High

West
Antarctic
ice sheet
collapse

Relative impact

ENSO
amplitude
increase

Med.

Atlantic
THC
shutdown

Highest
risk
Greenland
ice sheet
meltdown

Amazon
rainforest
dieback

Boreal
forest
dieback

Low

Arctic
summer
sea-ice
loss

Lowest
risk

Low

Med.

High

Relative likelihood

Figure 2.3 A ‘straw-man’ risk matrix for climate tipping points (Lenton 2011).

33

Tim Lenton
et al. 2008) assuming minimal discounting of impacts on future generations.
(Note that if placed on an absolute scale compared to other climate
eventualities most tipping point impacts would be high.)
This risk matrix illustrates some familiar dilemmas for the would-be risk
manager: ‘relatively high impact–low probability’ events, such as West
African monsoon shift, come out with a similar risk to ‘relatively lower
impact–high probability’ events, such as Arctic summer sea-ice loss.
However, what stand out are the ‘high impact–high-probability’ scenarios
as a priority for risk management effort: in this case Greenland ice sheet
meltdown and West Antarctic ice sheet collapse. I emphasize that this
straw-man assessment could be spectacularly wrong, especially on the
impact axis. The point is to inspire a more scientifically credible and socially
legitimate assessment of the risks, which in turn demands the engagement
of a wider team of experts and relevant stakeholders (Stirling 2003).
The effort to translate climate tipping points into impacts inevitably
leads down to regional, local and individual scales where the impacts will
be felt. Whilst the Earth system scientist tries to gaze omnisciently at the
planet from the top down, an alternative approach would be to define
tipping points in impacts from the bottom up. The bottom-up approach
would doubtless lead to the identification of some different threats, not
least because some nations may experience tipping points as a result of
entirely smooth changes in climate. For example, even a smooth movement
in latitude of the jet streams, relative to island nations that are fixed in
location underneath, can cause tipping point changes. The 2007 summer
flooding in the UK is a seasonal example of the effects of a southwardstraying polar jet. For Australia, the future depends crucially on whether
the subtropical jet, which has been weakening, drifts away from the
continent.
Having taken a risk-assessment approach, where the tipping points are
treated independently, it is also worth considering a worst case scenario,
which includes potential interactions between them. The aim of such
horizon scanning is to be braced for all possible eventualities.

What is the worst case scenario?
By 2100, the worst case would be to be locked on to a trajectory to a hotter,
higher sea-level, low-ice state for the planet, with qualitatively different
patterns of atmospheric and oceanic circulation, different modes of internal

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Tipping elements from a global perspective
variability, diminished carbon stores on land, and major changes in biomes
– in short, a structural change in the Earth system. In this worst case
scenario, unmitigated radiative forcing and high climate sensitivity trigger
‘domino dynamics’, in which tipping one element of the Earth system
significantly increases the probability of tipping another, and so on.
Worryingly, from the limited information (Kriegler et al. 2009) that exists
on the causal relations between different individual tipping events, the
majority of connections do reinforce one another. Furthermore, the palaeorecord shows us that the Earth system ‘prefers’ particular states from time
to time and tends to switch between them. On several occasions in the past,
the planet was radically reorganized without there being any sign of a
particularly large forcing perturbation (e.g. at the end of the last ice age).
This scenario might go something like this. The loss of Arctic summer
sea-ice accelerates warming on the neighbouring land surfaces. The
Greenland ice sheet is already in a state of irreversible shrinkage, and seaice loss accelerates its contribution to sea-level rise. The West Antarctic ice
sheet starts to collapse and the rate of sea-level rise exceeds 1 metre per
century (upper limit 2 metres by 2100 (Pfeffer et al. 2008)). The Atlantic
overturning circulation weakens and deep water formation shifts in
location, leading to regionally enhanced sea-level rise along the north-east
cost of North America (Yin et al. 2009). Weakening of the overturning
contributes to strong warming in the tropical Atlantic and a collapse of the
West African monsoon (Chang et al. 2008). Meanwhile the monsoon in
Southeast Asia shows enhanced inter-annual variability and Himalayan
glaciers shrink, first increasing and later reducing dry season river flow. El
Niño events become stronger and droughts afflicting the Amazon cause
rainforest dieback mid-century. Some regions of unfreezing tundra lose
their carbon abruptly (Khvorostyanov et al. 2008a), and large areas of boreal
forest dieback (Lucht et al. 2006), releasing yet more carbon. Arctic sea-ice
is lost year-round at the end of the century (Eisenman and Wettlaufer 2009),
contributing to further reorganization of atmospheric and ocean circulation
patterns.
This is an apocalyptic storyline, which should not be viewed as a
prediction or projection. In its totality, the scenario is highly unlikely to
transpire. However, the impacts are so great that from a risk-management
point of view, it deserves consideration. Furthermore, parts of the scenario
may become more likely than not (Kriegler et al. 2009) if we are heading
into a >4°C warmer world.

35

Tim Lenton

What early warning signs should we be looking for?
Faced with the risk of unpleasant climate surprises, perhaps the most useful
information that science could provide to help societies cope is some early
warning of an approaching tipping point. Early warning information can
take several forms, ranging from the knowledge that a threshold change
could occur, through qualitative assessment that it is becoming more likely,
to a forecast of its timing. For several rapid onset natural hazards, e.g.
hurricanes (Willoughby et al. 2007) and tsunamis (Titov et al. 2005), quite
sophisticated early warning systems are already in place (Sorensen 2000),
whilst for some slower onset hazards, e.g. drought (Verdin et al. 2005) and
malaria outbreaks (Thomson et al. 2006), seasonal forecasting skill is
beginning to be used in early warning. The United Nations (2006) has called
for the development of a globally comprehensive early warning system,
but this has yet to consider early warning of climate tipping points.
There are encouraging signs that we can directly extract some information on the present stability (or otherwise) of different tipping elements.
Recent progress has been made in identifying and testing generic early
warning indicators of an approaching tipping point (Dakos et al. 2008;
Lenton et al. 2008; Lenton et al. 2009b; Livina and Lenton 2007; Scheffer et
al. 2009). In particular, slowing down in response to perturbation is a nearly
universal property of systems approaching various types of tipping point
(Dakos et al. 2008; Scheffer et al. 2009; Wissel 1984). To visualize this, picture
the present state of a system as a ball in a curved potential well (attractor)
that is being nudged around by some stochastic (random) noise process,
e.g. weather (Figure 2.4). The ball continually tends to roll back towards
the bottom of the well – its lowest potential energy state – and the rate at
which it rolls back is determined by the curvature of the potential well. As
the system is forced towards a bifurcation point, the potential well becomes
flatter. Hence the ball will roll back ever more sluggishly. At the bifurcation
point, the potential becomes flat and the ball is destined to roll off into some
other state (alternative potential well).
Slowing down can be detected as increasing temporal or spatial
correlation in data, increasing memory, or a shift to greater fluctuations at
lower frequencies. Such signals have been successfully detected in past
climate records approaching different transitions (Dakos et al. 2008; Lenton
et al. 2012a; Lenton et al. 2012b; Livina and Lenton 2007), and in model
experiments (Dakos et al. 2008; Held and Kleinen 2004; Kleinen et al. 2003;
Lenton et al. 2009b; Lenton et al. 2012b; Livina and Lenton 2007). This offers
the prospect of probabilistic forecasting of some conceivable future climate
36

Tipping elements from a global perspective

τ

System being
forced past a
bifurcation
point

Figure 2.4 Schematic representation of a system being forced past a bifurcation
point. The system’s response time to small perturbations is related to the growing
radius of the potential well (Lenton et al. 2008).

tipping points (Lenton et al. 2008), especially if such statistical early warning
indicators can be combined with dynamical models. However, critics have
questioned the statistical robustness of proposed early warning signals
(Ditlevsen and Johnsen 2010), and have noted that some types of abrupt
transition carry no early warning signals (Ditlevsen and Johnsen 2010;
Hastings and Wysham 2010).
Other early warning indicators that have been explored for ecological
tipping points include increasing variance (Biggs et al. 2009), skewed
responses (Biggs et al. 2009; Guttal and Jayaprakash 2008), and their spatial
equivalents (Guttal and Jayaprakash 2009). Successful tests on ecological
models (Dakos et al. 2010) suggest it would be worth looking for increasing
37

Tim Lenton
spatial correlation as an early warning indicator in climate data and
models. Also, increasing variability is beginning to be applied to anticipating climate tipping points (Ditlevsen and Johnsen 2010). For climate
sub-systems subject to a high degree of short timescale variability (‘noise’),
flickering between states may occur prior to a more permanent transition
(Bakke et al. 2009). For such cases, we have recently developed a method
of deducing the number of states (or ‘modes’) being sampled by a system,
their relative stability (or otherwise), and changes in these properties over
time (Livina et al. 2010).
Looking ahead, there is a need for much better targeted monitoring of
tipping elements and their leading indicators of vulnerability. In many
cases, model-based research is needed to establish which variables best
indicate underlying vulnerability (and can be readily monitored). Then
direct or remote-sensing-based monitoring can be designed and implemented (for example, much recent effort has been invested in directly
monitoring (Cunningham et al. 2007) the overturning strength of the
Atlantic at 26.5°N).

When can we get reliable predictions?
Whilst the prospects for early warning are encouraging, the very nature
of Earth system dynamics is such that we can never have complete
predictability of tipping points: a mixture of deterministic and stochastic
processes will always be at work. We can work to better constrain the
deterministic components, and to get a measure of the nature, level and
influence of the ‘noise’. But there will always be the potential for a random
fluctuation to tip a vulnerable system at a time that cannot be precisely
predicted. This is a kind of ‘irreducible uncertainty’. It means that any
tipping point early warning system has the potential for missed alarms.
Still, by 2030, if we continue to clean up our aerosol pollution, then we
may get a much better measure of the sensitivity of global temperature to
radiative forcing. The reason is that the direct and indirect effects of
aerosols (especially on cloud properties) are currently having a cooling
effect, but the size of that effect is by far the most poorly constrained term
in the equation determining global temperature. By removing the aerosols
we will learn how much cooling effect they have been imparting. This will
greatly improve our upper limit on how warm it could get by the end of
the century, and hence which tipping elements are vulnerable.
38

Tipping elements from a global perspective

How should we respond?
Once an early warning of an approaching climate tipping point has been
obtained and effectively communicated, risk can be reduced by trying to
minimize the likelihood of passing a tipping point, or by trying to minimize
the impacts of passing it. Corresponding risk-reduction strategies need to
be considered and evaluated (Keller et al. 2008). Conceivably, for some
climate tipping points, warning could be early enough to allow aversive
action by mitigation of short-lived radiative forcing agents (Jackson 2009),
or by geo-engineering to reduce incoming sunlight (Lenton and Vaughan
2009). However, the multiple sources of inertia in the climate system,
and in human response systems, make this proposition questionable.
An analogous problem of avoiding an approaching tipping point in an
ecological system – a fishery (Biggs et al. 2009) – shows that once there is a
reliable early warning of an approaching tipping point, it is too late for slow
intervention methods to avoid it. Even where a tipping point is unavoidable, mitigation action may still help. For example, the rate of Greenland
ice sheet melt and corresponding sea-level rise, even when committed to
irreversible meltdown, depends on the extent to which this threshold has
been exceeded (Huybrechts and De Wolde 1999). Still, adaptation to
minimize impacts is likely to be the dominant response when faced with
most tipping point early warnings. Appropriate adaptation action will
clearly depend on the particular tipping point, but in the worst case it could
involve intentional resettlement of populations before their home region
becomes uninhabitable. As a general rule, early warning information is
only useful if the warning recipients are empowered to act effectively on
the information (Patt and Gwata 2002).

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46

PART 3
THE CULTURE DIMENSIONS

One of the purposes of the Kavli conference was to place together contrasting perspectives on the tipping points theme. This is particularly true
of the relationship between the two contributions of this Part in the context
of the science-based Chapter 2.1. Tim Lenton is well aware of science–
policy relationships, so he frames his analysis both from the perspective of
evidentiary science and the organized prognoses of informed commentators. Giles Foden, who is a writer, but also a student of complex systems
and indeterminacy, offers (3.1) the framing of metaphor and narrative for
providing another insight into the reading of tipping points. He recognizes
the power of bringing together contradictory and novel information to
kick-start revelation as fresh ways of creating understanding. He sees the
notion of ‘tipping’ as being both a tap or a hit, and the transformation of
the object or process which is struck or tilted. This allows for the joining
up of analysis and interpretation on the one hand, and narrative and
scenario on the other, where the process of speculating about the future is
one of both storytelling and prognosis. In this way, Tim Lenton’s prognoses
depicted in Figure 2.2 are but one version of the metaphor process offered
by Foden.
What we discern here is the mixing of three sets of observation which
perhaps lie at the core of this book. One is the longevity of the concept of
abrupt change in the lexicon of language and metaphor. So ‘tipping points’
may be a relatively recently coined phrase, but the notion of tip and travel
(or transformation caused by some form of hitting or forcing) is well settled
in the linguistic tradition.
A second concept is the bringing together of many ideas and perspectives which cause some form of fresh outlooks, or revelation, of ‘contemplative consciousness’ to use the phrase offered by Laurence Freeman in

The culture dimension
Chapter 5.1. Here may lurk the devices for the kinds of transformative
beginnings we search for in Part 8.
The third view is that provided by Matthew Taylor in this section (3.2)
and by Camilla Toulmin (7.4). This is the scope for enabling individuals
and groups to be confident about letting go of the interpretations of rapid
and convulsive change as these perspectives are influenced by peer
pressure and by personal mindsets, and to have the opportunity and
courage to explore new ways forward, both for personal behaviour as well
as for collective resilience.
Giles Foden had provided the spark for this scope for transformative
action, and Laurence Freeman offers the spiritual and meditative underpinning for the process to evolve without internal intellectual crises or
external stress. We are very grateful to both of these authors for initiating
this vital perspective on tipping points in such a rich interdisciplinary
manner, and to their companion commentators Matthew Taylor (3.2) and
David Atkinson (5.2) for reinforcing their contributions. Tipping points are
as turbulent for the mind as they are for the planet.

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3.1
Skittles
The story of the tipping point metaphor
and its relation to new realities
GILES FODEN

Let us assume, for the context of the present discussion, a situation in which
‘global coordination for sustainable outcomes is needed to an extent that
existing institutions are clearly unable to provide’ (Foden 2009: 1). This
would not necessarily mean that we need new institutions – but it would
at least mean that existing institutions must find novel ways to disengage
from linear, ‘locked-in’ modes of thinking. The proposed challenge is
genuinely multidimensional and definitively transdisciplinary. It involves
from the outset a need for clarity about who the ‘we’ is, and an accompanying effort of inclusion and flexibility. It would therefore seem likely
that systems theory is a framework in which radical new approaches might
be taken.
As it is now commonly encountered in models of complex systems, the
metaphor of the tipping point seems a good place to begin a systems-based
encounter with metaphor. Metaphor and its close cousin narrative can offer
pathways to a higher-order management of complexity. This can aid
decision-making, policy formulation, and communication. All this is
already to hand: what lies further from our grasp, beckoning from times
ahead, is a kind of benign tipping point for all, a shift in global consciousness that will allow us to face the future with excitement and purpose.
Inevitably that process will involve us separating ourselves mentally from
those modes of thinking and habits of behaviour which have put us in
abeyance as regards the world to come.

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Giles Foden

A new paradigm
One of the functions of metaphor is to open up unmeasured domains and
potential channels of action. This is necessary at a time when our models
of the world and consequent plans for action are underdetermined by our
scientific observations and overdetermined by our past experiences (Van
der Leeuw 2004; Atlan 1992). We make policies on a deficit of knowledge,
effectively seeding future crisis into socio-economic systems, with correlate
damage to Earth systems.
Our current plight relates to global society’s inability to process a wide
range of signals, suggesting that multiple systems have either failed or are
on the point of failure. We can see it happening, despite inadequate data,
but we don’t seem to be able to do anything. We appear paralysed by our
modes of thought, as if viewing multiple images of ourselves in mirrored
postures of rictus. One way out could involve a new engagement of science,
technology, humanities, and the creative arts. This would begin by acknowledging both general indeterminacy and the particular interrelations of
systems/groups, and then move forward to new states, through a linked
understanding of relativity and metaphoricity. We need to design the
future from a range of narrative options rather than accept it as it comes to
us: metaphor gives us the frames with which to begin doing that.

Metaphor and science
At the very least, commitment to the study and practice of metaphor is a
useful supplement to traditional scientific activity, offering a different type
of future-oriented knowledge that can provide a platform for decisive
action. The combinations of metaphor are anyway bound up with the semiintuitive aspect of science as it relates to language and the unconscious.
Metaphor is of a type with ‘the combinations which present themselves to
the mind in a kind of sudden illumination’ identified by Poincaré (1914:
58), who was extremely alert to the mutual transformations of mathematical and verbal concepts, and how verbal analogies can stimulate both
research and public understanding. (It was also Poincaré, of course, who
developed the modern conceptions of stability on the foundations laid by
the eighteenth-century mathematicians mentioned below.)
Long before publication of Malcolm Gladwell’s (2000) famous book, the
phrase ‘tipping point’ existed in interrelated areas of ecology and environ50

Skittles
mental science. In these fields, tipping points often have the status of
discretely understood academic and physical realities: they are ‘literal’, to
use the appropriate linguistic term, rather than ‘figurative’. Frequently
these apparently non-metaphorical tipping points have already established
different scientific understandings through discipline and paradigm, so
that ‘tipping point’ means something different as well as being something
different.
In general it appears that these scientific users are not, at least not consciously, committing the useful error of metaphoric expression. When
encountering a word or phrase somewhat at odds with its expected
conceptual context within a language system, interpreters seek out –
through perceived resemblances between the tenor (underlying idea A)
and vehicle (the metaphorical word or phrase B) of a metaphor – the
perceived semantic intention (C), according to a particular discourse. As
we will see, such interpretation is not without risk of failure: it is not
necessarily a given that (C) is more easily or instantly grasped, or even that
more creative communication is the underlying purpose of metaphors.
Metaphor is creative in the sense that fire is creative: it jumps from roof to
roof, opening up new ground, and fresh arrays of positional information,
according to how the burnt sticks fall.
Between conceptual context, discourse situation, and models of a
language system in general, are various philosophical traps: each of those
interrelated contextual domains is a shifting field of uncertainty.
Tripping, tumbling – tipping – into one of these traps and suddenly
understanding the problem, otherwise well-intentioned scientists might
find they had, in fact, been using metaphors without having realized they
were doing so. It would be a specific instance of Jakobson’s observation
(1960: 356) that like Molière’s M. Jourdain we all ‘practice metalanguage
without realizing the metalingual character of our operations’.
This recognition would be in the nature of a tipping point in itself, as
the notionally solid footing of the phrase within a particular scientific
discipline could then be impeached. And then, as if a line of marching
soldiers were to trip in succession, the ankles of one having been entangled
in the bolas of a guerrilla rhetorician, why not the next term and the next?
Yet as we will see, if metaphorical slippage is itself recalibrated as
offering a visionary half-glimpse of quantum realities, what was a problem
becomes a novel opportunity.

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Giles Foden

What does metaphor do?
Metaphor offers a displacement of information: it dynamically makes other
linguistic contexts present, subjecting the pre-existing understanding (A)
to a shift or substitution (B), which process may summon a composite or
third value (C) that asks to observed and understood in turn. It is important
to consider that while A and C operate over longer time series (forward
and backwards in time – see Figure 3.1 below), B’s union or equivalence
with A is instantiated in a single transformative moment.1 It is a kind of
new beginning: a ‘tipping point’, as we may say, a place where or moment
when new types of being are begun, born of the couplings of language in
a particular context.
Metaphor’s moment of conjecture (‘throwing together’) invites us on a
voyage towards future conclusions, taking us on a new tack in the direction
of other final states than those we might otherwise have envisaged. As
Mason (1987: 245) has it, ‘Metaphor gives us a new, unthought-for equation, an infusion of meaning from outside customary domains.’
For decision-makers, the appearance of these new potentialities within
the bounds of conception implies at least an optional possibility of
actualization. Whether the decision was not at all possible before (because
the mental conditions for it had not been created until the conjecture had
taken place) is an arguable philosophical point. The issue is bound up with
ideas about time and the ways in which humanity deals with continuous
and discrete phenomena. In open systems, tipping points remain a critical
change but the separateness of the pre- and post-tip point moment is
challenged: by feedback and feedforward issues, by activity at the edge of
the system, by disappearances from it, and by the new values brought into
being by the emergent situation. It is in these areas that our best hopes lie:
by simultaneously inculcating a sense of a developing present,2 revising
past projections, and envisioning new possibilities, we can ourselves

1

However, the equivalence may be perpetuated over longer time series through repeated
motifs and artistic concinnity. This is Roland Barthes’ point about a ‘syntagmatized paradigm’.
It is worth bearing in mind, as Čermák (1997) shows, that synchrony and diachrony are much
debated terms in linguistics.
2
Some related temporal aspects of dynamical narratives are addressed from a literary
perspective in Mark Currie’s ‘The Novel and the Moving Now’ (2009), which considers the
fictional novel as a model of time, specifically for a nunc movens (moving now) conception of
time. Links to narrative are briefly addressed at the end of this chapter.

52

Skittles
become resilient. Elsewhere I consider some ways of addressing ourselves
to that ideal practically (Foden 2010).
Metaphor plays a key role in what literature knows, as well as in its
poetic effects. It is also something that users of language in general ‘do’ or
‘perform’, consciously or unconsciously. Rhetoric (traditionally the native
ground of metaphor as a practice) provides language-based heuristics for
various purposes, while in linguistics metaphorology is a distinct branch
of objective study. From Aristotle to Hegel, to Derrida and beyond, philosophers of language have tried to grasp metaphor, either within a total
rationale, or in passing while focused on other matters.
The slipperiest of fishes, metaphor won’t be in fact governed by any one
of these disciplines or types of activity. This is why systems theory is a good
environment in which to think about it, though we should not be complacent about the ability of any discipline or practice to contain metaphor.
Engaging with metaphors we leap across logical and hierarchical divisions,
making category errors that overturn the authority structures embedded
in linguistic and philosophical systems. As Paul de Man (1979: 10) suggests:
‘Rhetoric radically suspends logic and opens up vertiginous possibilities
of referential aberration.’
To see metaphor as a form of knowledge is to acknowledge its errant
behaviour (broadly, its positing of A as B against contextual expectation)
as useful. At the same time, we must equally acknowledge the unruliness
of metaphor’s transformative power. This is to recognize metaphor as ‘the
unsystemizable, transcendent centre of language’ (Coetzee 1979: 28). The
best we can hope for is that since metaphors summon their newly observed
values from other contexts, these new values contain the possibility of
greater social utility than that which obtained with old values. Of course,
the reverse is also true: this is the secondary risk of metaphor, the first being
that you simply are not understood (see the commentary by Matthew
Taylor which follows).
There are no doubt complicated reasons in the social psyche for metaphor’s double life as a communicative civil servant and a tramping outcast.
The essential relation of metaphor to positional information (and ‘context’
in general) means that polarity just offered (A = B) can never be relied upon.
Sometimes metaphors fail and then ‘irony comes in to save the day when
the world turns upside down on consciousness, when the old certainties
become uncertainties, and there is no new standard to put in place of the
old’ (Mason 1987: 245).

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Giles Foden

Interdisciplinary problems and opportunities
Many scientists, rightly seeking to be exact about phenomena, struggle
with the concept that all language is subject to metaphoric slippage; yet to
not believe so would come close to being a trahison des clercs in the
humanities. At the same time, humanities people make little effort to make
an accommodation with scientific models and methodologies about and
around uncertainty, in particular those
system dynamics that have been generalized by advances in mathematical,
scientific and technological research over the past 50 years, together with new
approaches to the use of data and ICT.
(Hunt et al. 2012: 1)

Though the idea of mimesis is well developed in the humanities, it is not
adequately linked with the scientific idea of a model: that needs to happen
if a truly transdisciplinary moment is to occur.
There have, however, been a number of attempts to link systems theory
with linguistics (such as Rogers 1987–88). There have also been significant
attempts by creative writers to admit systems theory. Some of these are
charted in Tom Leclair’s groundbreaking In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the
Systems Novel (Leclair 1988), one of few attempts to bring systems theory
into literary hermeneutics.3
Scientific and humanities conceptions of uncertainty and indeterminacy
need, in any large systems model, to be brought into yoked harness if a
higher-order field of enquiry and decision-making is to be established. Part
of this will involve further transfer to formal logic and mathematics of
philosophical concepts. While that has long been a direction of some
aspects of Anglo-American philosophy, it seems to have happened much
less with the French and German philosophers whose work is concerned
with, indeed is often based on, uncertainty and indeterminacy. This process
would need to recognize the objection made by Coetzee (1979: 28) to ‘any
scheme that has recourse to analogy . . . If rules are to be rules, they must
be well-defined. The relation “to be like” must be defined.’ (The occluded
context of Coetzee’s observation is the system of political apartheid in
South Africa.)
3

I myself write not as a specialist of metaphor within linguistics but as a creative writer who
stumbled into the world of complexity while writing a novel. Turbulence (2009), which is about
the D-Day weather forecast, invokes the paradigm of turbulent fluid motions across multiple
systems to address issues of uncertainty.

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Skittles
The idea of metaphors (and narratives) as vehicles across dimensionality
and between groups or sets, in a mathematical sense and in the wider field
of information processing, does not seem to have been adequately
explored. It may in the future be possible to develop an ICT-enabled spatial
(or topological) conceptualization of a lexicon that exploits the ability of
metaphors to ‘travel’ across experiences that are usually demarcated. But
as de Beaugrande observes:
the concept of ‘dimensionality’ is meaningful only if we assume that any
particular observed value belongs within a range of alternative values of ‘the
same’ dimension. In that sense, the observed value rests on the interference
pattern of other possible values.
(de Beaugrande 1989: 23)

Nonetheless, as a subject for information processing (as something
which offers instantaneous communication between cognitive categories
or linguistic events), metaphor might helpfully be understood as an
interference phenomenon on this basis, with the pattern developing from
the new value-system that is in the process of emerging when metaphorization takes place.
The problem, of course, is that we don’t know the limits and correlations
of the emergent structure, so it is not fully logical or intelligible. But this is
also the opportunity of metaphor as a pointing tool to orientate evolving
structures.
Semantics, discourse analysis and related areas of the social sciences
have evolved many useful modes of analysis that could act as a bridging
mechanism between humanities and science, but these seem to be rarely
deployed in the service of global systems science, despite the current
importance placed on metaphor, narrative and communication in general
by scientists and policymakers.
There is, however, some background for treating tipping points as
metaphors with respect to an analogous discussion of the related term
‘resilience’ within the literature of adaptation within socio-environmental
systems:
When applied to people and their environments, resilience is fundamentally
a metaphor. With roots in the sciences of physics and mathematics, the term
originally was used to describe the capacity of a material or system to return
to equilibrium after a displacement. A resilient material, for example, bends
and bounces back, rather than breaks, when stressed (Gordon 1978; Bodin
and Wiman 2004). In physics, resilience is not a matter of how large the initial
displacement is or even how severe the oscillations are but is more precisely

55

Giles Foden
the speed with which homeostasis is achieved. The image is a compelling
one, capable of sparking human imagination, as it clearly did for Holling
(1973) in his original and influential thesis about ‘ecological resilience’.
(Norris et al. 2008: 127)

The two terms, ’resilience’ and ‘tipping point’, are extremely significant
in current socio-environmental discourse, and that they come from the
domain of physics (demonstrably so in the case of resilience, more tentatively with the tipping point phrase – see the quotation from Bernoulli
below), should probably be being treated as significant information in itself,
i.e. the figurative dimension of these words says something about the
disciplines in which they are being used; and this should not really be that
surprising at all, as linguistic developments are systemic signals just as
valid as ocean temperature data.
For now, and for that reason, we will proceed on the basis that tipping
points are both metaphors and physical realities, as if a convergence of
discursive and physical systems has taken place, a collapse between the
multidisciplinary usage of the term ‘tipping point’ in a major world
language and the interdependent actualization of tipping points in different
socio-environmental systems. If that is indeed the case, it would be an
extremely worrying development.

Theories of metaphor
As is well known to humanities scholars, the origin of the word ‘metaphor’
in many European languages is the Greek meta-pherein, a carrying over
from one realm to another, a ‘transference’. The word relates to a wider
conception of ‘transport’ deeply embedded in ancient Greek thought. This
carrying over is more specifically defined as the transport of a linguistic
entity from one category, discipline or paradigm to another. It relates to
classical theories of groups, and in respect of the interference patterns
mentioned above it is worth remarking that mathematical/physical and
philosophical group theory comes from the same fundamental classical
sources.
When a metaphor is made, a process of mapping takes place between
literal and figurative. Already, however, in the notion of a map we see an
example of metaphorical usage conditioning our everyday language. This
conditioning explodes the dichotomy between literal and figurative on
which more basic metaphor theory depends, which is one reason why the
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Skittles
simplistic appeal to analogy between A and B cannot be maintained
philosophically.
Partly for this reason, the theory of metaphor has since classical times
been one of the most contentious subjects in philosophy, literary criticism
and linguistics. We cannot hope to cover all that bloody ground here but,
arming ourselves with patience, we shall try to sow a few dragon’s teeth
that might spring up in the service of systems thinking generally, rather
than fomenting disputes.
We might begin with understanding what class of concept metaphor is
within rhetoric. While there have been many philosophical challenges to
the classification, within literary study metaphor is commonly treated as
an example of a ‘trope’ or ‘figure’ whereby there has been a divergence
from a proper or literal use, thus also ‘error’, as in err (wander), an important concept in literary study.
There may well be a link to the systems idea of the non-linear or dynamic
reaction in Bahti’s well-founded observation that:
the general insistence on trope’s and figure’s divergence from a quasinaturalistic or basic norm is apparently preserved in the terms themselves,
trope being from the Gr. tropein, ‘to turn’, ‘to swerve’, figure from the Lat.
figura, ‘the made’, ‘the shaped’.
(Bahti 1993: 410)

This suggests that the preceding linguistic context constitutes a system
input from which the emerging metaphor is the unpredicted output. The
idea of trope is at base sensuous and organic while the opposite is true of
figura, where the emphasis is on construction: the distinction is significant
in metaphorology but little observed.
The most commonly deployed theory of metaphor, from Aristotle to
Jakobson and beyond, through various modulations, involves a substitution. A = B, again (though of course the conditions are always different).
Hitherto, this diachronic moment of substitution has been opposed,
graphically and conceptually, with a related synchronic structure of
signification: that is to say, the structure of metonymy in which concepts
are either categorically related or contiguously linked by syntax.
In a famous paper concerned primarily to identify the empirical
linguistic function of poetry, Jakobson (1960) argues that any utterance is
a function of two axes: the metaphoric (the axis of selection/substitution)
and the metonymic (the axis of combination). Communication takes place
at the intersection of the axes, in a joint process (see Figure 3.1):
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Giles Foden
The selection is produced on the base of equivalence, similarity and
dissimilarity, synonymity and antonymity, while the combination, the
buildup of the sequence, is based on contiguity. The poetic function projects
the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of
combination.
(Jakobson 1960: 358)

Axis of selection:
analogy, poetry,
dream,
unmeasured
domains,
interdisciplinarity

Axis of
combination: logic,
prose, realism,
measured
domains,
discipline,
multidisciplinarity

A=B
transdisciplinarity,
unknown domain:
C

Metonym:
syntagm,
contiguity by
context, by already
coexisting
category or via
copula; diachrony

Metaphor:
paradigm;
similarity by
perception,
intuition or
imitation;
synchrony

Actual history, constructed models
of language; already unfolded
context and discourse situation

Foward flow of words into possible
futures; new models of language, not yet
disclosed context and discourse situation

Figure 3.1 Metaphoric and metonymic axes

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Skittles
Figure 3.1 is a customized version of a graphic crux that has dominated
the study of linguistics and literature, emphasizing (to put it in systems
terms) the linearity of grammar and a language system and the nonlinearity of metaphoric reference (and to a larger degree signification in
general, for the conditioning reasons I have explained); all linguistic activity
is involved with both axes. In linguistics and cultural study, as Jayne (2005)
has concisely shown, this binarism originated with Saussure’s ‘axis of
simultaneities’ and ‘axis of successions’ within language, then rapidly
propagated through twentieth-century thought in modulated and disputed
forms. It is worth stressing again that the linearity of models of language
systems is an idealization: in reality, of course, language-in-use reflects all
manner of variations and fluctuations across time and space, which are
flattened by models of language.
One key issue in these developments involves the direction of travel of
information between the two axes, and the related choice of ground into
which the projection of equivalence is made. As Barthes puts it:
Any metaphoric series is a syntagmatized paradigm, and any metonymy a
syntagm which is frozen and absorbed in a system; in metaphor, selection
becomes contiguity, and in metonymy contiguity becomes a field to select
from. It therefore seems that it is always on the frontiers of the two planes
that creation has a chance to occur.
(Barthes 1968: 88)

There are many related versions of this point in the semiotic literature and
it clearly also relates to aspects of group theory and relativity in mathematics and physics; it is within this intersection that a sensible new space
between the sciences and humanities might be opened up (see Favre et al.
1995). Derrida (1982: 207–71) explores the problematic play of metaphor
across groups and categories from the perspective of philosophy and the
wider humanities.
In this context it might be useful to think of the relationship between
metaphor and metonymy as itself being a tipping point (see Figure 3.2). Of
course, the diagram could equally be rearranged laterally, or with a
different balance, and this is rather the point. There is a problem or
(depending how you look at it) an opportunity of indeterminacy and
perspective. For certain: one of the problems is the challenge this presents
to the computation of language. To speculate: the opportunity could
concern aspects of quantum computation. As de Beaugrande has it:
A willingness to acknowledge indeterminacy should allow us to gain a more
determinate grasp of complex issues and of potential relations among them.

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Giles Foden

Projection into
the metaphoric field

Projection into
the metonymic field

Figure 3.2 The relationship between metaphor and metonymy
Ideally, this result could greatly expand human perception by revealing the
model character of quantum reality for numerous modes of access to classical
reality.
(de Beaugrande 1989: 46)

Versions of the substitution theory of metaphor remain the method in
working pedagogical use in most of the humanities. For many decades,
however, those working in literary semantics and other areas on the
margins of philosophy, as well as related groups working in cognitive
psychology, have challenged substitution theory. Despite their differences,
many of the other theories hold that:
rather than simply substituting one word for another, or comparing two
things, metaphor invokes a transaction between words and things, after
which words, things and thoughts are not quite the same. Metaphor, from
these perspectives, is not a decorative figure, but a transformed literalism,
meaning precisely what it says.
(Martin 1993: 761)

In this precision, we may say, the ground is prepared for a limited recovery
from aberrance of metaphor, turning its propensity to induce a mise en abîme
of signification into a useful capacity within systems science – as a vehicle
for communicating information about inaugural states of affairs, systemic
developments, or hypothetical conceptual relationships. We need to start
thinking about other metaphors that shed light on the future arrangements
implied by tipping points.
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Connecting all this with hard science is not easy. As we have discussed,
the limitation arises because metaphoricity resists finite quantities and
discrete categories. Derrida (1982: 219–29) demonstrates the paradoxical
impossibility of total schematics for a metaphorics of philosophy:
Each time that a rhetoric defines metaphor, not only is a philosophy implied,
but also a conceptual network in which philosophy itself has been constituted.
Moreover, each thread in this network forms a turn, or one might say a
metaphor . . . What is defined, therefore, is implied in the defining of the
definition.
(Derrida 1982: 230)

It follows that an intrinsic metaphorology of any delimited domain of
human experience is similarly circumscribed. In other words, the effective
metaphoric intervention is always a paradigmatic intervention. Metaphor
is, in terms of models of language, again itself a tipping point, since the
very idea of ‘other words’ always comes into play, along with challenges
to the limits of underlying groups or sets.

Metaphor and complexity
The idea that metaphor teeters on a seesaw of intelligibility/unintelligibility
is one of the links between metaphorology and complexity science. The
complex system ‘organizes within the space placed at the edge of chaos,
where an activity arises that produces a maximal information processing’
(Longa 2001: 5). In this way metaphors might be seen as both an approximation of chaos and as attractors which capture emergent aspects of the
language system ‘forcing it to abandon the territory of chaos thus entering
into an ordered pattern’ (Longa, 2001: 6). As Longa shows, the space of
possibilities is not constrained by historical possibilities but by the attractors
themselves. They constitute the informational conditions of the new
situation.
None of this should deter scientists from listening, on a simple and
practicable level, to their inner metaphor meter as they present their
findings. The temptation or need to metaphorize is probably itself a signal
that a paradigmatic shift is involved with their work and that some
alteration of theory must be made to catch up with the new information.
The rhetoric itself is part of that information, projecting itself on to the
grammar of the ostensibly scientific work as a kind of feedback effect.
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‘Catching up with the new information’ – this is rather in the nature of
dynamical systems, both in their interpretation and in terms of the systems
themselves, as they process information. As Hunt et al. (2012) reveal, a
mismatch between the speed at which a system operates and the speed at
which it processes information is often the cause of crisis.
Martin (1993: 762) points out, citing Brooke-Rose (1958), that verbal
forms of metaphor (‘the dying year’; ‘the tipping point’) are more common
than ‘the nominal “A is B” equation’. In systems terms, the use of the verbal
form would equate to the dynamical aspects of non-linearity, and a wider
sense that something unpredictable is in the process of happening, that
may or may not involve a typological change or contextual turbulence.
Richards’s (1936) idea of metaphor as a ‘transaction between contexts’
was developed by others to draw out the idea of an apparent contradiction
which causes us to seek out an emergent meaning. Black’s (1962) interaction
theory distinguished the frame (the verbal unit in which a metaphor occurs)
and the focus of a metaphor (the figurative expression itself), with the focus
bringing into being a ‘system of associated commonplaces’ that ‘interacts
with its frame to produce implications that can be shared by a speech
community’ (Martin 1993: 764).

Metaphor as risk
The risk of metaphor, and it is the risk currently being run by users of the
tipping point metaphor in the context of Earth systems, is that these
implications are not understood or acted upon. As well as within systems
theory, it might be possible to consider metaphor within a framework of
risk, but for the time being we shall keep within the domain of linguistics
(not least because ideas about risk differ radically across different
disciplines and practices).
In their seminal paper, Nair et al. (1988: 20–40) explore metaphor with
reference to the notions that (1) ‘metaphor can usefully be seen as a kind
of risk-taking in the interests of richer interpersonal communication (hence
a risk with rewards)’; and (2) that there is the possibility of a ‘cline of
metaphoricity associated by speakers with items in the lexicon’.
To expand, the implication of the second point is that makers and
interpreters of metaphors construe what is normal in context-determined
language-in-use (rather than simply the lexicon) and discern degrees of
anomalous difference away from that as they create and interpret metaphors:
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This could be cast as a continuum with familiar standard language use at one
end of the scale and the nearly indecipherable at the other end. Between these
two poles lies the usage we are interested in, involving degrees of individual
and creative risk-taking.
(Nair et al. 1988: 35)

As these authors recognize, understanding of these clines of difference is
fraught with problems, because of context dependence and other questions.
However, their most important point for our purposes relates to their
speculation that there is a ‘roughly delimitable set of core, productive and
culturally salient vocabulary items that predominate in conventional and
creative metaphors’. These are the frames the past is built upon; somehow
they must also serve as the foundations, the good Earth, for the new core
metaphors of the future.
With core metaphors, the metaphor has become so embedded and
widespread in particular cultural formations across time that the metaphorized concept itself shapes discourse and thought, for example, ‘life is
a journey’, ‘argument is war’. The definitive statement on this is the work
of Lakoff and Johnson (1978), though there have been many advances since.
It is possible that the widespread use of tipping point across disciplines
indicates its adoption as a core metaphor.

Tipping: an emergent core metaphor?
The set of core metaphors derives from basic-level concepts: that is, ‘the
most vividly grasped, most discriminable, most usefully differentiated
items in our taxonomies’ where instances of a category are judged to have
many attributes in common (i.e. wings and feathers but rarely fur in birds).
The suggestion is that the commonest, most effective, most rewarding
metaphors are those which project an equivalence of attributes from one
set to another and that that projection is understood and absorbed by
interpreters. These metaphors then become extended by analogy and
become institutionalized.
Whether this means we are now to take ‘tipping’ as an emergent basiclevel concept across multiple systems is a speculation too far, but it is
certainly the case that ‘tipping point’ is a phrase being used across a very
wide range of instances, and within certain disciplines it is institutionalized.
That multi-projection of tipping attributes across different domains is in
itself significant.
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Metaphor and separation
‘It is quite true what philosophy says; that life must be understood
backwards. But then one forgets the other principle: that it must be lived
forwards.’ Kierkegaard’s conundrum (1966 [1843]: 63, 161) invites us to
apply a folk form of Bayesian probability as a way of dealing with tipping
point problems, in that to face them we must actively reconsider the fixities
of our previous beliefs in the light of new data and new needs. Metaphor
can help memory in this work. There is a long tradition in European
philosophy whereby the relative roles of dialectic and metaphor, in
consciousness and in culture generally, offer a revivifying new connection
based on a recollection of (and therefore separation from) previous states
of being. Chief arbiter of this tradition is Hegel who integrated these dual
processes in the structure of his Phenomenology. As Jeffrey Mason writes:
The employment, supercession and transformation of metaphors in the
Phenomenology are part of a rhetorical strategy of recollection. The way
consciousness moves through its permutations is based on need and lack.
That need and lack in turn depend on the recognition of their existence by
consciousness. And that recognition itself depends upon recollection. Only
when consciousness can say ‘that is what I was, but I am no longer it’ has it
moved beyond its former position. The dialectic is the liberation of
consciousness from its own creations, its images and pictures.
(Mason 1987: 245)

Mason’s characterization of metaphors as ‘the stepping stones of speculative thought, which never stops on any one stone but without them could
not move’ (1987: 247) is itself a useful metaphor with which to progress to
the next stage of my own argument, which concerns the relation of
metaphors to the body and, by extension, all the living systems currently
under threat.

Metaphor and the sensuous
To recollect the brief and incomplete survey of metaphorology above,
which left unsaid the recognition that much else has been said on the topic,
one must also consider the relation of metaphors to living things.
It has become a commonplace in systems circles to think of narratives,
metaphors and models (in the sense of computer models) as idealized
representations of experience. But the direction of some key metaphors
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Skittles
(and the metaphor of the key might be one of them, being to hand) seems
to be explicitly anti-idealist, sending us back in the direction of the sensuous
body. Fusion theorists within linguistics argue that metaphors unify the
sensual and the conceptual and/or the concrete and the abstract in a single
universal. This surely relates to the appeal of the tipping point metaphor
across multiple disciplines, within a total concept of Earth and socioeconomic systems. From the side of the philosophers, Nowell-Smith
shows,4 Heidegger’s view is that metaphor’s transference is dependent on
division of sensuous and non-sensuous realms. The best metaphors bear
back on the body, and the forbidding power of ‘tipping point’ as a phrase
is that it seems to ask: is it me, or is it my body, that is falling?

The etymology of the tipping point metaphor
When we try to understand what that means – is it me that is tipping? –
the differentiations of social and national groups come into play,5 as does
the historical usage of the tipping point phrase. Employment of the phrase
carries through a whole host of meanings from previous usage.
As Lang and Ingram observe in Chapter 4.1, the phrase was itself tipped
into mass usage by the publication of Malcolm Gladwell’s book, The Tipping
Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference (2000), which sought to explain
sudden changes, dramatizing tipping point narratives over a range of
disciplines and paradigms. While the original scientific usage on which
Gladwell largely draws is actually from the world of epidemiology, the
current popular definition (and the only definition in the Oxford English
Dictionary) is:
The prevalence of a social phenomenon sufficient to set in motion a process
of rapid change; the moment when such a change begins to occur.

4

‘Heidegger’s Figures’, Textual Practice, 26: 5 (November 2012). This essay focuses on
Heidegger’s insistence that the import of metaphor for philosophy and poetry lies in its
structural dependence, as meta-pherein or Über-tragung (carrying-over), on the dualism
between sensuous and nonsensuous realms. In this, the critique opens on to a far more
developed thinking on the relation between bodily experience and linguistic cognition, and
in particular an attempt to think of the body as a site for an ‘articulation’ of language anterior
to any opposition of sound and sense. The relation of this articulation to resilience could bear
further examination.
5
Writing an article on global climate change for a national broadsheet, I received the following
communication from the editor: ‘But what does it mean for Britain?’

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Giles Foden
This definition is likely to be a consequence of the popularity of Gladwell’s
book and does not reflect a wider diversity of uses in academic discourse.
Its first recorded emergence in the context of urban racial balance seems
to have been in Scientific American in 1957:
White residents who will tolerate a few Negroes as neighbors . . . begin to
move out when the proportion of Negroes in the neighborhood or apartment
building passes a certain critical point. This ‘tip point’ varies from city to city
and from neighborhood to neighborhood.

Instinctively, this seems wrong as a base origin for tipping points. The
source is much more likely to be concrete, embedded in everyday life (see
‘Skittles’ below), and intellectually related to the history of the physics of
stability. For example we can hear the emergent tipping point rhetoric in
this 1738 quotation from Bernoulli:
a minimal arbitrary force makes a body – although put in firm equilibrium –
nod a little, but when the force has been undergone [i.e. ceases to act], the
body tends again to its natural position, unless the nodding would have
exceeded certain bounds.
(Bernoulli 1738: 148, cited in Leine 2009: 175)

Investigation shows that across all its senses the origins of tip and those
words with which they seem likely to be cognate are obscure. However,
we can identify the following verbal forms for tip in these edited and
adapted extracts from the historical thesaurus of the OED:
Verb form 1 [V1]
a. To strike or hit smartly but lightly; to give a slight blow, knock, or touch
to; to tap noiselessly.
[The remainder of the entries for V1 need not delay us further.]
Verb form 2 [V2]
Transitive senses:
a. To overthrow, knock, or cast down, cause to fall or tumble; to overturn,
upset; to throw down by effort or accidentally.
b. Skittles. In the older game, said of a pin. To knock down another skittle
by falling or rolling against it, as distinguished from the direct action of
the bowl. 1801: ‘In playing at skittles, there is a double exertion; one by
bowling, and the other by tipping.’ [This meaning seems highly relevant
to the interaction of tipping points across different systems. Though one
is only asserting rather than proving this, it feels as if skittles might be the
genuine origin of tipping point as a phrase, sometime in the mid-to-late
1700s, coming at roughly the same period as physicists such as Bernoulli,

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Skittles

c.
d.
e.

f.
g.

Euler and Lagrange were working out the effect of small disturbances on
stability (see Leine 2009).]
To cause to assume a slanting or sloping position; to raise, push, or move
into such a position; to incline, tilt.
to tip the scales: to tilt or depress the scale of a balance by excess of weight;
to turn the scale.
to tip one’s hand: to disclose one’s intentions inadvertently. 1979: ‘Mr
Hunt will not tip his hand on the price at which he will buy more bullion.’
[This meaning probably comes from card play.]
To empty out (a wagon, cart, truck, or the like, or its contents) by tilting it
up; to dump.
To dispose of or kill (a person). 1928: ‘Jake’s sort o’ done me a good turn,
getting himself tipped off.’

Intransitive senses:
a. To be overthrown, to fall.
b. To fall by overbalancing; to be overturned or upset; to tumble or topple
over.
c. To assume a slanting or sloping position; to incline, tilt; e.g. of a balance.
d. To be drunk, intoxicated, unsteady.
e. to tip off , also simply to tip, or tip the perch: to die.

V2 may be related (but not necessarily) to V1. If so, this would suggest a
link between smart or slight blows and severe effects, and clearly this is
relevant to tipping points. V1 in turn seems likely to be cognate with ‘tip’
(noun form 1) as in ‘point’ or ‘top’, but this cannot be fully established:
Noun form 1 [N1]
The slender extremity or top of a thing; esp. the pointed or rounded end of
anything long and slender; the top, summit, apex, very end.

We can see already how all these meanings further feed into our current
understanding of tipping points. Yet there is a further etymology which
seems relevant, which is the root of N1 but also (demonstrably) of the word
‘type’ in its taxonomical, representative sense, as in a typical situation,
norm or pattern.
‘Type’ comes from the Greek τυ‹ ποσ [tuptein] which connotes both a
blow, and, more commonly, things produced by means of a blow or pressure; and hence, the means by which one can reproduce craft objects by
moulding, imprinting, etc. (such as seals, which is a primary technological
usage; it was also used for engraving, making dots on dice, or other kinds
of carving). Over time, tuptein became a primary way of thinking about
replicating, figuring and modelling in more abstract ways, too. Some
meanings of tuptein can be listed as follows:
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Giles Foden
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.

A blow, pressing
The results of a blow: mark, impression
Mark, figure, image, outline
General character of a thing: sort, type
Text, content
Pattern, example, model
Summoning.

A relevant early verbal sense of ‘type’ in English was ‘to prefigure or
foreshadow as a type; to represent in prophetic similitude’, i.e. according
to the aforesaid pattern or paradigm.
Overall, one begins to build a picture of a related set of words in which
there is a semantic collapse between:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.

A smart blow
Deleterious falling
Slanting with a sense of the imminent possibility of fall
The communication or ‘summoning’ of information about an emergent
phenomenon (also there in tip as in a stock market or betting tip)
The end or top of something
And, much more vaguely and tendentiously, a replicable ‘type’ within
a category, something designed according to a paradigm.

Obviously different contexts imply different separate historical usages
but the widest sense of tipping point which one might infer – the reasonable
bundle of connotations – is of an unstable phenomenon which faces two
ways in time, doubly summoning information from past (because of the
historical push into tipping) and future (because tipping initiates new
states). This is anyway cohered in its grammatical dual state as a compound
noun (a complex category). The emphasis on ‘tipping’ rather than ‘point’
in pronunciation (cf. compounds such as ‘bath-house’ and ‘greenhouse’ in
contrast with ‘bath bun’ and ‘a green house’) allows some room for
manoeuvring the concept in a positive direction, i.e. we haven’t tipped yet,
we are only tilting. But the primary scientific use seems to place the
emphasis on point, i.e. the point at which an irreversible critical change has
taken place.
The parallels between the past/future conjectures of tipping points
and metaphor itself are stimulating to consider, opening up the possibility
of a cognitive tipping point in which human beings are able to pursue a
higher-level systems-oriented approach to solving complex problems by
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Skittles
‘stretching the present’ of their subjectivity to consider future humans and
other species. This ‘extended body’ is the necessary condition of a solution
to climate change: to follow the elusive etymological trail, we need to find
the new ‘type’ of being hidden in ‘tip’.
The new condition may well involve a turn away from mechanistic
(linear) conceptions of world systems to more dynamical frames of thought
that account for indeterminacy. This would amount to a shift in cultural
consciousness, as we respond to a dialectic whereby tipping events become
a recognized norm (but a norm which is always challenging its own
normativity). Many people in the world already live this kind of precarious
life already: it is us in the insulated West who should change our future
outlook. We need to find ourselves a new story.

Metaphor and narrative
Metaphors frame narratives in so far as they condition the worldviews
which narratives propose. In storytelling the author or speaker solicits
the reader or listener into a story world through a direction (‘Imagine that
. . .’) or declaration (‘It must have been about nine that the postman
rang . . .’) with a relativistic orientation to ordinary time and being.
This is a form of the illocutionary act, in which fictional world A (often
with its nunc movens) is proposed to supplant or suspend real world B in
which time is irreversible. The story often remains dimensionally indeterminate, so ‘A is B’ is more like a proposition or option than a linear equation; at least it is optional until what is metaphoric/narrative has become
syntagmatic, an intelligible but fixed ‘fact’ institutionally.
The ability to see the syntagmatic possibilities of the metaphoric, to
follow through from the frame to a possible story, which is akin to prediction, is surely part of human risk management. It is there in the brain’s
reading of perceptions according to particular frames of reference. It is in
this area that we need to work hardest to find our new stories, sifting
possible futures.
One sees all this very clearly when one hears one’s children successively
propose in a role-playing game, ‘Pretend that . . .’. The rapidity with which
children are able to run through the narrative options, shuttling between
optional possibilities, fills one with hope for humankind; but why does this
ability to shuttle between metaphoric frames/narratives ossify so quickly?
How to prevent that is a useful research question in itself, but for the time
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Giles Foden
being some metaphorical and narrative equivalent of physical education
might be usefully dispensed to Western adults.
Shell and other companies already do versions of this with scenario
writing, as do some government departments, but the process needs to be
extended and embedded in society so that, co-creating a better future, we
can all become agents of ‘the broader genre of declarative illocutions whose
function is to inaugurate a new state of affairs’ (Genette 1993: 42). In this
sense the story of the metaphor of the tipping point is always waiting to be
told again, since the context for that retelling always already exists, in the
ultimate ground of each individual consciousness.

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Van der Leeuw, S. (2004), ‘Why Model?’, Cybernetics and Systems: An International
Journal, 35: 117–28.
Van der Leeuw, S. (2010), ‘Information Processing: A Long-Term Perspective’, a
presentation within the workshop Future Technology and Society organized by
the European Commission (DGINFSO). http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/fetopen/docs/2010-11-19-designing-together-to-unshock-the-new.pdf (see Foden
(2010) above).

72

Commentary 3.2
Aligning contrasting perspectives
of tipping points
MATTHEW TAYLOR

It is illuminating to explore the ideas of tipping points through the prism
of the theories of plural rationality. Of these perhaps the most developed
is the unhelpfully named ‘cultural theory’, based broadly on the research
of anthropologist Mary Douglas (Douglas and Wildavsky 1982) and often
used as a way of thinking about risk.
Cultural theory argues that there are four basic and distinct ways of
thinking about change – both descriptively and prescriptively. As the
anthropologist and systems thinker Michael Thompson has described, each
of these perspectives is associated with a different underlying model of
nature as a system (Thompson et al. 1990). These models can be represented
by four images in which a healthy natural system is portrayed as a ball, along
the lines introduced by Tim Lenton in Chapter 2.1 (see Figure 2.4, page 37).
The hierarchical perspective sees nature as volatile but manageable. This
perspective sees tipping points as real phenomena, but also as something
that can be predicted and managed through the right combination of
expertise and leadership.
The individualistic perspective sees nature as highly resilient and
adaptive. This perspective leads either to scepticism about tipping points
or a faith in nature and its human stewards to avoid catastrophe by
adapting to change to achieve a new and better equilibrium. (In the words
of Richard Sears, ‘the Stone Age didn’t end because we ran out of stones’.)
The egalitarian perspective sees nature in the modern world as fundamentally unstable and vulnerable. Our management of the environment
needs to take account of the basic fragility of natural systems. From this
perspective, tipping points have a powerful resonance both as descriptions
of concrete reality but also as a kind of morality tale about the dire
consequences of our cavalier treatment of natural systems.
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Matthew Taylor
Finally, there is the fatalistic perspective that, in as much as it believes at
all in tipping points, sees them as inevitable and malign. Nature in this
view is capricious and liable to threaten human interests. Fatalists will tend
to see tipping points either as a propaganda tool to justify interference by
those with other perspectives, or simply another example of the unhappy
vagaries of life.
Cultural theory therefore has a warning for those seeking to use the
concept of tipping points as a way of enhancing public awareness of, and
engagement in, issues relating to sustainability (broadly defined). The very
idea of tipping points will tend to be seen in some quarters as a concept
intimately bound up with a particular worldview (egalitarianism) and the
political and ethical positions associated with it.
In the hierarchical position of being a Downing Street adviser some years
ago, I noticed that it was almost taken for granted that interest groups
lobbying government would offer apparently credible evidence that the
sector or people they represented were about to face catastrophe without
some form of intervention. Given how jaded we advisers became, there is
a danger that the idea of a tipping point comes to be seen as simply a new
pseudo-scientific form of special interest ‘shroud-waving’. Indeed, given
Whitehall’s predisposition towards seeing the world as predictable and
manageable, a weakly made argument for a tipping point could even be
seen as an admission of an inability to make a case in terms of a more
conventional incremental change process.
The current Coalition government has shown some interest in ideas of
discontinuous change, particularly in their enthusiasm for the ‘Black Swan’
thesis of Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2010). Taleb touches on the argument of
Giles Foden here in visualizing a ‘black swan event’ as an outlier, something which reconfigures thought, a process which allows reflective
explanation in the wake of its occurrence. Black swan events are an
outcome of selective blindness, influenced by patterns of outlook and
uncontested thought.
As we observe in the United States, the free market (individualist) right
tends to portray environmental ‘alarmism’ as simply the latest ruse
deployed by apologists for state interference over enterprise. The point
from cultural theory is that, in as much as other worldviews can accommodate the idea, there will be a profound difference between their interpretations of the significance of tipping points and what they imply, if
anything, for policy. This perspective reflects the argument of Dan Kahan
(2012: 255) who contends that views on highly polarized interpretations
74

Contrasting perspectives of tipping points
tend to be channelled towards what one’s social and cultural reference
group contends, and not to any objective weighing of the evidence.
So far, so pessimistic: but culture theory also provides some ideas about
how to make debate more constructive and inclusive. In debates over risk
– particularly risks associated with the environment – protagonists can
expend a great deal of energy in the generally futile process of beating each
other around the head with evidence. To start by recognizing that we each
bring certain predispositions to the table can provide a more constructive
context based on mutual recognition.
For example, in talking to school students I have found it useful to ask
them to choose between four different responses to climate change, the
paradigmatic example of threat regarding catastrophic tipping points. The
four responses are these:
•
•
•
•

Climate change should be addressed through global treaties drawn up
by experts and leaders (hierarchical).
The threat to nature and global justice require us in the West fundamentally to change our lifestyles (egalitarian).
Technology and markets are most likely to solve the problem (individualist).
Man-made climate change is either all made up or it is a real phenomenon that we cannot cope with, and therefore we are doomed
(fatalist).

Managing to find agreement about what it is people disagree about can
be a powerful way of opening up debate (see also Mike Hulme (2010) in
this regard). I have found that when the young people with whom I have
spoken feel their position is being fairly represented, they are less resistant
to recognizing the virtues of other views – and even the frailties within their
own.
While we may not find it easy to agree about the nature of tipping points,
this doesn’t mean we can’t combine perspectives to produce what cultural
theorists such as Thompson et al. (1990) call ‘clumsy’ solutions – approaches
to policy that ensure that all the perspectives are brought to bear and that
voices representing all of them are heard.
What tends to emerge from the conversations I have just described is
agreement that we need a combination of leadership, social responsibility
and invention to reduce carbon emissions. ‘Clumsiness’ in the design of
deliberations can then turn the discussion from a loser-inducing argument over whether there is a problem at all to a positive debate about the
75

Matthew Taylor
relative contributions that representatives of each perspective can make.
Conversation can also explore the inherent strengths and weaknesses in
each approach, marshalling the combined insights and techniques of
hierarchy (while resisting its tendency to be controlling), egalitarianism
(while resisting its tendency to be alarmist), and individualism (while
resisting its tendency toward complacency) – always bearing in mind the
allure of fatalism.
The concept of the tipping point is rich and valuable on many levels. It
can help us understand the world, the way we think about the world and
why, and also why social power as it is currently configured may be unable
to respond to extreme and rapid change. But if our aim is for the tipping
point idea to open up new debate and challenge deeply held assumptions,
we should be aware that the very concept and how it is used can be
perceived as betraying strong ideological preconceptions. Cultural theory
provides tools and processes, the art of designing ‘clumsy’ solutions, to
help overcome the barriers to dialogue that our values and predispositions
can set up.

References
Douglas, M. and Wildavsky, A. (1982), Risk and Culture: An Essay on the Selection of
Technical and Environmental Dangers (Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press).
Hulme, M. (2010), Why We Disagree About Climate Change (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press).
Kahan, D. (2012), ‘Why We Are Poles Apart on Climate Change’, Nature, 488: 255.
Taleb, N.N. (2010), The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2nd edn)
(London: Penguin).
Thompson, M., Ellis, R., and Wildavsky, A. (1990), Cultural Theory (Boulder, CO:
Westview Press).

76

PART 4
FOOD SECURITY,
BIODIVERSITY, AND
ECOSYSTEMS DEGRADATION
In the first eight months of 2012 the price of fish oil rose from $1500 to $2000
per tonne, and fish meal from $1300 to $1700 per tonne (Neate 2012: 33).
The causes connect across space and society. Storms off the Peruvian coast
reduced anchovy populations; diversion of drought-diminished corn
output in the USA in favour of ethanol production (required by climate
change mitigation rules) left a huge gap in animal feed supplies; and a
surge in Omega 3 pills usage amongst wealthy health-conscious consumers
across the world combined to guarantee high prices for oily fish products.
It is not surprising that financial investment firms took an interest in
anchovy fishery companies, and that the lucrative prospect of rising prices
of farmed fish and beef was also of interest to speculators. Neate (2012: 33)
also explores the impact of warming seawater on farmed salmon growth,
probably one outcome of global climate change. Balmier waters have
increased the metabolisms of the salmon, leading to more demand for fish
meal and lower prices as stocks increase. Consequently consumers are
acquiring a taste for what was previously considered a luxury, but also a
basis of bodily and mental health.
As Tim Lang and John Ingram explore in this Part, the food industry is
both global and predatory. It makes sincere reference to sustainability, as
we see from the commentary by Thomas Lingard (6.8), but at its heart it is
unsustainable. The former Government Chief Scientist, John Beddington
(2009), likened the combination of a 33 per cent rise in population, a 50 per
cent growth in energy and food requirements, and a 30 per cent increase
in water usage as producing the ‘perfect storm’ of what we termed in our
introductory chapter as ‘combinational tipping points’.
We believe that there is a powerful mutually propulsive set of forces –
lying between a changing climate, aided in part by increasing agriculturally

Food security, biodiversity, and ecosystems degradation
based emissions of nitrous oxides and methane; urbanization with over 60
per cent of the world’s population in cities by 2050 (UN Habitat 2011);
changing diets in favour of more meat and fish; losses of biodiversity and
ecosystem life-support functions; and the near impossible challenge of
producing large amounts of healthy food from new genetic technologies
and ecologically adaptive farming methods – which will combine to bear
out Beddington’s prognoses.
Lang and Ingram (4.1) assert that the global food industry aggressively
markets foods which encourage ill health and overeating by both poor
and rich. The industry is one of the most sophisticated lobbies in an arena
of oppressive business bias, acting well beyond the reach of national
governments. Indeed, according to Action Aid, these lobbies control the
international trading bodies:
Under the Influence reveals a worldwide explosion of corporate lobbying
which contributes to unfair trade rules that undermine the fight against
poverty. The report highlights examples of privileged corporate access to,
and excessive influence over, the WTO [World Trade Organization] policymaking process. In the EU alone, there are 15,000 lobbyists based in Brussels
– around one for every official in the European Commission. Annual
corporate lobbying expenditure in Brussels is estimated at €750 million to
€1 billion. In the US, 17,000 lobbyists work in Washington DC – outnumbering US Congress lawmakers by 30 to one. Meanwhile, the pharmaceutical
industry is reported to have spent over $1 billion lobbying in the US in 2004.
(Action Aid 2012: 2)

Lang and Ingram do not offer any easy or reliable resolution. They see
tensions between political and commercial priorities (for example in the
increasingly troublesome conflict between biofuels and food needs),
between all levels of competing governments (rendering them easy to pick
off), and awesome overlapping complexities of governing organizations.
If sustainability was to be shared as the overriding objective, there would
be a chance of shifting to lower and healthier food and drink consumption,
of building adaptive resilience in food-producing societies and economies,
and of sharing food and water use with the natural world before its
inherent diversity is irrecoverably lost.
Patricia Howard (4.2) documents the losses of both natural and cultural
biodiversity. She concludes that the declines and extinctions of highly
interconnected and interdependent natural species will be magnified by
the removal of long-established cultural restraints which were designed to
safeguard against the dangerous narrowing of the historical range of food
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Food security, biodiversity, and ecosystems degradation
plant species. She is concerned over the disruption of the cultural transmission of language and farming practices which are needed to accumulate
social and ecological resilience. She also sees a failure of governing
leadership, and the meddling of corporates and lobbies as contributing to
what may become the sixth mass extinction of the global evolutionary
journey. In this human-induced case there will be no prolonged, largely
stress-free period of restoration and reconstitution as was available in past
biodiversity recoveries and transformations.
Munang et al. (2011) point to emerging experiments in ecosystem-based
adaptation (EbA) in African agriculture as an exciting opportunity for
redesigning farming and biodiversity:
Ecosystem-based adaptation is the use of biodiversity and ecosystem services
as part of an overall adaptation strategy to help people and communities
adapt to the negative effects of climate change at local, national, regional and
global levels. EbA provides many other benefits to communities including
food security (from fisheries to agro-forestry), sustainable water management
and livelihood diversification (through increasing resource-used options).
(Munang et al. 2011)

But such positive schemes rely on robust and extended leadership,
investments in transport and marketing arrangements, and integrative
behaviour by farmers and food suppliers/distributors protected from the
volatilities of the international food markets. This is a tall order. But it could
be met if honourable experiments are carefully monitored for their fairness,
community well-being, and ecosystem integrity. The outcome could result
in better land care and public health, improved incomes and community
security, and avoidance of the perfect storm.
Toby Gardner (4.3) offers a genuinely interdisciplinary analysis of one
of the more immediate tipping points. This is the insidious drying of the
Amazon rainforest, the hugely debilitating subsurface slow-burning fires,
and the self-reinforcing perverse climate changes caused by loss of forest
to cattle and soya production to feed the new meat cultures of Brazilian
megalopolises and further afield. Gardner provides the scientific bases for
prognoses and the hope of new approaches to forest management and
regeneration which will require global financial support. The loss of the
rainforest has global as well as regional repercussions. If paying for ecosystem services has any meaning, then the nearby urban populations,
which are experiencing periodic but severe water shortages, should be
investing in forest replanting which mixes the triumphs of ecosystem
restorative cultures with the best of applied sustainability science.
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Food security, biodiversity, and ecosystems degradation
Gardner also points to the instabilities of Amazonian land use futures.
Variations in the US Dollar/Brazilian Real exchange rate can have huge
and sudden impacts on soya production and resulting forest loss or
recovery. If the prices offered for stewarding the carbon and biodiversity
of the virgin rainforest biomes are not adjustable to highly variable food
prices, then the best laid plans of carbon sequestration could fail to achieve
their intended sustainability outcomes. And if the long-established forest
safeguarding cultures of the Amazon are forced to migrate in the face of
drought and savannah incursion, then Patricia Howard’s anxieties may be
fulfilled. Tipping points may be metaphors. But they can point to unsettling
and deeply destabilizing interconnecting processes with no obvious entry
points and no clear pathways for guidance and proactive intervention.

References
Action Aid (2012), Under the Influence: Exposing Undue Corporate Influence over Policy
Making at the World Trade Organization (London: Action Aid).
Beddington, J. (2009), ‘Food, Energy, Water and the Climate: A Perfect Storm of
Global Events’ (London: Government Office for Science).
Munang, R., Thiaw, I., and Rivington, M. (2011), ‘Ecosystem Management:
Tomorrow’s Approach to Enhancing Food Security Under a Changing Climate’,
Sustainability, 3: 937–54.
Neate, R. (2012), ‘Fish Price Leap Has Food Chain Reaction’, Guardian, 25 August:
33.
UN Habitat (2011), State of the World’s Cities, 2010–2011 (Geneva: UN Habitat).

80

4.1
Food security twists and turns
Why food systems need complex governance
TIM LANG AND JOHN INGRAM

A note of caution about Mr Gladwell’s metaphor
The language and theory of tipping points have become popular in academic, political and everyday discourse since Malcolm Gladwell’s book
of the same name was published (Gladwell 2000). We are well aware of
the arguments advanced around the association with metaphors in the
introductory chapter to this book (1.1). But while metaphors and analogies
are useful (and beloved of the human mind as well as culture) we believe
some caution is necessary. Gladwell’s popular book is a pot-pourri of
ideas, an intelligent journalist’s interpretation of insights from psychology,
sociology and, above all, his reading of epidemiology. That he is a
journalist is not a criticism. We offer it as a comment on how fissured
modern academia and the sciences are. As is suggested by Giles Foden
(3.1), Joe Smith (7.1), and Paul Brown (7.3), it is often left to brilliant
journalists and science writers to offer overviews or narratives that inform
our lives and outlooks, especially where there is no solid evidentiary
ground.
Gladwell’s thesis is attractively simple. It filled a vacuum: how to
interpret threats in a language that suits a political era infused (some say
made) by the sound-bite. His concern is for change and whether there are
points at which internal dynamics can go haywire. From epidemiology, for
example, he takes the notion that we need to understand how diseases ‘tip’
from minorities to the masses. This is a deeply rooted and fearful notion,
the age-old threat of contagion as superior force, and an unstoppable set
of sequences and consequences, which can overwhelm human existence.
The ‘tipping points’ metaphor thus can lead to deep pessimism, if not
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Tim Lang and John Ingram
fatalism. History gives this some legitimacy, of course. There is a vast
human experience of viruses, boiling points, catastrophe, and plagues. No
wonder the ‘tipping points’ metaphor features so much in science fiction
and sci-fi films. But Gladwell’s is a very American book in its inherent
optimism. You can turn crisis into opportunity. You can make a difference.
In this he is on a par with another popular metaphor now given credence
in an era which favours light-touch government – ‘nudge’ theory (Thaler
and Sunstein 2008; and Dobson (8.2)).
Although we are wary of the consequences of politicians believing their
favoured metaphors, this chapter is not a critique of Gladwell’s metaphor
per se. Rather, it suggests that policymakers need more subtle analyses and
metaphors if, in the case of food security, they are to begin to address the
complexities of the real problems. Metaphors are useful if they help funnel
activity in appropriate directions. They become dangerous if they
encourage decision-makers to pursue single ‘triggers’ or tension points. In
food security, the best contemporary analyses suggest the need for multilayered, systemic approaches to ensure availability and affordability of
food. On a positive note, Gladwell himself has acknowledged that the real
question is to ask what generates change, not the characteristics of tipping
points. Our chapter tries to stay true to that wider task. Policy needs to be
better informed by an understanding of the dynamics, drivers and
challenges that shape or ought to shape food demand and supply ahead.
The goal ought to be a world where societies are able to feed all people
equitably, healthily, and in ways which enhance rather than destroy the
habitability of the planet.
That is clearly not the case at present. There is a troubling but not
unfamiliar gap between evidence and policy. And looking ahead, unless
the vast majority of forecasting is wrong, humanity faces awesome
challenges in this first half of the twenty-first century. It will have to adapt
food systems to improve food resilience. Already, climate change is upon
us; water stress too; and biodiversity loss (as Patricia Howard (4.2) and
Toby Gardiner (4.3) cover in their companion chapters) endemic. The
parameters of such environmental pressures have begun to be outlined by
science and are impinging on the attention of policymakers. Less attention,
however, is being given to the two other nodes of sustainable development’s triangle – society and economy – yet the social and economic
implications of coming environmental change for food are considerable:
threats of social dislocation, price volatility, and speculation. Over the last
half-century, modes of consuming food have become normalized in the
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Food security twists and turns
West which are unsustainable but profitable. The lock-in to unsustainability
is tight. If food insecurity is to be tackled, innovative thinking which integrates environment, society and economy will be required from institutions
and governance. This is currently not the case, and it is a failure not just of
government, but of commerce and consumer culture.

Food security and food systems
Like tipping points, ‘food security’ is a term with much baggage, used
in many ways and with many different meanings (Maxwell 2001).
Nonetheless a cluster of meanings dominates contemporary discourse (see
examples in Table 4.1). In public policy, the notion of food security centres
on the pursuit of a situation where everyone is fed or could be fed
adequately, appropriately, affordably and regularly. The key issues are
often described as three As: Availability, Access and Affordability.
Analyses have tended to assume that insecurity stems from insufficiency
of production or dislocation of supply. Yet from the 1970s, just as the
term ‘food security’ came into policy discourse, the old awareness that
hunger and insecurity can occur despite there being sufficient food on
the planet to feed everyone had been reasserted by Drèze, Sen, and
others (Drèze et al. 1999). Sen’s own argument stressed the role of entitlements as a key factor in famines. A deciding factor in whether famine
takes hold is the social expression of rights and demand for food; it
makes or breaks political demands to resolve or ride out harvest failure.
Such analyses of food security stress the need for not just sustainable
production, but equitable distribution and sensitive culture change. Why
is it that some people are well fed (and now over-fed) while many others
are not?
In mainstream policy, the conventional definition of food security is that
offered by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). Morally based
on the articulation of rights in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, and voiced loudly at the 1974 World Food Conference (FAO 1974),
a definition of food security emerged which, by the 1996 World Food
Summit, saw it as a state when:
all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe,
and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an
active and healthy life.
(FAO 1996)

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Tim Lang and John Ingram
This definition suggests a broader notion than just the three As. But some
key words, such as ‘food production’ and ‘agriculture’ – which might have
been expected in such a definition – are not included. Most formal
discussions of food security, therefore, recognize that it sits in a web of issues
Table 4.1 Strands in the food security discourse
Term

Focus

Comment

Food
security

The extent to which food
systems can deliver adequate,
affordable, accessible supplies,
at many levels

Currently this does not connect with the
sustainability agenda. Security implies
food systems which are ‘likely to
continue or remain safe’ (OED).

Food
nationalism

Policy priority to food from
national resources and land

May range from general desire for more
self-sufficiency to autarky

Food control

Actions of state or other
power sources to shape food
systems

Top-down control systems; rationing,
at the most extreme

Food defence

Feeding in extreme
emergencies

Assessment of minimum requirements
for survival

Food resilience Capacity to withstand and
recover from shock

Used widely in food security discourse
with ecological roots but appeals
elsewhere, e.g. insurance, military

Food risks

Factors which threaten food
goals

Appeals to systems thinking and
suggests need to identify, rate and
prevent risks

Food
entitlement

Citizens’ sense of their rights
Articulated by Nobel Laureate Amartya
to have access to adequate food Sen to explain why famines occur
despite supply

Food
sovereignty

Ensuring bottom-up societal
control of primary production

Championed by small farmer
movements and development NGOs

Food
democracy

Social engagement and
pressure for food rights

Emphasizes political processes within
societal demands for adequate food

Food capacity

Capabilities and requirements
for any system of food
production

Environmental, economic and societal
requirements for and limits to
sustainable food systems

Community
food security

Building local food systems

Mainly used in developed world to
indicate locally led food provision.
Tends to be used by organizations
committed to sustainability frameworks.

Source: Adapted from Lang (2008)

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Food security twists and turns
including food production, distribution, demand, rights, environment and
health, all shaped by actors whose moral buy-in is assumed or expected.
Yet this is not the case. Hunger remains on a mass scale today. And this
approach to food security barely acknowledges that mal-consumption and
over-consumption might be factors in under-consumption. The discourse
is pitched on welfarist terrain, with the developing world as supplicant or
applicant and the developed world as donor (Lang et al. 2009).
The politics that this implies has a very long history. Arguably, the entire
food security debate goes back centrally to Malthus’s Essay on the Principle
of Population (Malthus 1798). Malthus, like Gladwell two centuries later,
worried about irresolvable forces and trends; above all he feared population rising faster than the potential to increase food supply. His core
question – and why his writing remains so potent today – was partly
philosophical, partly political: can humans escape the limits of nature?
(Malthus 1815).
Malthus was not one to shirk the politics of food security, which is why
in part Karl Marx later in the nineteenth century was so exercised with
finding flaws in his arguments. Societal structures, particularly land
ownership and capital distribution, were downplayed, when the potential
lay to unleash technology which could remove the barriers to hunger.
Ossified social structures, not Malthusian inevitabilities, create hunger, said
Marx.
In the mid-twentieth century, science and technical advance were
posited as value-neutral means through which the Malthusian spectre
could be banished. The Green Revolution’s plant breeding remains a prime
example of that approach to food security; Norman Borlaug won the Peace
Nobel Prize. By the end of the twentieth century, however, the social
dimension of food (in)security was once more being reasserted. Even if
technical change was needed, a social framework would be necessary to
unlock its potential. A recent example of this more balanced approach was
the World Bank’s and FAO’s evidence-based review published as the
International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology Development
Knowledge (IAASTD 2008). This assessment proposed that social support,
particularly to small-scale farming and to women in Africa, would help
them achieve large increases in output and create economic pathways by
which food demand could be met. Other recent large-scale reviews of the
global food system conducted by national scientific teams in Australia,
France and the UK have concurred with the case for a more balanced mix
of technical, social and economic improvements to deliver food security
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Tim Lang and John Ingram
(Foresight 2011; Paillard et al. 2011; PMSEIC (Australia) 2010). If this is the
case, a framework of thinking based on systems analysis becomes almost
inevitable. Food security has to blend multiple strands of issues – land,
people, economics, social structures, environment, health, distribution –
not reduce their complex interactions to one factor or favoured approach.
This is why policy discussion of food security inexorably dovetails into
the challenge of wider sustainable development; indeed, food security is a
microcosm of sustainable development. Equal attention to societal,
economic and environmental drivers and outcomes is needed to ensure
that food systems operate stably and adaptably.
The literature on food security amply justifies the necessity of such a
systems analysis, pointing to critical stresses emerging for food supplies
from:
•
•

•

Environmental forces, such as climate change, water stress, soil, land use,
biodiversity loss;
Economic forces, such as inappropriate price signals and uncosted
externalities, fossil fuel reliance, labour force reorganization, urbanization, and first regionalization and now globalization;
Social forces, such as population demand, the nutrition transition
(changed eating patterns), diet-based ill-health patterns, the triumph
of choice culture, the continuation of high levels of food waste.

The challenge ahead is not just producing enough but changing expectations that everyone can and should aspire to eat like the USA or UK. To
eat like the former implies a society consuming as though there are five
planets, and the latter a mere three planets (Global Footprint Network
2010). How did such an extraordinary state of affairs come about?

The world of food policy
Throughout the twentieth century, while communist bloc politics were
driving their experiments in one direction, the West was taking different
routes. At the global level, food production kept ahead of rising population
until relatively recently. Building on chemical, biological and transport
advances, food production rose. ‘Researchers turned policy advocates’ such
as John Boyd Orr, the first Director General of FAO, charted a pathway past
the opposing poles of Malthus and Marx. More food could be produced,
by applying science, technology and capital, working with rather than
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Food security twists and turns
imposing on primary producers. Knowledge could be dispersed, for
example via extension services, rather than enforced through social control.
Science could unleash potential everywhere. It could also help prevent
waste from poor storage and inefficient distribution techniques. Thus food
costs would come down, and availability would increase, delivering
general welfare and preventing ill health (Boyd Orr 1943; Boyd Orr and
Lubbock 1953). This had been a powerful and dominant analysis of food
security for most of the twentieth century (Vernon 2007). Termed variously
the ‘productivist’ or ‘productionist’ analysis, it emphasized underproduction as the policy problem to be resolved. The environment was to be
reshaped, mined, and indeed tamed, to meet core human needs. With
variations, it has been the paradigm for food policy for the last 70 years;
food policy sought a planet tailored for people.
Part of the rationale for the paradigm’s adoption was the powerful
evidence of hunger and mal-distribution of food in the West itself. Boyd
Orr’s book, Food, Health and Income – a study of food poverty in the UK –
was enormously influential throughout the British Empire (Boyd Orr 1936;
Ostry 2006). The institutional architecture created in and after the Second
World War owed its existence to such arguments. In the crisis of wartime,
they began to plan for better structures to share knowledge and food, while
avoiding draconian USSR-type intervention. The evidence of poor social
distribution within the capitalist West – hunger in the USA and UK being
particularly cited – reminded political decision-makers of how underconsumption and unaffordability were core problems, not just underproduction. Hence the visionary language of rights and possibilities in the
1943 Hot Springs Conference that spawned the FAO (Hot Springs
Conference 1943), and the strand of ‘Right to Food’ legalism from the 1948
UN Declaration to the 1974 World Food Conference, to the creation of the
UN’s ‘Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food’ (Eide and Kracht 2005).
Recognition of the history of food security thinking clarifies why global
and national institutions are as they are, and why they struggle to address
food security as sustainability. They have adapted, of course, but they
clearly struggle to face, let alone resolve, the complexity now emerging
from multi-factorial analyses, such as from IAASTD and the Global
Environmental Change and Food Systems project (IAASTD 2008; Liverman
and Kapadia 2010). Even in its decades of success, much of the pressure on
the productionist paradigm came from mounting evidence about environmental damage and externalities. Evidence grew about the complexity of
ecosystems’ infrastructure and about the impact of a runaway food culture
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Tim Lang and John Ingram
based on untrammelled choice. Yet policy remained overwhelmingly
productionist, with a welfarist safety net at global, but not always at
national level (Shaw 2007).
In the twenty-first century, the world faces both old and new food
dynamics. Today, for instance, hunger is again rising; after three decades
of dropping as a proportion of world population, it is now back up to
affecting a billion people. But this is outstripped by the 1.2 billion estimated
to be overweight or obese (Gardner and Halweil 2000). Nowadays under-,
over-, and mal-consumption of food co-exist. Loosened tastes and rampant
consumerism have become major drivers of land use, as we see in the
Amazon case study provided by Toby Gardner (4.3). Powerful global
retailers and traders, not just national governments, dominate how food is
grown, distributed, priced and consumed (Burch and Lawrence 2007). The
marketing budget of one giant soft-drinks corporation exceeds the World
Health Organization’s bi-annual public health budget (Lang et al. 2006).
Billions of people today eat as only kings and the rich ate in the past; more
people are clinically obese or overweight than are malnourished (Gardner
and Halweil 2000). Entire new structures and networks of food commodity
routes have been created, aided by the age of oil. Cheap oil has fuelled both
the nutrition and logistics revolutions. Neither is sustainable.
At the start of the twenty-first century, therefore, public policy over food
security is in some turmoil. On the one hand, there is widespread specialist
recognition that a structural reassessment is in order. On the other hand,
there is institutional and consumer lifestyle ‘lock-in’ to productionism’s
inappropriate brilliance. This mismatch emerged clearly in 2006–08, when
world political leaders began to realize something serious and new was
facing the future of food and agriculture. In 2006, world agricultural
commodity prices began to rise, and then rocketed in 2007–08. These
peaked in 2008, but not before the FAO had won attention for the view that
unless agriculture received more R&D investment and political support,
the world would enter a neo-Malthusian crisis (FAO 2008). Neoliberal
economists disagreed, arguing that price signals would reinvigorate
production. As prices dropped and crop figures rose, it seemed they were
right, only for the FAO Food Price Index to rise slowly again to the point
where by 2011 prices had exceeded 2008 peak levels. Oil prices, too,
exceeded $125 a barrel. This added weight to the structural analyses urging
fundamental review. Although the seriousness of the situation helped
trigger many national inquiries and processes, such as former French
President Sarkozy’s G20 inquiry into food price volatility, the fundamental
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‘blank sheet’ rethink has not yet happened. Dominant thinking still centres
on ‘produce more’ rather than ‘consume less or differently’, let alone radical
redistributive politics.
The significance of this policy mess cannot be overestimated. There is
much lock-in to the status quo. Who could not want to maintain a
supermarket culture which offers 30,000 food items for the consumer to
choose? But who takes seriously that, behind this astonishing feat, is an
unsustainable reliance on oil? In the UK, for instance, one company sells a
third of all food and drink consumed, one-quarter of all lorries on UK roads
are food-related, and half travel empty. Vast investment has been expended
on building the twentieth-century food infrastructure to enable this affront
to sustainability. Yet policymakers continue to believe that somehow
‘business as usual’ is both possible and desirable; they are either in a state
of denial or else believe that market dynamics will resolve the difficulties.
Meanwhile evidence that addressing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions
alone requires huge change in rich countries’ food and lifestyles mounts
(Audsley et al. 2010). Future challenges go further than just GHGs, of
course. A ‘one planet’ food system must develop new relationships with
not just oil, but water, carbon, land, climate and ecosystems support. The
transition to sustainability and long-term food security will be rocky and
requires culture change, not just a few products with ‘lo carbon’ or ‘bird
friendly’ labels.
UK governments since the 1970s have championed liberal food policy
analyses despite (sometimes because of) membership of the Common
Agricultural Policy (HM Treasury and Defra 2005). Today, with home food
production back down to 1950s proportions (after a high point in the 1980s),
UK governments are acutely aware of their reliance on external sources,
on how sterling levels shape food prices, and how reliance on big food
retailers to lower food prices has its limits (Collingham 2011). Investment
in sustainable food systems is a priority, yet consumers and retailers
themselves are hooked on the pursuit of ‘cheap food’ rather than
sustainable food. This tension began to surface in the UK, and across OECD
economies more generally, when world agricultural commodity prices
rocketed in the 2007–08 price spike.
Concerned, the UK set up a Cabinet Office review. The resulting Food
Matters report in 2008 proposed a more integrated analysis and policy
(Cabinet Office 2008). It suggested a new ‘low carbon and healthy’ framework for the UK and de facto EU food system. This new perspective suggested that equal emphasis needs to be given to supply and consumption;
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Tim Lang and John Ingram
to push and pull; to society, environment and production, not just production; to the interface of people, natural systems and socio-economic
structures. It called for processes and institutions to manage change, and
the need to acknowledge not just technical but socio-political options; to
incorporate not just economic but cultural factors; to address not just
farming but ever longer supply chains. The discourse thus began to move
from mapping problems and their extent to what to do about it, and to
scoping policy re-engagement with the world of investment, and better
coordination between state, companies and consumerism. In short, what
began to emerge from just one high level review of one relatively small
country was a case for renewed integrated public policy, not just narrow
‘market-think’. ‘Leave it to Tesco et al.’ is not a sustainable or sensible public
policy, not least since big retailers and processors are only too aware of
how coming crises might destabilize their own supply chains and market
value – hence their creation of some interesting parallel processes such as
the Sustainable Agriculture Initiative and GlobalGAP (GlobalGAP 2008;
SAI 2008). These are company-specific rather than planetary global
initiatives, but they are signs that even the powerful are nervous. Certainly,
the undertow is that not just academics and analysts are voicing the
question as to whether public food governance and institutions are ‘fit for
purpose’.
It is important not to lose sight of the enormous successes of twentiethcentury agriculture. The impact of 150 years of research and field
experimentation has delivered major advances in food production, most
notably in food crops (and especially in the ‘green revolution’ in the 1960s
and 1970s). There have also been significant advances in animal sciences
and in understanding the population dynamics of fisheries. Globally,
however, although food production has kept ahead of global demand,
there are still marked regional differences in food security. And the fragility
of the current global food system was illustrated by the immediate
consequences of the 2008 price rises.
This is important in the context of tipping points. The 2006–08 food price
spike propelled the broader notion of food security into the policy and
public eye. Almost overnight, governments were issuing statements about
food security (as opposed to food production) and the media were relaying
these to civil society. A key consideration for the tipping points discussion
is that many reasons were advanced for the ‘food crisis’ including not only
poor harvests due to weather anomalies but also commodity price speculation, increased demand for grains, export bans on selected foodstuffs,
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Food security twists and turns
inadequate grain stocks, higher oil prices and the use of crop lands for the
production of biofuels (Gregrory and Ingram 2008).
The world of food policy now has to address a wide range of drivers.
These are highly complex. While climate change could well accentuate the
interaction of factors shaping access, affordability, and utilization, it is but
one of several external stressors acting on the food system. Economic access
to food, and hence livelihoods, is critically important. If policymakers are
to consider future change successfully and based on evidence, they require
understanding of the whole food system rather than just the production component. In this context we share the argument, advanced in
Chapter 1.1, that tipping points could be better understood as combinations
of intertwining factors.

Food systems, food security and food vulnerabilities
The Global Environmental Change and Food Systems (GECAFS) project is
an example of a major research effort in the 2000s which ideally ought to
have been central to this process of building integrated policy understanding. For GECAFS, Ericksen (2008) conceptually divided food security
into three major components, each of which needs to be stable over time:
food availability (which depends on food production, distribution and
exchange), food access (which depends on food affordability, allocation and
preference), and food utilization (which depends on nutritional value, social
value, and food safety) (Ericksen 2008). These components are all outcomes
of a number of activities of the ‘food chain’: (1) producing food; (2)
processing food and packaging food; (3) distributing and retailing food;
and (4) consuming food. Both the food systems activities and the
consequences of these activities for food security (i.e. their outcomes) are
influenced by global environmental change; and the activities have
environmental feedbacks as well as food security implications.
These activities therefore lead to a number of outcomes, many of which
contribute to food security, and others which relate to environmental and
other social welfare concerns. The GECAFS food-system model attempted
to capture this dynamic. Ingram (2011) details five contrasting examples
where its application has helped focus research and policy formulation.
Food security is compromised as and when any of the components of food
security are diminished, as is usually the case when food-system activities
are disrupted by any stress. While each activity is to some extent vulnerable
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to global environmental change, it is the combined vulnerability of the food
system as a whole which is critically important for food security. This is
what the Royal Institute for International Affairs (Chatham House) called
the ‘new fundamentals’ for food policy (Ambler-Edwards et al. 2009). The
massive floods in Pakistan in 2010 affected the whole food system: storing
food, distributing food, retailing and consuming food, as well as severely
disrupting production itself. Single issues affect all food-system activities,
but are influenced by cultural and social capacities for accommodation and
adjustment, as covered by Emily Boyd (7.2).
So what are the likely pressures for change in food systems which might
lead to increased food insecurity? While climate change will undoubtedly
be a major factor impacting food production in many regions, it is the
combination of increasing demand for food, coupled with growing climate
stress (combined with yet further environmental stresses such as reduced
water availability or soil degradation), that will be critical. While producing
food has kept ahead of food demand historically, global demand is now
growing fast. Economic growth in countries such as China and India,
coupled with urbanization and the increasing influence of the retailing
sector, is pushing up the consumption of meat and dairy products, projected
to increase by up to 2.4 per cent annually between 2007 and 2016 (Von Braun
2007). Goodland and Anhang (2009) suggest that the total contribution to
global GHG emission could be as high as 51 per cent. This kind of analysis
contributes to the lively debate for one meatless day per week.
Diets don’t ‘Westernize’ by themselves. Very aggressive campaigns on
the part of major corporations and Western governments to shift diets to
Western patterns in poorer economies continue to have a very substantial
impact, as have Western subsidies and ‘dumping’ of products – e.g. milk
powder from the EU into China. Different policy discourses emerge from
this picture. On the one hand some argue that this is progress; why
shouldn’t the Chinese or Indians eat more and differently? On the other
hand, evidence from Western countries already suggests costly healthcare
consequences from the nutrition transition. How can Mumbai afford its
rocketing type 2 diabetes rate? Or China its rise of non-communicable
disease as it consumes more fat? (Chen et al. 1991). Even the West has
political difficulties with the health aspects of its unsustainable food
footprint. One European Commission study, for instance, estimated that
food accounts for 30 per cent of European consumers’ environmental
impact (Tukker et al. 2006). A study of UK food GHG emissions also
estimated that food accounts for 30 per cent (Audsley et al. 2010). If GHGs
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are to be reduced, considerable changes in Western food consumption
patterns will be crucial.
This is what troubles politicians. In developing countries, the rising
middle classes would love to be able to eat like their counterparts in the
West. In the developed world, companies and politicians are both nervous
of weaning consumers off that lifestyle. Yet already policy decisions are
being made which add further pressures to the already unsustainable mix.
Commitments to increase and subsidise biofuel production are a case in
point. On the supply side, the diversion of a significant proportion of the
US maize crop to bio-ethanol production (25 per cent of the crop in 2007),
coupled with poor harvests of wheat in Australia and parts of eastern
Europe, reduced the amount of long-distance tradable grains at a time
when global cereal stocks (about 400 million tonnes) were at their lowest
levels since the early 1980s (Gregrory and Ingram 2008). Maize exports
from the USA averaged 47 million tonnes per year from 2000 to 2005, but
in 2007 80 million tonnes went to ethanol refineries. Oil prices have also
risen leading to increased fertilizer, transport and distribution costs, and a
growing realization that world cereal and energy prices are not independent (Von Braun 2007). This was realized in the early 1970s but was
politically marginalized, ironically due to the success of the Green
Revolution and the new political compact between the oil-rich Middle East
and dependent OECD Western states (Green 1978). The linkage is clearly
seen in wheat prices, which like oil tripled between January 2000 and July
2007, and in the doubling of maize and rice prices over the same period
(Von Braun 2007).
The OECD and FAO have now acknowledged that the era of dropping
agricultural commodity prices may well be over. While average food prices
have declined, food prices for many of the poor have not dropped over
time as a percentage of their disposable income. This may be good news
for urbanized consumers and food processors, but troubling for primary
producers (OECD and FAO 2008). Their joint Agricultural Outlook report
predicts price rises in the 2010s. The lack of stocks may be a major factor in
the short-term increase in grain prices, but while the current high prices
are unlikely to be sustained as farmers increased production in 2008, they
are likely to remain relatively high for the medium term. This will bring
benefits to some producers but it poses problems for the poor, governments
of low income countries, and aid agencies supplying food, although with
the appropriate policies higher prices could provide incentives to produce
local food and stimulate agriculture.
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But how will the additional impacts of climate change, and its likely
growing importance in the future as a factor affecting food systems, further
complicate what is already a very complex situation? Gregory and Ingram
(2008) reviewed the present knowledge of recorded impacts of climate
change and variability on crop production, and estimated its contribution to the then current ‘food crisis’ (Gregrory and Ingram 2008). Such
contributions might arise directly through the impact of existing climate
change and/or climate variability on crop production, or arise indirectly
through actions to mitigate or adapt to anticipated changes in climate. As
they point out, the effect of increasing the mean temperature is relatively
straightforward with the frequency distribution moved towards hotter and
away from colder temperatures. However, increased variability of temperature becomes very important if crop biological responses are nonlinear, and there are absolute thresholds for crop resilience.
Increasing variability of weather (and thus climate) may stem from three
sources:
•
•

•

Changes in the mean weather, such as an increase in annual mean
temperature and/or precipitation;
A change in the distribution of weather so that there are more frequent
extreme weather events such as physiologically damaging temperatures or longer periods of drought;
A combination of changes to the mean and its variability.

The consequences of the dry conditions on grain production and exports
have been significant. Recent volatility in wheat prices has shown the
impact of drought and seasonal fluctuation and has been a reminder that
small variations in Australia, for example, can throw price predictions,
open up opportunities for speculation and compound the effects of US and
EU decisions to build biofuel production (Gregrory and Ingram 2008).

Environmental interactions with food systems
There is now a substantial body of work that shows how sensitive
agricultural production is to climate change, water and energy inputs
(e.g. IPCC 2007, Stern 2008). Agricultural systems could be thrown by
weather extremes, such as a drought season (or successive droughts),
thereby accelerating migration and urbanization which in turn stresses
food distribution and labour markets.
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Food security twists and turns
While the impacts of environmental change on food production might
be the most obvious issue, other food system activities are vulnerable to
such stress. Food transport is one determinant of food availability; most
people do not grow their own food and they rely on distribution systems
to bring food to them. The world has now passed the point where a
majority is urbanized. At a local level, food distribution might be stressed
if a critical piece of distribution infrastructure (e.g. a railway or road bridge)
is destroyed by a flood. In many cases a ‘work around’ can reduce its
impact (by finding another route for example), but not always. Emily Boyd
(7.2) takes this further, but relevant here are aspects of community
response.
Concentrating on the vulnerability of distinct-level food systems to
global environmental change in the Indo-Gangetic Plain, a GECAFS foodsystems approach identified that the ‘vulnerability points’ were due to a
number of interacting socio-economic and bio-geophysical factors; the
context is fundamentally important (Aggarwal et al. 2004). In Ludhiana
District of the Indian Punjab, for instance, where socio-economic development has led to a dependence on irrigation, the key vulnerability point is
reduced irrigation supply due to lowering groundwater tables due to
excessive extraction. This threatens crop productivity and overall production. In contrast, in the Ruhani Basin District, in the Nepali Terai, food
security depends on moving food from village to village, especially in times
of stress. Increased flooding due to glacier melt, coupled with more extreme
weather, disrupts footpaths, bridges, and other vital food distribution
infrastructure. Taking a food-system approach helped identify the
vulnerability points in the two contrasting Districts in the Indian Punjab
and the Nepali Terai and showed them to be quite different. They will need
very different adaptation responses to reduce their respective vulnerabilities: agronomic in the Indian case, structural and policy in the Nepali
case.
Climate change and other aspects of environmental change stress food
systems in a number of ways which may lead to organized responses of
the kinds described by Emily Boyd. But food-system activities feed back to
environmental conditions, which may in turn exacerbate these stresses.
From a food perspective, agriculture is usually thought of as the main
culprit; 12–14 per cent of total GHG emissions are attributed to agriculture,
and a further 18 per cent to land use change and forestry, much of which
relates to clearing land for agriculture and pasture (Foresight 2011). While
agriculture and associated activities clearly contribute substantially to
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GHG emissions and other aspects of environmental degradation, all foodsystem activities lead to GHG emissions. Edwards and colleagues
estimated that in the US food system 40 per cent of emissions are due to
non-agricultural food-system activities (Edwards et al. 2009). But GHG
emission is not the only environmental consequence of food systems.
Impacts on biodiversity, on biogeochemical cycles, on fresh water
resources, and on other environmental parameters are all in part caused
by food-system activities.
An initial analysis by Ingram (2011) uses a matrix to indicate where the
four sets of food-system activities contribute to crossing a number of
‘planetary boundaries’ (as identified by Rockstrom et al. 2009; see Table
4.2). Far from reducing the impacts attributed to agriculture, Table 4.2
provides examples in almost all cells of the matrix. Clearly mitigation
opportunities exist across the food system. But it is also well worth noting
that much of the GHG emission could be reduced across the whole food
system if less food was wasted by consumers (Foresight 2011). Parfitt and
colleagues report that 25 per cent of food purchased (by weight) is wasted
in UK households, and that the 8.3 million tonnes of food and drink wasted
each year in the UK has a carbon impact exceeding 20 million tonnes of
CO2-equivalent (Parfitt et al. 2010). Reducing food waste by only 25 per cent
in the USA would reduce CO2-equivalent by 65 million tonnes annually
(Lyutse 2010).

The institutional challenge
The picture of food security sketched here is one whose complexity and
global reach pose significant challenges for governance. In the midtwentieth century, after the Second World War, governments were the
drivers of reformed food policies designed principally to raise production.
But, in the twenty-first century, power and influence lie in a new global
configuration of vast companies alongside altered national governmental
powers, along with consumer and environmental groups. This illcoordinated patchwork of multilevel governance – part public, part private,
part global, part national – has to address global to local capacities in order
to feed an unprecedented combination of 9 billion people in 2050, in an era
of climate change with changed economies, societal expectations and
consumer cultures. Figure 4.1 provides a conceptual model of current food
96

Eutrophication and
GHGs from fertilization

P mining for fertilizers

Irrigation

Extensification and
intensification

Land use change,
pesticide and fertilizer
pollution, overhunting,
overfishing, crop
homogenization, irrigation

Smoke and dust from
land use change

Pesticides

Nitrogen cycle

Phosphorus cycle

Fresh water use

Land use change

Biodiversity loss
(including agrobiodiversity)

Atmospheric aerosols

Chemical pollution

Source: Ingram (2011)

GHGs from fertilizers;
changing albedo

Climate change

Producing food

Effluent from processing
and packaging plants

Hydroelectricity dams
for aluminium smelting

Deforestation for paper/
card

Washing, heating,
cooling

Detergents from
processing plants

Effluent from processing
and packaging plants

GHGs from energy
production

Processing and
packaging food

Transport emissions

Emissions from shipping

Invasive species

Transport and retail
infrastructure

NOx emissions from
transport

GHGs from transport
and refrigeration systems

Distributing and
retailing food

Table 4.2 Examples of how food-chain activities (columns) affect key environmental variables (rows)

Cooking, cleaning

Consumer choices

Cooking, cleaning

Food waste

Food waste

GHGs from cooking

Consuming food

Social impact

CONTEXT

Health/ill-health

OUTCOMES
Waste and biological outflow,
e.g. pollutants

restaurants, public sector

e.g. supermarkets, shops

DOMESTIC FOOD
PREPARATION

CATERING

Economic drivers,
e.g. price, profits

RETAIL

e.g. national/international, import/export

DISTRIBUTION AND LOGISTICS

PROCESSING AND MANUFACTURE

farming, fishing, horticulture

PRIMARY PRODUCTION

e.g. agrichemicals, pharmaceuticals, equipment

INPUTS

Socio-cultural
influences, e.g.
religion, gender, family

Figure 4.1 The food system, its external influences, and outcomes: a flowchart

Cultural impact

Local governments → Laws,
regulations, subsidies, etc.

National governments → Laws,
regulations, subsidies, etc.

Regional bodies → Regulations,
law, subsidies, etc.

International Organizations →
Policy guidelines, advice, etc.

INSTITUTIONS

Environmental
‘givens’, e.g. climate,
water, land, biodiversity

Energy and
material outflow

Civil society
organizations

Consciousness
industries, e.g.
advertising, media

Health, hygiene controls

Finance capital

Social policies

Research,
development,
engineering and
technology

Human labour, skills
and education

SHAPING FORCES

Food security twists and turns
systems. This conceives of food flowing down a supply chain, drawing
upon natural, social and economic capital, with outputs and consequences
which feed back on the system dynamics. Around this central flow, other
forces operate. Multiple stresses and interactions are possible, whose
direction is affected by institutions and governance.
The mid-twentieth-century policy model was more top-down than it
is today, with government broadly shaping the relationship between
supply-chain actors, consumers and civil society. That model has been
frayed by new dynamics: regionalization and globalization, consumerism
and the astonishing expansion of choice culture, and the spread and
flow of information and other technologies. The result is that the activities
of farmers and growers are largely dictated away from the land, even in
the developing world, let alone in Western societies where more people
are employed off than on the land. Farming and food production remain
hugely important for food security, of course, not least because they
are the largest employers on the planet, engaging nearly 400 million
people.
It is primarily governments which have the legitimacy and policy
potential to facilitate any transition to sustainable food systems for food
security. Are governments able to do this? Attempts to create new policy
frameworks, even in the area of trade (which governments almost universally state through the World Trade Organization is their top priority),
have not successfully engaged with the challenge of sustainability. Trade
rules have been framed around the pursuit of commerce rather than living
within environmental limits. Yet, as we noted above, along with Amanda
Long (6.4), some giant commercial companies now realize the urgency of
sustainability, if only as threats to their brands and their own survival. The
assumption is often made that food governance will inevitably be delivered
by existing institutions, as though they are (a) functioning adequately, (b)
have appropriate terms of reference, and (c) have a good understanding of
how best to integrate environmental, social and economic policy demands
for food systems.
These assumptions do not hold. And there are good reasons for why
modern food governance is fraying. First, there are tensions over priorities
– trade, environment, health, and consumers. Secondly, governance is
inexorably multilevel, with competing pulls from local, sub-national,
national, regional and global levels of democratic accountability. And
thirdly, institutional complexity has been compounded by failure to
restructure. At the UN level alone there is fragmentation among the
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big organizations. The FAO dwarfs the World Health Organization.
Environmental issues are championed by the UN Environment Programme
(UNEP), but are largely sidelined by the sole body which is supposed to
arch across the UN, the old Administrative Committee on Co-ordination/
Sub-Committee on Nutrition (ACC/SCN), now renamed the ‘Standing
Committee on Nutrition’.
No one champions an integrated approach to food policy per se. Food
security de facto receives most policy attention from the World Food
Programme, which has an overt crisis-mitigation role, but which is entirely
dependent on donor beneficence. A welfarist backstop or safety net is
essential, but prevention rather than crisis management is what is now
required. In government, like commerce, institutional divisions are
inevitable. What matters is cross-sectoral or ministerial coordination. And
it is here that failures of governance have been most marked.
Happily, pressures to reform world food security governance have
begun to emerge. In the UN, a Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food was
created in the late 1990s. This office has become a remarkable voice for
reformed governance through a series of powerful papers addressed to the
Secretary General (www.srfood.org). In 2010, the Committee on World
Food Security, created in 1974, was revamped and given new urgency. It
remains to be seen whether the renewed body will get a grip of the new
policy requirements, and drive action on prevention and the delivery of
sustainable food systems.
Our recommendation is that more thought needs to be given to how
global, regional, national, and local policy architecture could help the
transition to sustainable food systems. Better coordination, thinking
capacity and sharing of experimentation are clearly required. But where is
the political will? For this to happen, policymakers need to give equal
emphasis to all aspects of sustainability. History suggests that food shocks
are not always anticipated. As Emily Boyd (7.2) suggests, resilience stems
from building capacities, not assuming ‘business as usual’.

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Policy, 7: 487–98.

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4.2
Human resilience in the face of
biodiversity tipping points at local
and regional scales1
PATRICIA HOWARD

Perspective
Biodiversity, in its broadest sense, is life on Earth. It has been characterized
as a ‘concept, a measurable entity, and a social or political construct’ (Jax
2010). In this last sense, biodiversity is charged with great religious,
aesthetic, moral, and economic meanings that vary according to the
observer. For ecologists, the broad definition includes genetic diversity,
species diversity, and ecosystem diversity, whereas a common narrower
definition is the diversity of species (on Earth, in biomes, in ecosystems).
Its relevance for biologists and ecologists is usually cast in evolutionary
terms or in terms of ecosystem functioning, which some economists refer
to as ecosystem services. Ecosystem services are defined as the benefits that
humans derive from ecosystem functions or processes. Thus, the relationship between biodiversity change, ecosystem functioning, and ecosystem
services has become central to contemporary scientific understanding of
biodiversity and human well-being, as well as to a multitude of policies
that seek to assess and address human well-being, environmental degradation, and global environmental change. There is great debate and
uncertainty about the relations between biodiversity and ecosystem
functioning, about the significance of change in biodiversity for ecosystem

1
This work is based on the ‘Human Adaptation to Biodiversity Change’ Project NE/
1004122/1, which was partly funded with support from the Ecosystem Services for Poverty
Alleviation (ESPA) programme. The ESPA programme is funded by the Department for
International Development (DfID), the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the
Natural Environment Research Council (NERC).

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functioning, and indeed for evolution. This necessarily creates much
uncertainty about the nature of the relationship between biodiversity and
human well-being. In spite of such uncertainty, which affects all assessments of the actual and potential threats to human well-being from
biodiversity change, there is broad agreement that the implications of
current and projected levels of biodiversity change for human well-being
are, in most instances, major and possibly dire, at local, regional, and global
scales.
Most people across the globe will feel the direct impacts of local
biodiversity change, but everyone is likely to feel the indirect impacts, since
local changes can connect to create global repercussions. One set of such
impacts arises from the rapid emergence and transmission of new infectious diseases and pests that threaten plants and animals (and thus the
humans that depend upon them), as well as humans (see e.g. Chivian and
Bernstein 2008; Pongsiri 2009; Keesing et al. 2010). A second set is presented
by ‘biodiversity tipping points’ that may emerge at regional scale, such as
the loss of the Amazon rainforest or the collapse of coral reefs, that will
have extra-regional or even global repercussions not only due to the loss
of species and ecosystems, but also due to the loss of ecosystem services
that these provide at higher scales. A third set of impacts results from the
reconfiguration of ecosystems (including tipping into alternative ecosystem
states) resulting from changes in species range, phenology, and abundance,
which in turn provoke changes in ecosystem functions and associated
human benefits. It also includes the loss of single species in particular
contexts, such as ‘cultural keystone’ species or ecological keystone, engineer, or framework species. An example is the threat posed by the loss of
functional groups of species, such as pollinators (see e.g. Potts et al. 2010),
which has major implications for ecosystem productivity and the provision
of benefits such as food, fibre, and fuels. A fourth set of direct and indirect
impacts arises from human maladaptation to any of these threats.
To adapt successfully to biodiversity tipping points requires major
changes in values, priorities, and institutions, particularly economic
institutions. Some of this change may be forthcoming but much is unlikely
to happen quickly or profoundly enough. A first step is to recognize the
implications of biodiversity change and potential tipping points for human
welfare. A second is to take urgent measures to mitigate such change, and
a third is to consider potential responses to early warnings. This chapter
focuses on the first and the third of these options, principally in relation to
societies that are directly and highly dependent on biodiversity, since it is
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these populations that are (a) most immediately vulnerable to such change,
and (b) most important to preserving both the planet’s biodiversity and
humanity’s adaptive capacity.

Types, magnitudes and drivers of biodiversity
change
We find ourselves in a period when rates of species extinctions could range
between 50 and 500 times background losses, which is the highest rate in
the past 65 million years. The effects have been summarized as:
Changes in species’ geographic ranges, genetic risks of extinction, genetic
assimilation, natural selection, mutation rates, the shortening of food chains,
the increase in nutrient-enriched niches permitting the ascendancy of
microbes, and the differential survival of ecological generalists. Rates of
evolutionary processes will change in different groups, and speciation in the
larger vertebrates is essentially over . . . Whether the biota will continue to
provide the dependable ecological services humans take for granted is less
clear . . . Our inability to make clearer predictions about the future of
evolution has serious consequences for both biodiversity and humanity.
(Woodruff 2001: 5471)

The consequences for biodiversity and humanity depend in part on the
timescale. Some scientists argue that the Earth’s sixth extinction has already
arrived, where an estimated loss of over 75 per cent of species can be
expected, possibly within 250 to 500 years (Barnosky et al. 2011). Others
highlight the fact that projections of species extinction rates are controversial (Pereira et al. 2010). A mass extinction hardly bodes well for
humans, given the changes in the biosphere, in biomes and ecosystems, the
associated pest and disease outbreaks, etc. that are associated with the
different drivers of biodiversity change, and the possible critical thresholds
or tipping points discussed below and in other chapters presented here.
Thus, the implications of what is laid out below are magnified manyfold
and their effects become increasingly synergistic over time – 500 years is a
very short period when we consider that Homininae appeared 8 million
years ago, Homo sapiens 500,000 years ago, and modern humans 200,000
years ago. Were humans to have a council of elders to deliberate the impact
of our activities on future generations, they would certainly be extraordinarily alarmed and calling for radical transformations, as, indeed, are
many scientists today.
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What is extraordinary about this possible sixth extinction of species is
that, for the first time in the Earth’s history, a species is actually in a position
to change the course of evolution writ large (Western 2001; Pereira et al.
2010). This is reflected in the wide range of projected changes in biodiversity, because ‘there are major opportunities to intervene through
better policies, but also because of large uncertainties in projections’
(Pereira et al. 2010: 1496).
The causes of species extinctions and related changes in biodiversity and
ecosystem services can be characterized as synergistic stressors – climatic
change coupled with ‘abnormally high ecological stressors’ and ‘unusual
interactions’ (e.g. between human-induced climate change, habitat fragmentation, pollution, overharvesting, invasive species, pathogens and,
some would add, the ‘expanding human biomass’ (Barnosky et al. 2011),
although one could just as easily add ‘expanding livestock biomass’ or
‘expanding biofuels production’ (Steinfeld et al. 2010; Wise et al. 2009)).
Beyond this, humans have had a massive impact on the productivity,
composition, and diversity of terrestrial ecosystems by changing the rates
of supply of major nutrients (nitrogen, phosphorus, and atmospheric CO2),
altering regional fire frequencies, and relaxing biogeographic barriers to
species dispersal (Tilman and Lehman 2001). Many human-dominated
ecosystems are characterized by high natural resource extraction, short
food chains, food web simplification, habitat and landscape homogeneity,
heavy use of petrochemicals and fossil fuels, convergent soil characteristics,
modified hydrological cycles, reduced biotic and physical disturbance
regimes, and global mobility of people, goods, and services (Western 2001).
A great concern to biologists and ecologists is the uneven ability of
species to change their range, or distributions, in response to climate
change (CBD 2007). If individual species are not able to change their range,
they are likely to be lost (Root and Hughes 2005; Malcolm et al. 2005). It
also highlights a second major concern, which is the break-up of species
associations and communities, which will result in further extinctions and
also in major ecological changes that occur as new species associations form
and species richness potentially decreases. Meta-analyses indicate that
temperature rises in the twentieth century have led to shifts in species’
range toward the poles that average 6.1 km per decade (Williams et al.
2007). Species with high dispersal capabilities may migrate at the rate of
one kilometre per year or more, so that these species, together with
climatically tolerant species, are likely to dominate many of the Earth’s
ecosystems. Scientists also argue that species are less able to adapt to
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climate warming today than at any other period in the last 10,000 years,
due to the faster pace of change and to human-induced ecosystem changes,
especially habitat change, which limit the possibilities for species to migrate
and to adapt (Thomas et al. 2004). Both biodiversity losses and changes in
species range can have multiple repercussions on ecosystems, in part due
to changing species composition and richness.

Biodiversity-related tipping points
The tipping points (or critical threshold) concept has only quite recently
been directly linked to the term ‘biodiversity’. The concept of biodiversity
tipping points is generally closely allied to an ecosystems perspective,
where it is thought that there are a number of key variables and dynamics
that have a determining role in the organization of an ecosystem. Within
any given system, there are alternative stable states (or ‘stability regimes’).
For example, shallow lakes may be at one equilibrium with clear water and
aquatic plants in place, or at another equilibrium where turbid water and
a lack of vegetation persist (Scheffer et al. 2001). Beyond some limit, if there
are even minor changes in the system, it can move over a threshold (or
‘tipping point’) into an alternative stable state that may be desirable or
undesirable from the standpoint of the goods and services that it provides.
Not all ecosystem tipping points are closely related to biodiversity. But
it appears that a large majority are, even though it is not always species
diversity that plays a key role – it may be species abundance or only a few
functionally important species. Scheffer’s (2009) work on critical transitions addresses lakes, oceans, and terrestrial ecosystems as case studies.
Table 4.3 presents examples from terrestrial ecosystems where biodiversity
change is central to the dynamics. In such cases, there are three types of
relations that can be discerned where biodiversity change is related to
tipping points in ecosystems:
1.
2.
3.

Biodiversity change is driven by exogenous driver(s) (e.g. climate
change).
There are feedbacks between biodiversity change and an exogenous
driver (e.g. climate change–vegetation feedbacks).
Biodiversity change is the direct driver of change leading to tipping
points.

An example of the first dynamic is change in species’ phenology due to
warming or changes in precipitation that lead to changes in species’ range
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or outbreaks of pests and diseases and thus reorganization of ecosystems.
Examples of the second dynamic are the climate–vegetation feedbacks
indicated in Table 4.3. Examples of the third are deforestation leading to
changes in albedo, overhunting of large predators leading to the collapse
of a trophic level, or certain ‘self-organizing’ effects of particular species.
While each of these dynamics can lead to tipping points, in many cases all
three may be occurring simultaneously and acting in synergy or
antagonistically at different scales, but generally synergies between them
lead to the highest probability of reaching tipping points.
A recent assessment of the vulnerability of Australian ecosystems to
tipping points (Laurance et al. 2011) classified them into three sets according to the ‘severity’ of the tipping point: ‘tipping’ ecosystems, which are
‘likely to experience profound regime changes across most or all of their
geographic range’; ‘dipping’ ecosystems, which experience such profound
change but in geographically limited areas; and ‘stripping’ ecosystems
which are ‘being stripped of important ecosystem components, such as
their small mammal, amphibian, or large predator fauna, but such changes
are more insidious and less visually apparent than major regime changes’.
Laurance et al. identified a number of intrinsic features of what they
considered to be the ten most vulnerable ecosystems, as well as the major
environmental threats. Of the seven intrinsic features identified, four relate
directly to the species composition of these ecosystems: the history of
habitat fragmentation; reliance on ecosystem engineers; reliance on
framework species; and reliance on predators or keystone mutualists.
Of the environmental threats, five (or six, depending on the causes of
salinization) are related to climate change, one to pollution, and the rest to
biodiversity change (habitat reduction, habitat fragmentation, changed fire
regimes, invasives, overexploitation, and pests and pathogens). They found
that most vulnerable ecosystems are threatened by multiple drivers, where
synergies between drivers are pervasive and directly contribute to the
likelihood of tipping points.
Recently, potential biodiversity-related tipping points have been
identified that are seen to have larger-scale regional effects, where such
effects are of great concern not only because of the implications these have
for large numbers of smaller-scale ecosystems and the people who inhabit
them, but also for global biodiversity per se, and for their potential
contributions to other Earth systems tipping points. Leadley et al. (2010: 8)
concluded that major biodiversity transformations will occur at levels near
or below a low level of only 2°C global warming, including ‘widespread
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Newly established vegetation may maintain
itself through diverse mechanisms
Loss of vegetation patches leads to desertic
conditions devoid of perennial vegetation

Herbivore mortality events trigger forest
expansion

Rare extreme weather events may trigger
woodland expansion
Self-organized vegetation patterns –
transport of nutrients and water from barren
land to vegetation patches

Small-scale transitions in
semi-arid vegetation

Alpine tree lines and lowland tree islands –
sharp natural boundaries maintained through
microclimates and soils

African savannah – Rinderpest epidemic
reduced ungulate numbers allowing large-scale
woodland expansion, then human-induced fire
eliminated woodlands, and the open landscape
again maintained by large herbivores

Amazon – deforestation decreases local
moisture recycling

Climate–vegetation feedbacks
through transpiration

From wet forested state to dry savannah, and
semi-desert, with expansion of tropical forest
northward

From wet vegetation state to desert state – drier
conditions and loss of vegetation drove
transition

Drylands – Sahel-Sahara – decrease in
temperature contrast between ocean and
land, weakening monsoon circulation

Climate–vegetation feedbacks
through albedo effects

Alternative states

Ecosystem examples

Dynamic

Table 4.3 Examples of ‘biodiversity’ tipping points in terrestrial ecosystems (derived from Scheffer 2009: 216–39)

Allee effect – e.g. positive feedback between
meta-population size and local population size

Epidemics occur only beyond critical
thresholds of population density and
eventually vanish, but system tips

Species extinction in fragmented
landscapes

Epidemics

Cycles between spruce/fir-dominated to
aspen/birch dominance, with moose browsing
leading to shift back to spruce

Insect outbreaks – warm dry weather gives
boost to spruce budworms

Transformation of boreal forest to lichen plains
from spruce budworm; collapse of Caribbean
coral reefs from disease in sea urchins

Meta-population goes extinct through excessive
fragmentation, may have cascading effects, e.g.
loss of fish leading to switch in turbidity to clear
state in ponds and lakes

Semi-terrestrial states become bogs; atmospheric
nitrogen input and drainage lead to vascular
plant-dominated system

Quebec – shift from forest to lichen woodlands
provoked by spruce budworm and fire

Lichen woodlands – closed lichen mat
prevents tree recruitment

Form in wet climates when shallow open
waters are filled with organic matter – peat
mosses achieve dominance

Regional amplifier of global warming;
terrestrial vegetation can affect ocean circulation
patterns

Boreal forest deforestation increases albedo
effect, leading to cooling; global warming
may promote forest expansion

Formation of raised bogs

Forest–climate feedback in
boreal regions

Patricia Howard
coral reef degradation, large shifts in marine plankton community structure
especially in the Arctic ocean, extensive invasion of tundra by boreal forest,
destruction of many coastal ecosystems, etc.’ They found that ‘the risk of
catastrophic biodiversity loss . . . has been substantially underestimated in
previous global biodiversity assessments . . . Most of the biodiversity
tipping points that we have identified will be accompanied by large
negative regional or global scale impacts on ecosystem services and human
well-being.’ The main regional tipping points they identified are presented
in the box below.

Possible regional tipping points with global
repercussions (from Leadley et al. 2010)
The Amazon Forest ‘due to the interaction of deforestation, fire and
climate change, undergoes a widespread dieback, changing from
rainforest to savanna or seasonal forest over wide areas, especially in
the East and South of the biome. The forest could move into a selfperpetuating cycle in which fires become more frequent, drought
more intense and dieback accelerates. Dieback of the Amazon will
have global impacts through increased carbon emissions, accelerating
climate change. It will also lead to regional rainfall reductions that
could compromise the sustainability of regional agriculture’ (p. 24).
See also Toby Gardiner (4.3).
The African Sahel: ‘under pressure from climate change and over-use
of limited land resources, [the Sahel] shifts to alternative, degraded
states, further driving desertification. Severe impacts on biodiversity
and agricultural productivity result. Continued degradation of the
Sahel has caused and could continue to cause loss of biodiversity and
shortages of food, fibre and water in Western Africa’ (p. 24). See
Emily Boyd (7.2).
Island Ecosystems ‘are afflicted by a cascading set of extinctions and
ecosystem instabilities, due to the impact of invasive alien species
. . . As the invaded communities become increasingly altered and
impoverished, vulnerability to new invasions may increase . . .
Because islands are the global hotspot for endemic species local

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eliminations often constitute global extinctions . . . [There are also]
large negative impacts of many invasive species on ecosystem
services such as plant productivity, nutrient cycling, water supply,
etc.’ (p. 23).
The Tundra: ‘boreal forests will permanently replace tundra ecosystems if current trends of greenhouse gas emissions persist . . .
These changes in tundra systems substantially increase climate
warming in many models. Permafrost melting and changes in game
availability have already heavily impacted some indigenous populations and these impacts are likely to become widespread and severe
over the coming decades . . . The invasion of tundra by boreal forests
can have a profound impact on global temperatures since low surface
albedo from boreal forests during the winter season warms climate
compared to tundra’ (p. 53).
Coastal Terrestrial Systems and Sea-level rise of 20–60 cm or more by
2100 are likely and will continue for many centuries, with greatest
impacts on coastal wetlands where sediment elevations are reduced,
and where species migration landward is prohibited due to physiographic setting or urban development. Biodiversity impacts are large
due to habitat loss and ecosystem area loss and degradation will
increase ‘coastal hazards to human settlements, reduce coastal water
quality, release large quantities of stored carbon, etc.’ (p. 25).
Marine Fisheries: The tipping point consists of changes in the
composition of marine communities, where large predator populations collapse and communities are dominated by organisms lower
in the food chain where, in addition to overfishing, ocean warming
and acidification are additional threats to marine biodiversity.
‘Allowing global ocean fisheries to reach a tipping-point will
not only affect marine biodiversity but it will also undermine life
on the planet because of the immense importance of the global
ocean to biogeochemical cycles . . . Total fish catch in the global ocean
may be reduced to up to a tenth of its peak amount by 2048. This will
result in significant negative economic and social effects, especially
on some of the world’s most vulnerable human communities’
(p. 117).

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Tropical Coral Reefs: These global biodiversity hotspots ‘provide a
broad range of ecosystems services with high socio-economic value:
tourism, fisheries (food and employment), nutrient cycling, climate
regulation, protection of the shoreline and other ecosystems (e.g.
mangroves), and constitute the habitat for a wide range of species’,
but rising CO2 concentrations will lead to levels of acidification that
severely impede calcium carbonate accretion, while global warming leads to coral bleaching. ‘If current trends continue coral reef
ecosystems may undergo regime shifts from coral to sponge or
algae dominated habitats. The tipping point for this phase shift is
estimated to be a sea-surface temperature increase of 2°C and/or
atmospheric CO2 concentrations above 480 ppm (estimated to occur
by 2050)’ (p. 125).

Not all scientists agree with the projections about potential tipping
points. For example, Willis et al. (2010) argue that fossil records covering
intervals of time when magnitudes and rates of climate change were similar
to those projected for the twenty-first century show that these were not
associated with large-scale biodiversity extinctions. They note that one of
the most biodiverse periods in the neotropics occurred during the Eocene
Climatic Optimum (53–51 million years ago), when atmospheric CO2
exceeded 1200 ppmv and tropical temperatures were 5–10 degrees warmer
than now. The tropical forest biome extended to mid-latitudes in the
northern and southern hemisphere and there was no ice at the poles. They
note that models presume less ecological tolerance of species than is likely
and that finer-grained resolution models predict far lower extinction rates
than grosser resolution models. However, a World Bank report (Vergara
and Scholtz 2011) also models CO2 effects and concludes that the synergies
between climate change, deforestation, and forest fires could well lead to
major impacts as soon as 2025.

Regional level biodiversity tipping points and
human resilience
There is a pressing need to begin to assess the vulnerabilities of different
groups of people to the pain and suffering, and loss of livelihoods (and
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indeed of life) associated with potential and real biodiversity-related
tipping points. As a case in point, some scientists predict that much of the
Amazon basin region could surpass a tipping point described in the box
above, with some of it ‘flipping’ to savannah. A World Bank-sponsored
modelling exercise that assessed this threat found that, with the interacting
effects of climate change, deforestation, and fire, ‘Substantial impacts are
already projected by 2025 and the situation worsens by 2050. The effect of
climate change alone would contribute to reduce the extent of the rainforest
biome by one third by the end of the century’ (Vergara and Scholtz 2011).
Vergara presented a qualitative assessment of the likely implications:
Direct economic losses . . . include yields and areas for specific crops in
tropical areas . . . as temperatures increase and rainfall patterns are modified,
and the ideal areas for different crops shift . . . dieback may reduce rainfall
in agricultural areas in southern Brazil . . . Sustainable forestry would also be
affected . . . [and the] magnitude of the carbon sink would likewise be
diminished. In addition, weather extremes, longer dry periods, disappearance or reduction of dry-period rainfalls and increased intensity
during rainy periods would all affect stream-flow regulation. This would
have an impact on the firm capacity of existing hydropower plants and on
the water storage capacity of future investments.
(Vergara 2010: 74–75)

The 2011 report called for ‘a full account of losses . . . a better valuation of
the financial and natural capital represented by the Amazon ecosystem is
required as well as a more comprehensive assessment of the economic
implications of its potential dieback’ (Vergara and Scholtz 2011: 63). The
concern, however, is not for the impacts on human beings, but for
‘economic losses’, ‘financial and natural capital’, ‘yields’, and so forth.
What, then, might be anticipated for human well-being in the region? Toby
Gardiner (4.3) looks at this, but here are some possible outcomes that might
be derived from the World Bank study:
•

•

•
•

The livelihoods base of many indigenous forest peoples (perhaps a
majority of the 349 ethnic groups) might collapse, which might lead to
their virtual disappearance.
There would be loss of much non-indigenous agriculture, fisheries, and
forest industries and thus loss or collapse of self-sufficient production
as well as rural employment in the areas worst affected.
Rural populations would be regionally displaced in order to continue
to fish, farm, and harvest forests.
Rural–urban migration would occur on a mass scale.
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•

•
•

•
•

There would be chronic water, food, and energy shortages in urban
areas, affecting nearly all populations but particularly the majority,
who are poor.
High unemployment in urban areas would result from direct and
indirect loss of economic activities, including tourism.
National and regional level economic crises would result from loss of
export revenues, rising social insecurity, and attempts to substitute for
lost ecosystem services.
There would be increasing conflict, violence, and social instability at
sub-national, national, and even inter-basin levels.
Unemployment and displacement would result in high levels of
migration to other nations and continents.

The implications for human welfare beyond the region might not be
limited to the ramifications for downstream and upstream markets and
employment (e.g. timber, soya, meat, minerals, etc.) and the regional and
global financial system, or to the effects of international migration flows or
national and regional conflicts. As the Amazon tips from a net greenhouse
gas absorber to a net source of greenhouse gases, it will be extremely
difficult to avoid exceeding ‘dangerous’ levels of global warming even if
CO2 reductions in other areas are achieved (Cox et al. 2003), with all of
the implications that this has for humanity’s efforts at climate change
mitigation and adaptation.
Whether or not such scenarios closely or remotely reflect our possible
futures, there are very strong reasons to develop them carefully and systematically based upon our best current knowledge, and for policymakers
and for the public to pay close attention. Had scientists neglected to make
clear the potential consequences of nuclear war for humanity and the types
of devastation that were implied, it is possible that such a war would not
have been averted until now. Knowing the implications for human
suffering and for the future of the human species (e.g. from a possible
nuclear winter) has been of inestimable importance in mobilizing public
and political support on all sides of the political spectrum to limit nuclear
weapons and avoid even limited nuclear warfare.
At the same time, there are very important measures that we must begin
to take with equal seriousness at local scales. Adaptation to local-scale
tipping points can have very major repercussions not only for regional
and global level environmental change and equity, but also for human
resilience in the face of local, regional, and global tipping points of all sorts.
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Bio-cultural diversity and resilience
Humans have substantially altered some 77 per cent of the Earth’s ice-free
land, half of which is in agricultural or urban use (Ellis and Ramankutty
2008). Throughout much of human existence, humans have altered ecosystems and the biodiversity that these contain in the effort to ensure livelihoods and cultural integrity across generations. In the process, humans have
often intentionally increased the biodiversity that is useful to them for food,
fibre, fodder, fuel, medicinal uses, cash, and other cultural purposes, and
this has modified landscapes in ways that support a multitude of other life
forms. Most of the world’s terrestrial biodiversity exists outside of protected
areas in biologically and ecologically complex human-dominated landscapes.
Biodiversity constitutes the principal form of wealth for a large part of
humanity. This includes about 2.8 billion people who live in rural areas of
the least developed countries, 2.4 billion of whom subsist from agriculture.
They constitute nearly 35 per cent of the world’s population (FAO 2004),
and feed a considerably larger proportion of the world’s population. About
half of the world’s farmers rely on no- or low-input agroforestry farming
systems (‘traditional agriculture’) (World Bank 2002), which generally tend
to be biodiversity-rich polycultures (Vandermeer 2002). Nearly 250 million
people live in forests and depend on them to a high degree, while some 60
million indigenous people are almost wholly dependent on forest biodiversity for their livelihoods (World Bank 2002). Another 50 million people
in developing countries depend on small-scale fisheries (ICLARM 2001).
It is estimated that about a billion people regularly consume wild foods
(Sunderland 2011: 266, citing Pimentel et al. 1997). While there is no global
inventory of all plant species that have direct-use values for humans,
PROSEA (Plant Resources of South-East Asia)2 recorded nearly 6000 species
that are used in that region, which Heywood (1999) extrapolated to some
18,000–25,000 species for the tropics as a whole – excluding the 25,000
species that are herbal medicines.3 The FAO Global Databank on Animal
2

See http://www.prosea.nl/.
Heywood (1999) noted that the Andres Bello Convention (involving Bolivia, Colombia, Chile,
Ecuador, Spain, Panama, Peru, and Venezuela) has identified over a thousand native species
that have ‘not been extensively domesticated, are underutilised, or little known but with economic potential’. ‘Another major source of agro-biodiversity is the tens of thousands of species
that are grown in a pre- or semi-domesticated state on home gardens or similar polycultures
. . . many thousands more are harvested wild to supplement farm household incomes . . . [but]
our knowledge of their most basic biology and agronomy is virtually non-existent and we must
depend on knowledge developed over long periods by local farming societies.’

3

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Patricia Howard
Genetic Resources (covering 182 countries) contains a total of 14,017 livestock breeds (FAO 2007), and it is estimated that humans consume around
1200 insect species (DeFoliart 2012). It is not only tropical biodiversity that
directly supports humans – even in the Arctic, people consume in excess
of a hundred local species, which represent the traditional and nutritionally
rich components of their diets (Kuhnlein and Receveur 1996). About 1.3
billion people live from ‘environmentally fragile’ lands (World Bank 2003),
where environmental disturbances and disequilibria are the rule rather
than the exception, and people must be adapted to living with environmental hazard, risk, and extremes. Biological resources constitute the
foundations of these people’s cultural and material heritage, and the
substance of the knowledge and practices that they pass on to future
generations (Balée and Erickson 2006; Salick and Byg 2007).
Some small-scale societies are heavily dependent on only a few species,
and some of these are located in areas that are relatively poor in biological
diversity, as is the case with Touareg camel pastoralists in the Sahara, Inuit
caribou hunters in northern Canada, and date palm (Phoenix dactylifera L.)
farmers in the Arabian Peninsula. Even small changes in local biodiversity
can present major threats to these populations’ food supply and to the
availability of fuel, medicine, fibre, construction materials, and other plantand animal-derived resources. Some live in areas that are very rich in
biological diversity – such as the Nuaulu of Seram who depend on sago
palm (Metroxylon sagu), Amerindian swidden gardeners who exchange
cassava (Manihot esculenta) in Amazonia, or Ethiopian Aari ensete
(E. ventricosum) producers. Such species are considered to be ‘cultural
keystones’, so important are they to livelihoods, social organization, and
cultural identity (Christancho and Vining 2004; Garabaldi and Turner
2004). These species have ecological and cultural functions that are not
readily substitutable, which renders the populations that depend on them
more vulnerable to abrupt change. The loss of such species, or of the species
that these same species depend upon (e.g. pasture grasses that camels
consume), or an outbreak of a pest or disease that seriously affects the
productivity of these species, could create many adverse effects not only
for livelihoods, but also for social organization and demographics.
Nevertheless, global biodiversity assessments focus on ecological keystone
species while ignoring such cultural keystones. Accordingly, the vulnerability of populations that are dependent on a few species when facing
biodiversity change is as yet largely unexplored, so their vulnerability is
unrecorded.
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Human resilience and biodiversity tipping points
Yet highly biodiversity-dependent societies may offer better prospects
for continued evolution given biodiversity tipping points in comparison
with systems that are highly dependent on external inputs (e.g. fossil fuels,
chemicals, irrigation) and markets, with high population densities and high
demands on natural resources and ecosystem services close to ecosystem
thresholds. Adapting intensive systems to biodiversity change generally
implies even greater intensification. Pest outbreaks, for example, are fought
with higher levels of pesticide use, weed invasions with more herbicides,
and soil biodiversity loss leads to higher levels of fertilizer use, which are
likely to further compound the negative consequences of biodiversity
change, price increases, etc. (see e.g. Lal 2007; IFDC 2008; Pimentel and
Pimentel 2008; Smil 2008). Tim Lang and John Ingram discussed the context
in Chapter 4.1.
Dobson et al. (2006) provided a general framework for understanding
the ecological consequences of species and population losses for a partial
collapse of ecosystems that they relate to habitat loss, but that may also be
seen as applicable in relation to other drivers of change. They note that
decreases in biodiversity should lead to reductions in ecosystem functioning, but this depends in part on the order in which species are lost or
gained. If only a few species provide a function or service, decline in the
service may be rapid if these species decline or disappear. Other services
may be provided by functionally redundant competing species, so decline
in one species is compensated by the increase in another. When habitats
degrade, species at higher trophic levels are usually lost more rapidly than
those at lower levels, and species at different trophic levels perform
different ecosystem functions, so ‘we might expect to see a predictable
hierarchical loss of ecosystem services as habitats are eroded’ (p. 1917).
The loss of some species at a specific trophic level may occur slowly and
be compensated by the remaining species, until a point is reached through
further species loss when a drastic decrease in ecosystem services occurs.
At the other extreme, if the trophic level consists of a few rare or fragile
species, then small changes in species biodiversity may result in large and
rapid changes in ecosystem services. Most ecosystems will fall somewhere
between these two boundaries, where ‘a linear decrease in the service
[follows] as each species is lost . . . in essence, the loss of each individual
species results in the loss of a “unit” of ecosystem service’ (p. 1918). Dobson
et al. provide a table (Table 1, p. 1919) that relates the susceptibility of
different ecosystem functions to species loss for different ecosystems. Their
model suggests that ‘the collapse of ecosystem services will be determined
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Patricia Howard
by a hierarchical series of nested thresholds, or breakpoints, whose
magnitude will occur at different levels of decline in overall species
abundance’ where the most resilient species are at the bottom, and the least
at the top, of the food chain (acknowledging that there are exceptions).
They conclude that:
because different ecosystem services tend to be undertaken by species at
different trophic levels and because trophic webs will tend first to thin and
then collapse from top to bottom, we would expect to see a predictable
hierarchical and sequential loss of the economic goods and services by natural
ecosystems as they become eroded and degraded by anthropogenic activities.
(Dobson et al. 2006: 1925)

They warn that current dis-attention to the goods and services provided
by species at different trophic levels means that there is also limited
incentive to conserve these species.
The first requirement of any analysis of biodiversity change must be to
characterize and understand the types of dependencies, or inter-dependencies, that different human population groups have with: rare or fragile
species; cultural, ecosystem or economic keystone species; specific trophic
levels; specific functional groups; and specific ecosystem services. The
second is to deal with the question of how people are likely to adapt or
maladapt to such phenomena. Tipping points do not occur overnight. Many
ecosystems, trophic levels, etc. are already crossing thresholds towards
alternative states; others are manifesting ‘early warnings’ (e.g. slower
recovery from perturbations, increasing variance, increasing autocorrelation, flickering, and increased spatial coherence) (Scheffer 2009; Scheffer et
al. 2009). Early warnings related to biodiversity loss have already been
identified (e.g. for invasive species, see EEA 2010; for biodiversity change
in general, see the indicators used in the Swiss Biodiversity Monitoring
System4), and there is now a very interesting attempt to identify early warning indicators of biodiversity change in relation to local livelihoods in small
island developing states in relation to the vulnerability of the rural poor, the
status of resources important to nutrition, for food and medicine, and for
access and benefit sharing, among others (Teelucksingh and Perrings 2010).
It is no coincidence that the globe’s sixth extinction of species is occurring
together with an unprecedented extinction of human cultures, where both
are driven by similar underlying phenomena, and thus the current
biodiversity crisis should be reconceived as a crisis of ‘bio-cultural
4

http://www.biodiversitymonitoring.ch/english/aktuell/portal.php.

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Human resilience and biodiversity tipping points
diversity’ (e.g. Sutherland 2003; Maffi 2005; Rozzi 2012). Half of the globe’s
cultures/languages are likely to be lost by the end of this century; at least
as high a proportion of many rural subsistence socio-ecological systems are
likely to disappear, as is the case, for example, of the San Bushmen of the
Kalahari (e.g. Hitchcock 2006), the Ifaguo of the Philippines (Guimbatan
and Baguilat 2006), and the Hani in Southwest China (Xu et al. 2009).
Campaigns for the preservation of endangered cultures are rare; in fact,
such cultures are often portrayed as the cause of species’ loss and the
provokers of degradation of forests and other areas that are mistakenly
considered by outsiders to be ‘pristine’ environments.5
Scientists and policymakers often think that our resilience as a species
is based on science, technology, economic growth, accumulated wealth,
and modern democratic institutions, whereas in fact it is more likely to be
based on the more than 6700 cultures/languages6 across the globe that have
evolved vast knowledge, technologies, and a myriad of institutions that
have managed largely to meet the human needs that these have culturally
defined, most often without compromising, and usually by enhancing,
their natural base of existence, at times over millennia. Prioritizing and
supporting such rural subsistence societies could be seen as a global
insurance policy, so that the cultures, biodiversity, agro-biodiversity and
ecosystem services that are crucial to the world’s future continue to exist.
The study of such systems and the ways in which traditional peoples
maintain and use biodiversity can speed the emergence of the agroecological principles which are urgently needed to develop more
sustainable agro-ecosystems and agro-biodiversity conservation strategies
both in industrial and developing countries (Denevan 1995).
If we are indeed to be able to negotiate tipping points and meet the
unprecedented challenges that we face as a species, we must transform our

5

In the West, even the term ‘culture’ is widely misunderstood (e.g. known in reference to the
arts) or regarded with suspicion: it is not generally considered to be the subject of serious
policy attention or scientific inquiry, and is conveniently bundled off into underfunded
disciplines such as anthropology and sociology.
6
The 6700 languages across the globe are not identical with cultures. However, language is
considered as an acceptable proxy for cultures, where UNESCO notes: ‘Languages are
humankind’s principal tools for interacting and for expressing ideas, emotions, knowledge,
memories and values. Languages are also primary vehicles of cultural expressions and
intangible cultural heritage, essential to the identity of individuals and groups. Safeguarding
endangered languages is thus a crucial task in maintaining cultural diversity worldwide’
(http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/index.php?lg=ENandpg=00136).

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ways of thinking about our own species, going beyond a simple awareness
that places and things of great beauty, harmony, and intrinsic and monetary value are disappearing for ever. It will be necessary to realize that the
human race must maintain its cultural and technological options in case
our great experiment of ‘development’ fails.
At this moment, then, we are beginning seriously to wonder whether
the ‘end-point’ of ‘development’ toward which we have been racing might
indeed be the wrong one. Many are coming to realize that, in spite of our
vast accumulated wealth of scientific knowledge, we still seem to know
very little about how to live in and with the natural world. In fact, we are
just beginning to realize that we must attempt to retain the tremendous
adaptive capacity, knowledge, and cultural resilience that have allowed
people to occupy and thrive in virtually every ecosystem on earth over a
long period of time. It is no coincidence that, with biodiversity loss, we are
losing the basis of our physical existence, at the same time that we are also
losing the basis of our collective resilience with the mass loss of human
cultures.
Current adaptation thinking is based on the assumption that adaptation
can be rationally planned, funded, and managed or engineered, which
downplays the significance of autonomous adaptation at local levels, which
anthropological research shows is manifest in mobility, exchange,
rationing, resource pooling, diversification, intensification, innovation, and
revitalization (Thornton and Manasfi 2010). Such studies suggest that the
most resilient and adaptive social unit over long periods may be the
household rather than the community or state, and that adaptation must
be viewed not as a singular strategy, but as a set of diverse, intersecting
decision-making and behaviour-changing processes that may evolve
autonomously or through planning in response to a multitude of interacting biotic and non-biotic stressors. Understanding adaptation necessitates understanding of the dynamic flows and feedbacks between natural
processes and human intentions and actions. Indeed, the hope is that
humans can manage to adapt their social-ecological systems in ways that
mitigate biodiversity change, support ecosystem resilience, and ensure
human well-being. Human maladaptation will surely spell human and
ecological disaster. Supporting human adaptation research and policymaking can only be conducive to adaptation.

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4.3
The Amazon in transition
The challenge of transforming the world’s
largest tropical forest biome into a
sustainable social-ecological system
TOBY GARDNER

Setting
This chapter considers the fate of the Amazon as an integrated socialecological system that during the last half a century has undergone an
unprecedented period of change and disruption. The Amazon is a biome
of truly global significance. Its total area is approximately 6.9 million km2
and encompasses nine countries (Barthem et al. 2004). While 69 per cent
of the biome is within Brazil, the Amazon also makes up 66 per cent,
60 per cent and 47 per cent of the total landmass of Bolivia, Peru and
Ecuador respectively (Barthem et al. 2004). The Amazon basin discharges
approximately one-fifth of the world’s fresh water, provides a home and
resources for more than 31 million people, as well as hosting a significant
proportion of the world’s terrestrial biodiversity (FAO 2011). Indeed, the
Amazon has been described as the ultimate ‘ecoutility’, providing critical
ecosystem services on local to global scales (Trivedi et al. 2009). The total
amount of carbon stored in remaining forests across all of Amazonia (120
± 30 billion tonnes; Malhi et al. 2006) is approximately equivalent to a
decade of accumulated human-induced carbon emissions for the entire
planet (Canadell et al. 2007). Amazonian forests absorb vast amounts of
solar energy through the cooling effect of annually releasing trillions of
tonnes of water to the atmosphere. This drives atmospheric circulation
across the tropics, as well as being responsible for recycling between
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one-quarter and one-half of the region’s rainfall (Elthahir and Bras 1994;
Marengo et al. 2011). In addition, the water vapour released by the Amazon
also moderates regional weather conditions and supplies rainfall for
southern Brazil and the La Plata Basin, the economic powerhouse of Latin
America, on which US $1 trillion per year of agribusiness, hydropower,
and industry depends (Marengo et al. 2011).
The fate of the Amazon is currently at a crossroads. The last four decades
have witnessed widespread deforestation across the entire basin (Perz et
al. 2005; Etter et al. 2008; FAO 2011), with some 775,000 km2 of Amazon
forests having already been cleared in Brazil alone since 1988 (www.inpe.
gov.br). More recently, falling deforestation rates in Brazil since 2005 have
generated considerable international praise, giving rise to the notion that
Brazil may be one of the first countries to achieve the status of a major
economic power without destroying most of its forests (Davidson et al.
2012). Set against this positive outlook, a burgeoning number of studies
have raised the spectre of the Amazon system facing a regime shift or
tipping point, whereby a combination of global warming, continued
deforestation, an increased frequency of severe drought events, unsustainable timber extraction, and an increased prevalence of fire is set to drive a
vicious, and potentially irreversible positive feedback loop, leading to the
loss or degradation of a significant proportion of remaining forest
(Davidson et al. 2012). Here I use research on the prospect of Amazonian
forest dieback as an entry point to a broader discussion concerning the
Amazon as a complex social-ecological system undergoing an unprecedented process of transition. Drawing on work from across the natural and
social sciences, and my own personal experiences working in the eastern
Amazon, I then consider how this evermore dynamic system presents
particular challenges for societal, governmental and scientific efforts to
develop a more environmentally sustainable and socially progressive
model of development for the region.

Climate change, deforestation, and dieback of the
Amazon forest
Variation in moisture availability affects the productivity and resilience of
tropical ecosystems more profoundly than any other aspect of the climate
(Meir and Woodward 2010), meaning that reductions in precipitation and
increases in the frequency of severe drought represent a major threat to the
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future of tropical forests (Marengo et al. 2011). Because of the sheer size of
the Amazon rainforest even small changes in forest dynamics can have a
significant impact on atmospheric CO2 concentrations, and therefore on
the rate of climate change itself. Climate modelling work has suggested
two mechanisms that have the potential to drive widespread declines in
precipitation across the Amazon, raising the spectre of a potentially
irreversible shift towards a system that is only capable of supporting an
impoverished secondary or savannah-type vegetation state (Cox et al. 2004;
Nobre and Borma 2009; Malhi et al. 2009; Marengo et al. 2011). First, while
there is considerable uncertainty in the predictions of different global
circulation models (GCMs) there is some evidence to suggest an increase
in the likelihood of drought-like conditions for Eastern and Southern
Amazonia following twenty-first-century warming (Betts et al. 2004; Jupp
et al. 2010). Second, because the Amazon recycles as much as half of its own
rainfall, if a sufficient area of forest is cleared, it may be unable to sustain
itself in its current form. These models indicate that a threshold or tipping
point could be reached via either mechanism, with a 3–4°C temperature
rise or 30–40 per cent level of regional deforestation potentially being sufficient to precipitate large-scale vegetation dieback (Nobre and Borma 2009).
Despite the widespread scientific and media attention these predictions
have attracted, confidence in our ability to identify such a threshold or
tipping point is marred by uncertainty in both climate change predictions
themselves (Jupp et al. 2010; Poulter et al. 2010) and ecosystem responses
to changes in climatic conditions. Regarding ecosystem responses, considerable uncertainty exists in the potential for a compensation effect from
CO2 fertilization on plant growth, and water loss through transpiration
(Rammig et al. 2010; Meir and Woodward 2010). However, irrespective of
debates regarding the potential resilience of intact forests to long-term
declines in rainfall (see Meir and Woodward 2010), the Amazon is clearly
vulnerable to extreme drought events (Phillips et al. 2009; da Costa et al.
2010). The Amazon suffered from two of the severest drought events on
record in 2005 and 2010 (driven by increases in high-Atlantic sea surface
temperatures) which resulted in a total CO2 impact from reduced growth
and increased tree mortality that was estimated to be potentially equivalent
to the net carbon uptake by intact Amazonian forests for the whole decade
(Lewis et al. 2011). It is possible that these two droughts alone resulted in
the biome shifting from a net sink (Phillips et al. 1998) to a net source of
carbon dioxide (equating to c.4 billion tonnes of carbon; Phillips et al. 2009;
Lewis et al. 2011).
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Both short- and long-term changes in climatic conditions and moisture
stress present major threats to the integrity of Amazon ecosystems.
However, it is impossible to disentangle their impact from ongoing
patterns of deforestation and forest degradation associated with the
expansion of agriculture, roads, and timber harvesting across the basin
(Malhi et al. 2009; Davidson et al. 2012). Indeed, it is now broadly accepted
that the greatest threat of a positive feedback cycle capable of driving the
widespread and near-term loss or degradation of the Amazon forest comes,
not from global and continental-scale changes in climate, but from the
interaction between changes in both climate and local human activity – and
specifically a rise in the occurrence and intensity of forest fires (Nepstad et
al. 2001, 2008; Aragão et al. 2008). Most tropical rainforest tree species are
poorly adapted to fire stress, and even low-intensity surface fires can lead
to significant levels of mortality among adult trees (Barlow et al. 2002), with
repeat burns having the potential to drive an almost complete turnover in
tree species composition (Barlow and Peres 2008).
Conditions across much of the Amazon are now approaching something
of a ‘perfect storm’ for driving widespread forest degradation, with an
increasingly large area subject to a combination of: high levels of tree
mortality from drought, fire, fragmentation, and logging impacts; an
increased risk of recurrent fires from the drier and more flammable fuel
loads (including drier litter and an increased dominance of understory
grasses) that characterize partially degraded forests; and an increase in the
number and frequency of ignition sources from the expansion of agriculture and road networks (Nepstad et al. 2008).
Attempts to incorporate fire dynamics alongside climate and deforestation modelling suggest that ‘business as usual’ scenarios of regional
development may lead to a doubling of forest fires outside of protected
areas in years of extreme drought, and an expanding fire risk to much of
the Amazon, including the currently isolated north-western Amazon, by
the middle of this century (Golding and Betts 2008; Silvestrini et al. 2011).
Once the process of forest degradation has started, multiple and reinforcing
feedback effects can lead to: (1) a runaway cycle of increased forest vulnerability and impoverishment, driven by fires and repeated and unsustainable logging cycles at local scales, (2) the inhibition of regional rainfall
patterns from ongoing forest clearance and increased atmospheric smoke,
and (3) feedback effects of elevated CO2 emissions on the global climate
system, resulting in further increases in temperature and the likelihood of
more frequent and severe drought events, with associated impacts on soil
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respiration, tree mortality, and fire dynamics (Nepstad et al. 2001; Davidson
et al. 2012). The type of vegetation that is capable of withstanding this
unprecedented onslaught bears no resemblance to a species-rich closedcanopy rainforest. Instead it is better characterized by the young secondary
forests that are commonly found on degraded pastures – dominated by
pioneer species with low biomass and negligible economic value, and only
capable of supporting a tiny fraction of the original forest biota.

Expanding the tipping point metaphor: the Amazon
as a social-ecological system in transition
The notion of a tipping point has been very effective in drawing attention to the increasing vulnerability of the Amazon rainforest, and the
close coupling between the forest and global climate systems (Nobre and
Borma 2009). However, in keeping with what has been shown by research
on the resilience of a wide range of social-ecological systems (Folke et al.
2010), it is clear that the fate of the Amazon does not depend on some
threshold change in a key system variable (e.g. atmospheric temperature,
precipitation, or accumulated forest loss), but rather on a complex interplay of drivers and positive feedback loops that operate at landscape, continental, and global scales. Indeed, an exaggerated policy focus on a precise
numerical tipping point can be both distracting and misleading insofar
as it suggests that an individual basin-wide driver can be responsible for
a change in system state, that degradation below a certain level is ‘safe’,
and that improvements beyond that level are of no value (Davidson et al.
2012).
Despite scientific uncertainty regarding natural hydrological and
biogeochemical cycles, projections of climate and land use change, their
interaction effects and ecosystem responses to changing conditions, an
increasingly large proportion of the Amazon is affected by the combined
effects of deforestation and forest degradation. This process of change has
taken place against a backdrop of social, political and economic change that
has transformed the Amazon as a place to live over the course of the last
fifty years, with rapid increases in population and widespread migration
underpinned by regional economic growth, agricultural expansion and
diversification, exploration of new mineral, oil, and gas resources, major
infrastructure projects, and political and legal reform (Barthem et al. 2004;
Killeen 2007; FAO 2011).
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Encouragingly, deforestation rates in the Brazilian Amazon dropped
rapidly from 2006 to 2011, with a 56 per cent decline in the annual rate of
forest loss in 2006–11 compared to 2001–05 (www.inpe.gov.br). This change
has offered some hope that the ambitious deforestation reduction target to
20 per cent of baseline levels (1996–2005) by 2020, announced by former
President Lula in the Copenhagen climate change summit as part of Brazil’s
national climate change action plan, is possible. Indeed, it has even
prompted proposals that the end of deforestation is feasible within the
same period (Nepstad et al. 2009). However, despite the attractiveness and
tantalizing nature of this proposal there are a number of reasons why we
cannot afford to be complacent about the future of the Amazon, and why
a general shift towards a low-emission trajectory of rural development is
far from assured (Nepstad et al. 2011).
Assessments of alternative scenarios for regional development require
consideration of two characteristic features of recent social and ecological
changes in system dynamics: (1) an acceleration in the speed of many
processes of change, and (2) an increase in the interconnectedness of
changes at local, landscape, and regional scales.
One of the most important and far-reaching changes in the Amazon has
been the increase in human population. Often perceived as a space for
absorbing the population and development problems of other regions,
government resettlement and incentive schemes and infrastructure projects have all contributed towards a massive increase and redistribution
of people across the basin during the last half a century. Between 1980 and
2000 alone the population of the Brazilian Legal Amazon approximately
doubled from 12 to 21 million people, with increases of comparable magnitude in Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru (Perz et al. 2005), resulting
in a regional population today that exceeds 31 million (FAO 2011). Whilst
links between population growth and deforestation are complex (Perz et
al. 2005; Hecht 2010) this dramatic change has driven increased demand
for land and natural resources, as well as increased investment in infrastructure and energy projects, as regions of the Amazon have become
increasingly connected with national and international markets (Nepstad
et al. 2006; Killeen 2007; Lambin and Meyfroidt 2011). The majority of recent
population growth in the Amazon has occurred in cities (Guedes et al.
2009), many of which have also witnessed rapid rates of economic growth.
For example, between 1970 and 2000 the average rate of growth per decade
of urban Gross Domestic Product per capita was 85 per cent for cities in the
Brazilian Amazon, compared to only 76 per cent for the rest of the country
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(www.ibge.gov.br). Whilst urbanization and agricultural intensification
have led to a partial decoupling of deforestation and population growth,
continued increases in the size and consumption levels of urban populations have contributed towards the strengthening of rural–urban
linkages, and rising demand for agricultural commodities, particularly beef
(McAlpine et al. 2009).
Coupled with the increase in size and wealth of regional populations,
as well as the increased connection with international commodity markets
(Lambin and Meyfroidt 2011), one of the most important threats facing
efforts to reduce deforestation and forest degradation comes from rising
prices of agricultural commodities. Such price rises can make deforestation
more profitable and may weaken the resolve of local, regional and state
government actors to enforce or maintain strict environmental legislation.
Evidence for such a change can be seen in the recent negotiations to revise
the Brazilian forest code, the law that governs environmental protection
on private land, in response to strong lobbying from the agribusiness
sector. The potential for a reversal of falling deforestation rates due to
future agricultural development and changes in international markets can
be observed from the peak of forest loss that occurred between 2002 and
2004 during a rapid increase in the Amazonian cattle herd, and the first
large-scale expansion of industrialized agriculture to many parts of the
Brazilian Amazon, which resulted in the clearance of 75,000 km2 of forest
in Brazil alone – equivalent to 95 per cent of the total area of forest that has
been cleared since (2005–2011) (www.inpe.gov.br). The fact that projected
demands for both cattle and biofuels are set to exceed the area of land
legally available for agricultural expansion by 2020 (Walker 2011) indicates
that the system remains highly vulnerable to economic incentives. That
said, recent evidence of deforestation rates becoming decoupled from soy
production in southern Mato Grosso suggest that improvements in farming
techniques and regulation of land use have the potential to dampen
fluctuations in forest losses (Macedo et al. 2012).
Finally, the profit incentive to expand agriculture into remaining areas
of forest may be exacerbated further if much-publicized incentives for
forest conservation through carbon payments are not forthcoming, and
current expectations are replaced by an erosion of credibility and increasing
resentment within the agricultural and forestry sectors.
The sensitivity of Amazonian agriculture to short-term changes in
market prices also underpins a high level of instability and non-linear
behaviour in rural development trajectories (Rodrigues et al. 2009) as well
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as contributing towards a highly mobile rural population (Brondizio and
Moran 2008; Carrero and Fearnside 2011). This population mobility results
in a high turnover rate of farm managers and workers, lowering the
capacity to adapt to novel circumstances (such as droughts and price
fluctuations in particular crops) as newcomers invariably lack a nuanced
understanding of local ecological systems and social or economic networks
(Brondizio and Moran 2008). Intra-regional mixing of rural populations in
areas that often lack any clear system of property rights can also give rise
to so-called ‘contentious’ land use change, driven by antagonism and conflict within and between large landowners and the rural poor – a dynamic
which can greatly exacerbate attempts to improve land management
practices (Aldrich et al. 2012).
In addition to increases in the rate of change of demographic, economic
and environmental variables, the second factor to cast uncertainty over the
future development trajectories of the Amazon is an increased level of
interconnectedness amongst system elements. Research in recent decades
has revealed an increasing number of strong and cross-scale connections
in the drivers of deforestation and land use change with resonance at
global, national and regional scales.
Perhaps the most commonly cited example of a cross-scale connection
exerting a powerful influence on the dynamics of rural development in the
Amazon is the existence of so-called ‘teleconnections’: phenomena that
appear to be coupled, but take place in geographically distant places on the
planet. These include economic signals from other parts of the world – such
as trade-bans on beef export by the European Union following the outbreak
of foot and mouth disease or sky-rocketing demands for soybean imports
by China – which can play a potentially important (Nepstad et al. 2006;
Hargrave and Kis-Kato 2011), albeit complex role (Ewers et al. 2008) in
determining rates of change in agricultural expansion and deforestation.
Another important (though less appreciated) economic signal to have
emerged from an increasingly interconnected global commodities market
is the fluctuation of exchange rates between the currencies of Amazon
nations and the US dollar. For example, Richards et al. (2012) present
evidence to suggest that the recent devaluation of the dollar and appreciation of the Brazilian real have counteracted a recent rise in global
soybean prices, and in the process, spared an estimated 40,000 km2 of new
cropland in the Amazon region alone.
At the regional scale the process of indirect land use change, where the
expansion of more profitable mechanized farming can displace existing
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cattle pastures and smallholder farmers to the deforestation frontier, has
long been posited as a threat to the Amazon. Indeed, Arima et al. (2011)
found that for the period 2003–2008 a 10 per cent reduction in the expansion
of soy into previously colonized landscapes could have reduced deforestation by as much as 40 per cent in the heavily forested counties of the
Brazilian Amazon. Sharp fluctuations in economic opportunity across the
Amazon, driven in part by strong cross-scale interactions in the price of
land and the profitability of farming, also contribute towards a highly
dynamic human population. Although endogenous birth rates are now the
primary driver of population growth in the Amazon region, in-migration
is still continuing and there is a very high level of migratory circulation
within the region itself (Perz et al. 2010a).
One consequence of recent increases in the speed and connectivity of
land use changes across the Amazon is the increased likelihood of
cascading effects, whether negative or positive, of a development stimulus
or conservation intervention in one place having important ramifications elsewhere (Brondizio et al. 2009). Learning how to cope with such
variability, and to identify how it can be used to leverage positive change,
is one of the greatest challenges and opportunities facing both the
management and science of sustainable development in the Amazon and
elsewhere (Brondizio et al. 2009; Folke et al. 2011).

Challenges for governance in securing a sustainable
future for the Amazon
Discussions and proposals concerning the future of the Amazon suffer
from the same shortcomings as many other debates about issues of
sustainability – they are often catch-all, lack clarity of purpose and local
relevance, and are underpinned by levels of ambition and understanding
that vary enormously depending on the group of actors concerned. The
enduring legacy of the Brundtland Commission (1987) is that intergenerational equity lies at the heart of the goal of sustainable development
– that is, development that can meet the needs of the present without
compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.
Holling (2001) subsequently recast this overarching goal as the need to
foster and maintain adaptive capacities whilst continuing to create new
opportunities for continuing development. Faced with an unprecedented
state of social and ecological transition, including widespread environmental degradation and social inequality, the challenge lies in identifying,
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protecting and restoring the social, environmental and economic values
that support this adaptive capacity, and whose loss or degradation may be
irreversible or extremely costly to restore. Aspects of this overarching goal
are evident in some visions of development for the Amazon region,
including the Brazilian government’s Plano Amazônia Sustentável, which
has a strong emphasis on promoting economic betterment and reduction
of poverty, whilst respecting and ensuring compatibility with social and
ecological values (Federal Republic of Brazil 2008).
At a broad level we already know the main elements of a combined
strategy that is needed to set the Amazon on a more sustainable trajectory
(Nepstad et al. 2009, 2011; Malhi et al. 2007; Trivedi et al. 2009; Davidson et
al. 2012; Boyd (7.2)). These include the need to:
•

•
•

•

•

•

•

•

limit deforestation beneath the threshold of 30–40 per cent losses that
may precipitate basin-wide shifts in precipitation through reduced
transpiration and accelerated climate change;
strengthen and expand protected areas close to the deforestation
frontier;
deliver effective state- and municipality-level planning processes to
facilitate sustainable intensification of agriculture, responsible forest
management, and the protection of biological corridors across already
degraded landscapes;
support a shift towards fire-free livelihoods amongst Amazonian
farmers, especially the approximately 400,000 smallholders that
currently lack access to technology and resources;
alongside efforts to promote sustainable management systems, invest
in increasing the value of raw agricultural and forestry products using
locally trained labour forces;
expand the agricultural land that is responsibly managed through
development of reliable and premium markets, including a diversification of opportunities for the use of degraded land (e.g. silviculture
and biofuels);
support the development of stronger community-led institutions that
help build adaptive capacity locally and help plan for and adapt to
change (Boyd (7.2));
effectively leverage new finance from carbon markets and other forms
of ecosystem service payments to help support all of the above.

Implementing this integrated set of proposals depends upon the consolidation and scaling up of successful pilot initiatives, and the maintenance
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of momentum against a backdrop of increasing human population and
consumption, shifting market prices and the impacts of rising economic
globalization, and unproven incentive systems and regulatory frameworks.
There is no ‘one size fits all’ model. The types of governance responses that
are needed to foster social and ecological sustainability vary depending on
the location, the current social and ecological condition of the system, and
the timescale of the specific set of problems being addressed. In presenting
the concept of ecosystem stewardship as a framework for promoting
sustainability in a rapidly changing planet, Chapin et al. (2010) identify
three different levels of engagement or strategies that are necessary for
developing a more nuanced and regionally appropriate set of policy
approaches and incentives, namely: reduce vulnerability to risks, invest in
resilience, and promote positive transformation.
The first challenge is to reduce vulnerability towards known risks. Given
sufficient political will and resources, risk avoidance is relatively straightforward, as has been demonstrated by the expansion of the protected-areas
system and the role this has played in lowering rates of deforestation in the
Brazilian Amazon (Soares-Filho et al. 2010).
The second challenge is to invest in proactive policies that can improve
the resilience of desirable system properties (e.g. ecologically viable forest
reserves in agricultural landscapes) in the face of ongoing change. This is
much harder than simply reacting to observed problems and it requires
maintaining and/or restoring a diversity of options (e.g. migration corridors for biodiversity, different farm management systems and approaches
to capacity building and rural extension), enhancing social learning to
facilitate adaptation (including transparent information systems, effective
channels of communication across different levels of government), and
building adaptive governance systems that provide insurance for policy
implementation by not concentrating skills and resources inside specific,
overburdened institutions. Undermining efforts towards achieving these
goals in the Amazon, as elsewhere, is a common lack of awareness
and capacity for dealing with the often bewilderingly fast and patchily
implemented changes in legal regulations, and rapid changes in market
and financial incentives that influence land use choices. The continuing
revision of the Brazilian Forest Code, and the growth industry of
international, governmental, and non-governmental initiatives relating to
the UN policy of Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest
Degradation (REDD+) are two such examples. The asymmetries in capacity
and understanding that emerge following these changes can lead to unjust
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biases in the distribution of both penalties and benefits, and a divergence
in abilities of different stakeholder groups to respond to new threats and
opportunities.
The biggest challenge for sustainability lies in transforming areas that
have already undergone major changes, and which have achieved a high
level of resilience around a maladaptive and inflexible system (Steffen et
al. 2011; Boyd (7.2)). Berardi et al. (2011) suggest that an overemphasis on
improvements in agricultural efficiency has already undermined adaptive
capacity and led to such a trap in the US mechanized farming systems, with
a loss of diversity in types of production and an inability to respond to
unexpected shocks (such as hurricane Katrina). Achieving genuine
transformation to a new development pathway is both difficult and not
without risk. Plausible and desirable alternative trajectories or scenarios
need to be identified, as well as identifying potential barriers to change.
Approaches need to be developed for navigating and consolidating the
transitional processes that maintain broad stakeholder participation and
support, as well as for building sufficient resilience to ensure the viability
of the new system state.
One early attempt to promote a social-ecological transformation in
the Brazilian Amazon was through the ‘payment for ecosystem service’
scheme, Proambiente (Programme for the Socio-Environmental Development of Rural Family Production) (Hall 2008). Under the scheme, smallholder farmers
would cease to be regarded merely as suppliers of primary produce but be
valued for their multi-functional contributions to economic production, social
inclusion and preservation of the environment . . . [facilitating] compensation
for environmental services rendered to Brazil and the world.
(Proambiente 2003: 2–6)

Specific environmental services in this context were defined as: (1) reduction or avoidance of deforestation; (2) carbon sequestration; (3) recuperation of ecosystem hydrological functions; (4) soil conservation; (5)
preservation of biodiversity; and (6) reduction of forest fire risks (Hall 2008).
Despite its admirable aims, Proambiente has thus far fallen short of
expectations, being undermined in particular by the lack of a national legal
framework to allow direct payment schemes, but also due to limited
funding, reduced implementation capacity, poor cross-sector collaboration
and incompatibility with existing regional development policies (Hall 2008).
By contrast, the Municipio Verde (Green County) initiative spearheaded
by the municipality of Paragominas in the Brazilian Amazon has achieved
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more success in facilitating what may be seen as the start of a genuine
social-ecological transformation (Guimarães et al. 2011).
Until the 1990s, Paragominas was a region of the Amazon notorious for
lawlessness and land speculation, with rampant forest clearance and
unregulated timber extraction. Following a change in local governance and
the leadership of the farmers’ union a key group of actors managed to turn
a potential crisis situation (exclusion from access to rural credit due to high
levels of past deforestation) into a positive news story (zero-deforestation
pact and widespread voluntary registration of rural properties in the state
environmental land register) with an associated growth in opportunities
for rural development (including preferential investment by donors
interested in supporting sustainability initiatives, including the Fundo
Amazônia and Fundo Vale).
Nevertheless, much work remains to be completed. The majority of smallholder farmers have benefited little from the changes thus far, extensive lowyielding cattle farming still dominates much of the region, and remaining
forests are highly degraded and vulnerable to continued threats from
unsustainable logging and rampant fires in the dry season. It is also not yet
clear how easily the relative success of Paragominas can be replicated to
neighbouring municipalities that often have much weaker political
leadership, and still exhibit high levels of deforestation and degradation.
Ultimately the challenge of achieving sustainability in the Amazon
requires engaging with problems across all three of these levels, and
working to reduce vulnerabilities and building resilience within a broader
agenda of transformation towards a more sustainable social-ecological
system. As always, sustainability, and sustainable development, should
not be seen as a static blueprint for management action but as a mechanism
for creating a continued sense of purpose, and a guiding vision for social
and political discourse that can balance national and regional goals with
local values and circumstances. Whilst it is all too easy to become paralysed
by the complexity of the challenges that confront development in the
Amazon it is important to resist oversimplification of both problems and
management responses.
Perhaps the most common shortcoming of proposals to better protect
vulnerable ecosystems by changing institutional rules of use and sets of
incentives (e.g. REDD+) is that they frequently focus on one level of
governance (Brondizio et al. 2009; Brondizio and Moran 2012). In the case
of the Amazon this is often at the basin-wide scale. This can be of limited
practical value as we have a poor understanding of the wider system, and
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the agency of most organizations and institutions to foster real change is
at sub-regional, municipality, and community scales. A common response
to policy failure has been to simplify governance boundaries and shift
management responsibilities to higher or lower levels of public authority
(Brondizio et al. 2009). However, higher level management can be undermined by ignorance amongst managers who are distant from the source of
the problem, whilst local managers are often unaware of wider-scale
connections, dependencies, and the long-term implications of their choices.
The frequent disconnect and tension between state-level ecologicaleconomic zoning processes and property-level regulations for environmental protection in Brazil is a good example of this imbalance.
Counteracting this problem of scale is not trivial and requires improving the capacity of state and local governments, and developing institutions that reach across multiple scales and actor groups (Perz et al. 2008;
Brondizio et al. 2009; Boyd (7.2)). The emergence of the Governors’ Climate
and Forests Task Force (http://www.gcftaskforce.org/) – a multijurisdictional collaborative effort between states and provinces across the
tropics and the USA to develop capabilities necessary for implementing
the REDD+ programme – is a good example of improvements in cross-scale
governance where significant progress has been made to strengthen the
position of state-level actors in international forest policy. More such
examples are needed at the sub-national level within Amazonian nations.
The combination of state and non-state actors in such hybrid governance
models can help reconfigure state–market–society relationships towards
improved social and environmental outcomes (Brannstrom et al. 2012).
However, a lot of care is needed to ensure that responsibilities and capacities are not excessively transferred to large non-governmental organizations which may in turn lead to unsustainable and politically unviable
institutional dependencies.

Challenges for science in securing a sustainable
future for the Amazon
Science has a critical role to play in developing and securing a transition
towards a more sustainable future for the Amazon region. Whilst an
impressive body of knowledge has already been generated (Barlow et al.
2010; Davidson et al. 2012), the scientific community is commonly criticized
for failing to deliver the evidence that is most needed to foster this change.
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A lot of applied research is often of a narrow disciplinary focus, addresses
only a limited range of spatial scales, and is concerned largely with drawing
attention to problems instead of developing and testing specific management and policy solutions (e.g. Ferreira et al. 2012). Renewed efforts are
needed to develop a genuinely interdisciplinary science that can overcome
these shortcomings and help steer the region on to a more sustainable
pathway (Barlow et al. 2010; Perz et al. 2010b).
Social-ecological research in the Amazon, as elsewhere, has often failed
to focus on the most relevant spatial scales for guiding the development
of more sustainable land use strategies. Instead, a lot of work has been
concentrated either on the entire Amazon basin, thereby obscuring
important inter- and intra-regional processes and interactions (Brondizio
and Moran 2012), or on a detailed understanding of a small number of wellknown research sites, thereby capturing only a tiny fraction of the
variability in key environmental and land use gradients that drive social
and ecological change (e.g. as in the case of biodiversity research; Peres
et al. 2010). Whilst both large- and small-scale research is necessary,
much more work is needed at the mesoscale (i.e. 100s km). Perhaps most
importantly, the mesoscale corresponds to the scale of municipalities or
counties – the administrative unit which resonates most closely with local
pressures on natural resources and social services, as well as being
responsible for institutional linkages between local communities and
regions or states (Brondizio and Moran 2012). In addition, focusing work
at the mesoscale allows for a more meaningful cross-scale or nested
analysis that can simultaneously draw on data and understanding regarding both local and regional processes in a way that research focused at
either the smallest or largest scales cannot readily achieve.
Building effective interdisciplinary research programmes remains one
of the most difficult challenges facing the development of sustainability
science (Carpenter et al. 2009). In summarizing the status of scientific
knowledge across fourteen different areas of research in the Amazon,
Barlow et al. (2010) emphasize the benefits of a shared geographic focus in
developing a more interactive and interdisciplinary research and learning
environment. Indeed, accelerating the acquisition of reliable and contextualized knowledge about the fate of the Amazon is partly dependent
on our ability to build research networks that can effectively exploit
economies of scale in shared resources and technical expertise, recognize
and make explicit interconnections and feedbacks among sub-disciplines,
and increase the temporal and spatial scale of existing studies. Researchers
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also need to conceptualize interdisciplinary research as being much more
than a combination of different sets of skills and data, and rather an
opportunity to compare and integrate what are often fundamentally
different ways of thinking (Polasky et al. 2011).
Ultimately the success of any such research network depends on the
active participation of local and regional stakeholders, alongside different
scientific disciplines, in a co-designed approach to research and implementation (Future Earth 2012). Managing such networks is challenging,
and requires capabilities and strategies that often go far beyond the remit
of normal scientific training, including managing the politics of collaboration and cooperation and building functional redundancies across
networks in order to withstand the possible loss of key individuals or
institutions.

Conclusions
The introductory chapter of this book (1.1) expanded the tipping point
metaphor beyond thinking about threshold shifts in a system state to a
much broader heuristic device for conceptualizing the causes and consequences of unprecedented change across multiple social and ecological
attributes. In doing so it urges both decision makers and scientists to be
more imaginative in seeking to understand and address the challenges that
face the development of more sustainable and socially progressive
economies. The editors of this volume further propose that human societies
are predisposed towards creating the conditions that may contribute
towards tipping points in physical and social conditions, and also that
efforts to adapt to such changes can often have an exacerbating effect. Some
evidence of both propositions can be found in the Amazon which, in only
a few decades, has undergone an unprecedented period of social and
ecological change and disruption. The spectre of a clearly defined tipping
point in the Amazon system, driven by a threshold change in regional
deforestation and/or global temperature increases, remains poorly
understood due to variability in predicted climate and land use changes as
well as ecosystem responses. Nevertheless, and despite recent positive
changes – including a dramatic reduction in the rate of deforestation in
Brazil – the region currently stands at a crossroads, with the long-term
integrity of Amazon forests threatened by positive feedbacks between land
use and climate change that could lead to a widespread shift towards an
impoverished and fire-prone system.
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On a more positive note the editors also urged us all to think about the
possibility of positive transformational tipping points where societal
responses can turn-around trajectories of degradation and maladaptation
to build institutions that are capable of restoring and maintaining sustainable social-ecological systems. It is reassuring to observe that, while far
from dominant or secure, elements of this potential for transformation are
emerging across the Amazon in the form of declining deforestation rates,
changing land use practices, and the emergence of a critical mass of
individuals and institutions committed to demonstrating the potential for
positive change (Hecht 2011). Building upon and consolidating these
changes ultimately requires adaptability in the responses of decision
makers at all levels of governance, and the support of a solution-orientated
and interactive scientific community.

Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to Jamila Haider, Joice Ferreira, Luke Parry, Patrick Meir,
Emily Boyd, Luis Fernando Guedes Pinto, and Tim O’Riordan for insightful comments that helped greatly to improve the manuscript. I am grateful
to the Natural Environment Research Council (NE/FO1614x/1) and the
UK Government Darwin Initiative (17-023) for funding support while this
work was completed. This is publication #7 in the Rede Amazônia
Sustentável series.

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PART 5
THE SPIRITUAL DIMENSION

Laurence Freeman, in his thoughtful chapter (5.1), makes the telling
observation that ‘the “spiritual dimension” of a conversation is often placed
at the end of a meeting with a full agenda’. We have heeded his playful
comment and placed his contribution at the heart of this book.
We have done so because the architecture of the volume rests on the
evolution from the dissection of the causes and outcomes of tipping points
in Parts 1–4 to the scope for learning, forecasting and adapting to their
onset in Parts 6–8. In harmony with Giles Foden, Laurence Freeman
suggests that addressing tipping points offers immense scope for creative
re-interpretation of our psyches and mind patterns. It is right that his ideas
enter the complete discourse at this point in the volume. He asks pertinent
questions of science, of contemplation, of deeper awarenesses, and of
creative optimism. He offers the prospect of meeting in wholeness, of
opening minds to other ideas and possibilities, and of sharing understanding so that fresh perspectives can be gained. He suggests that science
can learn to be more humble in its moralizing, and in so being, it can gain
more attention and respect. Without the bedrock of sustainability science,
we have no firm platform on which to address tipping points.
Contemplative consciousness rests on silence, on meditation, and on
joining up. It provides the kinds of purposeful judgements and confidence
in proposed actions which any attempt to get to the transformational
tipping points which dominate the contributions to come will require. The
wonderful value of Freeman’s chapter lies in his presumption that we can
think and act differently from where we have thought and acted until
now. It is one aim of this volume to place into juxtaposition a range of
perspectives from many patterns of thought and evidence, which release
histories of imprisoned outlooks in favour of liberated reconnections. One
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role for tipping points, no matter how irritating the notion is for many, is
that they demand rethinking along with fresh ways of measuring and
valuing actions and outcomes. Freeman offers us the insights which Foden
initiated in what are delightfully complementary contributions.
David Atkinson, a former Bishop of Thetford, writes not just for
Christianity (5.2). He proclaims that all faiths establish moral certainties for
human occupancy of a self-perpetuating planet. These relate to ideals
which, though rarely attainable and certainly not met, nevertheless guide
our consciences and deeper behaviours. Many of the initiatives of sustainable localism which are appearing all over the globe, even in the face
of oppression and impoverishment, stem from the faith communities.
Indeed many are sustained by faith and by the tenacity of recognizing that
well-being and betterment have to be fought for and triumphed in the face
of the many impediments of mindsets and institutions. If we are indeed to
overcome the scourges of malign tipping points which currently beset both
the planet and its human family, we will have to do so with faith,
conviction, and compassion at our core.
These twin contributions offer the hope and the enlightenment that
spirituality and transcendence can grant us, should we develop the
antennae to sense them and the limbs to enact them. They also provide a
springboard for the emergence of a sustainability science. This is the science
of exploring, of dialogue, of learning and listening, and of partnerships and
companionships. Sustainability science blossoms through the marriage of
evidence and interpretation; of the capacity to ‘re-behave’, beyond the
confines of habit and social loyalties; and of the scope for reconnection and
conviction with passion. Sustainability science grapples with wicked
problems which cannot be solved without wholeness and stillness being
part of their analysis. Sustainability science seeks the experience of
experiments and trials, at all scales of human endeavour, so that companionships endure between partners who explore and share the same
journey. The two contributions in this Part provide the intellectual and
spiritual basis for the successful emergence of sustainability science,
without which we doubt whether tipping points can ever fully and
confidently be addressed.

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5.1
Contemplative consciousness
LAURENCE FREEMAN

Contemplative consciousness is a term acceptable, I hope, to the spiritually,
religiously, and scientifically inclined. It describes a way of knowledge as
old as history. Where do we start in making it useful as a guide through
our contemporary labyrinthine crises?
Let me examine this with regard to two interesting aspects of our tipping
points conversation. Contemplative consciousness reflects a common
openness to radically new approaches (new ways of seeing and judging).
It also links quite different specialities, thus aspiring to a new kind of
vantage point of perception and action which is integral, simple and,
hopefully, wise. I seek to contribute to both of these lines of thought by
suggesting that the scientific method needs to be practically complemented
by contemplative consciousness. But how might this best be achieved? The
connecting link is that scientists and spiritual leaders need to trust each
other and work together better. The present media-fuelled debate about
religion and atheism is largely irrelevant, and a distracting sideshow to this
endeavour.
Generally, the tipping points strategy strikes me, in the right sense of
the word, as prophetic. Unfortunately the prophetic cannot be predictive
in a way that satisfies our longing to know what is going to happen next.
Altruistically, the prophetic seeks radical insights into the present structure
of things in order to see what they mean in terms of the greater truth and
of the well-being of the people. Contemplative consciousness differs from
the scientific method in that it specifically addresses the undeniable human
need for meaning.
So, I suggest that we are at a tipping point not only physically in terms of
Earth’s systems, but consciously, too, with regard to human self-awareness.
Self-knowledge, according to some early masters of my spiritual tradition,
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is more important than the ability to work miracles. Technology has made
the miraculous part of our daily life. So, as usual, human beings look for
more. Beyond the miraculous lies . . . what?

Memento mori
To the degree that we can be sure that serious change is coming, and that
we don’t know quite how to deal with it, reflecting on the crisis is a
memento mori, a remembering that we are mortal. Mortality characterizes
everything from the individual organism to all energy systems we can
observe. Spiritual wisdom engages this unsettling truth and has, in fact,
turned it into a method for enhancing consciousness and maximizing our
potential for experiencing quality of life. Buddhism expresses it in terms
of anatta, the no-self or ‘empty’ nature of all things. This is not nihilistic, as
it may sound, but denotes the universal characteristics of impermanence
and interdependence. Christian thought arrives at the same insight through
its terms of ‘creatureliness’ and poverty of ‘spirit’. This is as much
descriptive and verifiable as it is dogmatic. Annata and God are often seen
as opposite poles of ways of describing the nature of things and their
meaning. Contemplative consciousness is good at reconciling opposites.
Nicholas of Cusa said that God is the ‘union of opposites’.
Research shows that most people in terminal illness, if they accept their
condition and if their pain is managed and they are psychologically cared
for, will say that they have never enjoyed a better quality of life. Little more
proof is needed than this research result, which never ceases to surprise,
namely that happiness does not depend primarily upon our material
situation. Terror Management Theory research claims that the repression
of the fear of death is our primary repression, greater than the sexual. So,
becoming free of repression constitutes an important part of the journey to
human well-being. Facing our death is a way to clarity of mind and
happiness. ‘Keep death always before your eyes’, as St Benedict said:
environmental scientists today would probably agree. Better to die free
than live imprisoned by fears. Science and its particular method of knowing
also help us face this reality of mortality dispassionately.
The work of everyone involved in understanding and preparing for the
great coming changes on the Earth can – by itself – help to raise consciousness and contribute to a better quality of life. We are facing change
on a scale that involves dying to the past. Many geographical, biological,
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and sociological species and patterns that we have become attached to will
be lost even in our lifetimes. Extinction, however, is not the only form of
death. We demonstrably survive many forms of death – the irretrievable
loss of what we once enjoyed. Whether we survive the last form of
biological and neurological death is not a relevant part of the discussion
here.
When we face mortality and impermanence we soon see that death is
part of life and is to be accepted at every level from the molecular to the
social. We are not only remembering the predicted death of the cosmos,
the second law of thermo-dynamics, but also the inevitable changes in
human self-organization which make up history and which have rapidly
accelerated in the modern period. The feeling of fast and radical mutation
is a particularly modern anxiety. ‘Everything that is solid melts into air’,
according to Marx. The fear of change is no doubt related to our fear of
death even if change is often as much desired as feared. The panic comes
when we realize we cannot control the change. There is, however, no going
back to the safe place we come from. Wherever we run, death is waiting
for us.
So, the awareness of mortality, which is integral to the contemplative
consciousness, is already present in the conversation we have begun
regarding the future of the planet.

The scientific method and contemplative consciousness
The ‘spiritual dimension’ of a conversation is often placed at the end of a
meeting with a full agenda. This may be for a number of reasons: because
the spiritual is supposed to sum up and integrate all the preceding
contributions (or give a satisfying illusion of this); or that it is intellectually
generous to admit its relevance to the conversation even if that relevance
is not paid much attention; or that, as we don’t know the answer, we scoop
the leftovers into this category of the nebulous, the paradoxical, and
apophatic until we can deal with them rationally. Perhaps, though, if it is
there at all, the spiritual aspect of our discourse should be somewhere in
the middle of the agenda so that it exerts a panoptic influence and invites
response from every aspect of the conversation. This however may be
asking too much of most meetings.
In any case, by ‘contemplative’ I mean a way of seeing and understanding that integrates all possible perspectives and available information.
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It is therefore sapiential rather than encyclopaedic. Many great scientists
of our era, from Heisenberg to Eddington, have arrived at this way of
seeing through the scientific method. Thomas Aquinas defined it pithily as
the ‘simple enjoyment of the truth’. Simplicity is not facile but the goal of
all truth-seeking and problem-solving. Children’s consciousness may be
our clearest teacher here.
By ‘contemplative consciousness’ I also mean a state of mind which is
detached and free of absolutizing any point of view or interpretation
whether scientific, political, or religious. This non-attachment (which is also
good scientific method) is the mind and heart of the spiritual dimension.
This too can be partially true of prayer without a contemplative element –
even when you are praying ‘for’ something like good weather, or a medical
cure, or world peace. But it is most fully true when contemplative consciousness is in play in prayer or indeed in any other application of our
capacity for attention.
To understand the relevance of contemplative consciousness it is helpful
to see that faith and belief are two distinct ways of seeing: although of
course they cohabit and tread on each other’s toes all the time. Briefly, I
would say that faith is our capacity for commitment, endurance, transcendence of self-interest, and for love. Belief is how we articulate the
reasons and values for our acting in a particular way.
At the end of his life the disillusioned philosopher Martin Heidegger
came to believe that philosophy was finished, and that in the age of the
new ‘technicity’, only a god can save us. Contemplative consciousness
dispels the grip of this kind of disillusion and the pessimism it engenders
with clarity of mind grounded in a verifiable, if not easily measurable,
experience that generates only realistic expectations. The knowledge that
arises in contemplation is distinct from that achieved by the scientific
method, but they are compatible, complementary, and as necessary to each
other as the two hemispheres of the brain. Contemplative knowledge is
‘advaitic’, that is, non-dualistic, free from the subject–object category. At
times therefore it looks nonsensical or flaky to the rational mind. But it is
also silent, simple, loving, and personally fulfilling, and it makes us happy.
These are all aspects that touch and move us at the deepest human level,
as do things like family, compassion, and beauty.

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The elements of contemplation
I would like to suggest that terms like silence, stillness, and simplicity –
universal elements of contemplation – are worthy of a good scientist’s or
indeed a good politician’s attention.
Simplicity is empirical and irreducible. Its focus is on the thing being paid
attention to, not the observer’s own sense of identity or self-interest. Once
we have connected to it we can more confidently confront the complexities
of our problems, together with diverse models and metaphors for their
resolution. Silence can, of course, be psychologically negative – as in denial
or repression. But the silence of contemplation is a positive level of
consciousness often enhancing creativity. It empowers us to use in a
detached but energetic way all the necessary – even if necessarily abstract
– models of intellectual enquiry. It is not anti-intellectual but it is not
thought, as we ordinarily understand it, either. If the contemplative mind
has been developed we can think, measure, analyse, and in fact do
everything in a contemplative way. Stillness protects detachment and keeps
us centred and free from emotional attachments, though it does not repress
or deny feeling. It keeps us creative even after we have started to test the
models and theories of our research and come to see that they need to be
revised. This means we remain healthily detached from our own questions
and answers, and hence open to criticism and change even after we have
begun to invest our reputation in them.

Open minds
Contemplative consciousness is more concrete than it may sound. It
therefore helps us to repair the abstraction and axiological poverty of an
unintegrated, unbalanced scientific method – the kind that puts science
above morality or common sense. I don’t mean that contemplation discovers
or endorses a particular morality or particular values. In this sense it is more
about faith than belief. It touches on moral ideas and values, however, in
ways that the scientific method is not called to do. Contemplative consciousness thus helps us to develop the axiologies that are necessary and relevant
for our time. It teaches us that we cannot live by fixed, unchangeable beliefs
as humanity did in the pre-industrial world. But it also reminds us that it is
not enough to live by the law of market forces, by entrepreneurial projects
driven by financial interest – or by science alone.
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This contemplative approach leads to the opening of the ‘catholic’ mind.
Forget the denominational associations with the word because it means the
opposite of the sectarian. The mens catolicus is open to all sources of
information and processing. Its default response to something new or
strange is to try to include, not exclude. This means it is prepared, even
eager, to change and expand its own parameters of belief. This openness
to change in the patterns in which our mind works, is captured in the
word ‘metanoia’ (turning of mind), and is equally essential to scientific
development and to moral and spiritual growth.
Sometimes we get unexpected breakthroughs through this openmindedness in understanding. Unassociated things come together in a
wonderfully clear and simple way. But contemplative consciousness is
generally developed by incremental growth rather than sudden enlightenments. Spiritual practices, pre-eminently the practice of meditation, have
this effect. It is comparable with other ‘nonlinear transitions where small
changes make big differences’. The world’s mystical traditions, which are
all expressions of the catholic mind, distinguish between temporary
(reversible) and permanent (irreversible) change. States of mind come and
go and may give fleeting insights into truth. Stages of development
represent the testing and integration of an insight after which we have
changed direction, once and for all, even if we have not yet arrived at the
destination.
This illustrates, I hope, why the ‘spiritual dimension’ of the conversation needs to be in the middle, not at the end. Contemplative consciousness
does not build the solution, but it does help to create an integrated consciousness that is both more humorous and more serious, more playful and
less dogmatic. It is a clearer mind. It also develops personal temperaments
of finer quality and depth. This is what I mean by ‘being spiritual’. The
experiments through which we try to ‘save the world’ or improve it, are
shaped by this way of seeing because they change people involved from
within, developing those qualities that are embodied in the personalities
who are doing the work. How many international summits on economic
or environmental questions stumble and fail to apply the obvious necessary
remedies because these personal qualities are not steering the debate or
rescuing it from prejudiced nationalism or short-term political self-interest?
The current environmental crisis illustrates how urgent is this process
of metanoia, this change of mind. The goal is a common or catholic mind
that respects the rights of both the global and the local, and balances them.
To advance the goal all possible ways of entering the common ground of
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humanity should be employed. Science is clearly one portal. Art and sport
are others. Cultural exchange especially opens young minds. Education,
rather than just technical training for employment, is a basic pre-requisite
of this personal development. Religion is also necessary. The totalitarian
failures to destroy it in the last century show that, like art and science, it is
an integral part of the human mix.

The embarrassment of religion: contemplative
science
The divorce and distrust between religion and science in the modern period
is out of date in an era that demands a new consciousness. However much
religious institutions may embarrass or outrage, the contemplative is often
carried and transmitted by them.
The contemporary British polemics in the media between scientific
atheism and religious superstition is entertaining but quaint. It misses the
spirit of the age. The twentieth-century prediction of the extinction of
religion in the face of scientific advances has been disappointed. But despite
the rise of religious fundamentalism – a modernist product of this divorce
between religion and science – a new kind of global, contemplative religious consciousness is developing. Each religious tradition revolves around
a contemplative sun and the awareness of this is growing stronger in them
all as their followers mature. Contemplative religious consciousness
understandably receives much less media attention but what if it represents
a stage of development, not (as in the case of fundamentalism) just a passing
state of mind? Inter-religious dialogue, scientifically engaged religious
teachers like the Dalai Lama, and countless grassroots movements are
advancing a global metanoia through religion. The secular worldview that
has emerged in all cultures to differing degrees is not inherently antireligious. It simply sees that religion occupies a new place in the world,
particularly in relation to science and personal freedom. Religion can no
longer claim special privileges and must meet the non-religious on a level
playing field of reason and faith.
The goal of a generalized contemplative consciousness is not just
abstract science. It is an effective implementation of the best science.
(Similarly the goal is not a platonic, unfeeling religion but one actively
engaged in addressing the material and spiritual needs of all humanity.)
This kind of ‘total (or contemplative) science’ is prophetic. It can be
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ridiculed and may be treated with suspicion in the academy; but it could
also turn out to be the kind of science needed today, upheld by the most
authentic and effective kind of scientific behaviour.
Science and contemplative religion in the global crisis are both
concerned with advancing the deepest well-being for the greatest number
while they follow different protocols. But they are complementary; and so
real connections can be made if the time is given to identifying them. These
connections will be manifestations of wisdom, good sense guided by
simple human kindness, and clear thinking backed up by courageous risktaking. In the Book of Wisdom it says that the ‘hope for the salvation of the
world lies in the greatest number of wise people’. Unfortunately it doesn’t
say how many are needed, but presumably more than we have at present.
I suggest thought be given as to how the connections can be made
between scientists and spiritual practitioners operating within a contemplative, integrated framework. This connection could easily begin (and
perhaps has begun already) by acknowledging the psychological and
physical benefits of meditation. It stands that if these benefits are useful at
the personal and interpersonal levels they will also help in resolving the
crisis we all face. For example, the British National Health Service has
recognized that meditation may be more effective and certainly less
expensive than medication in addressing the problems of mental illness
and promoting mental health.
I think this approach to developing the contemplative consciousness is
well-researched and persuasive. I would push it further, however, beyond
cholesterol levels and depression. Beyond these benefits lie, in the next
realm, many spiritual fruits.
Relating the scientific method to contemplative consciousness promises
a radical new approach to human problem-solving. We need intercultural
and political agreements about the rules of living together in the future,
but for these to be sustainable there is also a need for consensus about the
role of wisdom itself. This agreement would evoke the axiological matrices
from which specific moral values can be created inside diverse human
cultures and also govern our innovative projects for improving quality of
life worldwide. It is important, of course, that these ways of agreeing on
values are not too specific, and in particular not too occidental.
It is now time in my argument to get down to a practical issue, the role
of meditation in developing contemplative consciousness.

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Meditation
Once religion has been set free from the sectarian instinct to convert, it is
able to explore reality and to advance the integration of all forms of
knowledge. Central to this venture is the practice of meditation.
Present in the 40,000-year-old aboriginal culture (dadirri) and first
recorded in Indian philosophy about 1500 BC, meditation is a universal
human wisdom and form of knowledge. It is global and it is locally present
at the core of all the religious traditions. It is a gateway to humanity’s
common ground. Medical research over the past sixty years concludes that
meditation is good for people at the physical and psychological levels. The
NHS is currently adopting meditation as part of its cost-cutting mental
health policy. Schools are widely introducing it into the classroom.
Many financial and industrial institutions have designated meditation
spaces and like it being taught to their staff to reduce stress and increase
productivity. These benefits – stress-reduction, anger-control, immune
system enhancement – are not incompatible with those spiritual fruits of
meditation which are less easily measured but no less constitutive of
human well-being – love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, fidelity,
and self-control.
There are circumstances when a purely ‘secular’ approach to meditation
works best. However the religious origin and spiritual significance of
meditation should not be ignored, as there are distinct advantages in
teaching meditation with a spiritual approach as well. For example, the
practice of meditation is a discipline as well as a technique. Disciplines are
best learned and sustained in learning groups – the sense of community
and the local and global networks which meditation naturally engenders
at transcultural and inter-religious levels.
If we are to think radically, I would suggest an approach to a strategy
for dealing with tipping points that includes acknowledging the practice
of meditation as a way of metanoia, seeing in a new way. It can also be
recommended because it develops the best possible environment for
communicating hard truths to the general public, such as that of keeping
global warming to a moderated 2 per cent over pre-industrial levels.
Scientific method, political policy and religious wisdom can ‘meet’ in
meditation where the personal and the collective are harmonized. They
need to meet; they don’t need to merge.
I suggest thought be given as to how the connections can be made
between scientists and spiritual leaders operating within a contemplative,
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integrated framework. This connection could begin with an acknowledgement of the value of meditation for resolving the crisis and the
responsibility of religion to collaborate in the work. It would also help to
disseminate the insights necessary to change public policy from the
grassroots upwards. It would encourage political and economic leaders to
think and act with a common mind.
Meditation, of course, is part of the most ancient wisdom of humanity
and has been carried through history by religious traditions, especially the
monastic lineages. Seen with the detached but not cold gaze of the
contemplative consciousness, the benefits are attractive but the spiritual
fruits also come into view – ranging from love to self-control. In the
understanding of this contemplative practice (maybe a technique to the
scientist, a discipline to the spiritual) a possible new relationship between
techno-science and religion becomes imaginable.
Teaching meditation as a spiritual practice has convinced me it is
relevant to the contemporary crisis. As a way of experiencing unity with
those of different cultural, intellectual and religious backgrounds it is the
most direct way to verify the common ground of humanity. In teaching
children to meditate the teacher or parent is often amazed at how readily
– and profitably – the child responds. Better learning, happier behavioural
patterns, personal peace, and calmness quickly become evident results. The
benefits are the measurable expressions of the spiritual.
Thinking about medium- to long-term responses to the crisis, the
teaching of meditation to children on a global scale makes a sense that is
hard to deny. Within twenty years it would ensure a generation more
attuned to the contemplative consciousness than we might imagine. If we
believe that the way we look at a problem is an indispensable part of its
solution, what better, cheaper, and simpler way do we have to change the
way humanity approaches itself and its situation? Recent figures say that
the number of people on anti-depressants in the UK has increased in the
past four years by 40 per cent. We also know that more than half of the
cases of diagnosed mental illness in later life make their first appearance
before the age of fourteen. And we know that meditation makes a significant and beneficial difference.

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Crisis
This ‘contemplative dimension’ to the science, economics and politics of
global warming will help the tipping point to ease from the malign to the
benign.
Critical moments are good for developing contemplative consciousness.
Historically, some of the most flourishing contemplative schools of wisdom
have come to birth in times of social and economic breakdown – like the
great English mystical school of the fourteenth century during the Black
Death and the Hundred Years War. Contemplative consciousness provides
intellectual depth and stability in practical problem solving. It operates
with greater calmness and clarity in the midst of crisis because it is able to
trust the basic goodness of human nature.
Trusting the goodness of people is necessary for the kind of managed
change that does not infantalize society or tyrannize it. Contemplative
consciousness – even when it has been developed in a small minority of
people – exposes lies and the machinations of tyranny. It helps to shape
policy and allow quick response in ways that are not excessive or overcontrolling. In times of social breakdown, ‘security’ becomes a major
concern but, if it becomes obsessive, it leads to a perilous and hard to
reverse mass surrender of civil liberties such as occurred in Germany in
the 1930s. The cardinal virtues of justice, moderation, prudence, and
courage infiltrate the political and social ethos through the contemplative mind and determine good political and economic policy that applies
the recommendations of science. These virtues that underlie civilized
behaviour are demonstrably generated and developed in the contemplative
experience.
Developing a contemplative consciousness in a time of crisis is the
opposite of indoctrination. It may not be a mass movement, and political
or religious institutions have a limited power to promote it. Yet all are
capable of it and all are influenced by its development. There is a hunger
– a market for this – and enlightened scientists can help promote it by their
endorsement. The contemplative way of seeing manifests liberty at the
deepest level. It can be taught but it cannot be imposed and must be learned
through personal experience. As Plato’s allegory of the cave illustrates, it
will be only a few at first who venture out of the realm of shadows into the
clear light of day and then urge their fellows to do the same. But we must
start somewhere.

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Expanding our notion of prayer to include the exercise of contemplative
consciousness, this definition by Origen, a second-century Christian
teacher, makes good sense for us today:
We do not pray to get benefits from God but to become like God. Praying
itself is good. It calms the mind, reduces sin and promotes good deeds.
(De Oratione)

In crisis, vulnerability and uncertainty also expose us, not just to the
truths of chaos theory but also to the graciousness of life, the pure givenness
of reality and, at times, the goodness of human nature. We can be open on
a global scale and simultaneously as never before to the richness of a silent
and non-formulaic truth. The contemplative state of mind attunes to this
purity of existence and to the silence of truth. It gives space for all kinds of
existence and yet also frees our powers of clear discernment. We are then
not confused by a multiplicity of choices, and do not worship choice as the
exclusive mark of freedom.

Language and silence
Conversations easily get bogged down when too much time is given to
defining terms. Tipping points is a readily understood and attractive image
for understanding the problems of change and uncertainty we face. If it is
true that we can be imprisoned or misled by our metaphors, we can also
practice detachment from them in the silence of the contemplative mind.
Stories and narratives are as necessary and helpful, but also as tenuous,
as individual terms and vocabularies. The ‘parable’ may be a more helpful
term for the ways we narrate the story of our quest. It means literally a
‘throwing alongside’ and it is more than a moral story or an allegory. It is
an invitation to integrate that which seems incompatible and therefore
leads to wisdom, the union of opposites, and creative intelligence. Parables,
like koans, tend to leave us a little in the air, not totally certain that the end
has yet come. They are ideal teaching tools, therefore, because they instruct
with interest but do not deliver dogmatic answers. They cultivate the
contemplative consciousness because they focus on the next stage of the
process of understanding rather than building a shrine to what you have
reached so far.

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Some conclusions
The consequence of tipping points can, malignantly, be catastrophic both
environmentally and socially. Driven by panic, the virtue of justice and the
practice of compassion towards the weakest can quickly be lost. The more
leaders develop a personal level of contemplative consciousness, the less
likely are any downward spirals of collapsing social values.
Tipping points are nonlinear and unpredictable. This can terrify the
rational mind. But the fear factor inspired by uncertainty is mitigated by
the ‘apophatic’ mind. This complements the ‘kataphatic’ because it recognizes that ‘unknowing’ is also a way of knowing. In the same way, the leftand right-hand hemispheres of the brain are in constant communication
while operating in distinct modes.
There are ethical questions raised by the science of tipping points. The
personal dimension or the dignity of individuals in a time of crisis must
not be overridden by scientific knowledge or political considerations.
Balancing the local and the global, the individual and the collective,
demands a new way of seeing and knowing. It is not merely of academic
or political interest. The contemplative dimension of consciousness allows
for the integration of these complementary perspectives – at times, faced
with impossible choices, with the ‘wisdom of Solomon’.
There may be a good outcome from all this. Most certainly there can be,
and it depends largely upon the individuals who are leading the way
through the crisis. The virtue of hope is not putting the best spin on bad
news or fiddling while the planet burns. It is a conviction that because of,
and not despite the human element, an eventually positive outcome is
always possible.
Is it too late? The contemplative consciousness is programmed to find
meaning in the worst. With the experience of meaning our confidence in
the fundamental goodness of human nature allows for resilience in the face
of failure or defeat that always transforms despair into hope – and an
unexpected, new way of seeing.
I appreciate this opportunity to contribute to the discussion, because of
what I have learnt from it, and also because it helps to clarify in my own
mind the particular tipping point – many such points make up the current
global crisis – that religion itself is passing through. In one perspective this
looks like failure and erosion. From another – what I call the contemplative
– it is full of hope and wonder as a new kind of religious consciousness
evolves in humanity, one which advances the satisfying experience of unity
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without diminishing the richness of diversity. If this is true of one area of
human experience during our time of transition, it might well be of hope
and interest to many other areas of human life and knowledge that are also
undergoing our present transformation. Each newly perceived connection
between all the tipping points releases energy and yields new insight. And,
to end on a practical note, meditation shows how it is possible to create a
community of faith, leading to action, among people of different beliefs.

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Commentary 5.2
Faith and tipping points
DAVID ATKINSON

There is an episode of Yes Minister in which Jim Hacker is discussing a
document with Bernard: ‘I know what it says . . . what does it mean?’ He
knew the facts; he did not have a narrative of meaning in which to locate
them. The same is often true about climate change. The scientific consensus
is increasingly confident on many of the basic facts, for all the many
remaining uncertainties. But what do they mean? What story shall we tell
in order to respond to them?
As the authors of these chapters and commentaries explain, the language
of ‘tipping points’ can be used as a metaphor for interpreting uncertainty,
complexity, unpredictability. And one of the ways the metaphor is used is
through narrative, the art of storytelling. There are a number of stories
being told in response to the questions posed for us by ‘potentially convulsive’ climate change. Questions about our relationship to the planet and
to each other; about altruism and selfishness; about whether we are able to
overcome mistrust and develop global cooperation; about the place of
technology in causing and perhaps solving our problems. There are other
questions about the nature of our primary values, hopes and goals; about
whether it is possible to live sustainably within planetary limits; about how
we should seek justice, especially for the most disadvantaged parts of the
Earth; about our obligations to the future; about how we think about
human life and destiny, cope with uncertainties; and about our vulnerabilities, hopes, and fears. There are moral dimensions – and, I would
argue, spiritual dimensions – to each of these questions.
A number of narratives are being formulated in response. One is about
management. The Earth is resilient; we can therefore exploit it as much as
we need for our own good. Resource depletion is not something to be anxious about – technological discovery has always come to our aid in the past.
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Another is about fear. The Earth system is actually very fragile and
sensitive to climate and other change. We must be very worried about what
we are doing to the planet. Be afraid: be very afraid.
There is a third narrative that we could say is about greed. We are a
market-led society in which something called ‘the market’ rules. Finance
trumps every other value. Everything, including the environment, becomes
a commodity to be desired. The myth of limitless economic growth is a
primary driver of climate disruption.
Alongside these, other narratives are being prepared by religious people
and communities, narratives which have something fresh and potentially
more creative to offer. The narrative of the Christian story (which is where
I locate myself) is not about our management of the world: but about
wonder and worship and recognizing that the whole created order comes
to us as gift. There is sacredness about God’s world, in which we can delight,
but which requires the acknowledgement of more – much more – than a
technical fix.
The Christian story is not about fear, but about a community discovering
what it means to live in freedom. It is about a narrative which begins in
God’s creative love for the world, and ends in God’s ‘kingdom’ of justice,
which is the whole of creation healed. This is the basis for living in hope.
Within this narrative, humanity has a special role under God for the
cherishing and protection of the planet and for the well-being of all
creatures with which we are interdependent. It is a story about the growth
of a community marked by neighbour love and justice, especially for the
most disadvantaged. It is not about the autonomy which destroys any sense
of community and makes everything into a commodity. It is rather a story
about mutual cooperation and responsibility in place of fear. It recognizes
human and planetary values which cannot be reduced to a price – such as
friendship and loyalty, creative work, beauty, and love.
The Christian narrative of the human experience and our place in the
created order is not therefore about greed, but about gratitude for gift,
shown in self-giving, respect, and compassionate concern for the well-being
of others, for ‘the flourishing of innate and learned qualities of virtue and
goodness, and for the empathy of compassion and solidarity’.
The retelling of this story is what Christian liturgy is about, including
space for meditative reflection on ‘what it means’ – ‘visualizing new
horizons’. Such stories and liturgies are not unique to the Christian tradition. Many faith communities, focused in worship, are called to express
their community life in service for others and for the planet. And this has
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given rise to a host of small-scale local initiatives, based around churches,
mosques, temples, or synagogues, in which people are trying to live more
simply, more responsibly, and more aware of the possible ‘convulsions’ of
tipping points on the horizon.
For example, the ‘Sabbath’ principle is about recognizing the rhythms
of the Earth, and about living with sufficiency. The biblical concept of
‘jubilee’ supported the Jubilee 2000 campaign about reducing international
debt. The Church of England, with its buildings, schools, land, offices,
and numerous community initiatives, promotes a ‘Shrinking the Footprint
Campaign’ to reduce carbon emissions, and a Seven Year Plan for
environmental responsibility. Christian agencies such as Christian Aid and
Tearfund see that their development agenda needs to be woven into the
environmental agenda. Climate change is described by such organizations
as an issue of justice. Many Christians are involved in the Transition Town
movement. There are a variety of Christian-based organizations (A Rocha,
Christian Ecology Link, Eco-congregations, Operation Noah) working at
the practice of a Christian ecology. The John Ray Initiative promotes
scholarly and practical engagement between environmental science and
religion. Archbishop Rowan Williams, when he was Archbishop of
Canterbury, among others, has promoted significant inter-faith dialogue
on the environment.
So faith communities are among many others working for what Tim
O’Riordan calls (in drafts for this volume) ‘the beneficial outcomes of new
states of living and valuing betterment for all, such as in health, security,
in manageable scales of living and communicating, and of forming
economic relationships on the local rather than the multinational scale’.
They contribute to the myriad of ‘good news’ stories we are urged to listen
to, and in some places are becoming small, fresh ‘islands of transformation’.
Maybe they could even become benign cultural and social ‘tipping points’
themselves.

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PART 6
POLITICS, THE MARKETS,
AND BUSINESS

In designing the contributions for this volume, we knew this would be a
difficult Part to get right. It deals with the heart of addressing tipping
points. This is the nexus of markets, politics, corporates, and social mores,
all of which are meant to produce betterment for both the planet and all of
its human family for all time. Lying within this challenging mixture are the
powerful themes of the modern age: the social value of markets, the
effectiveness of democracies, the benign intent of business, and the strength
and clarity of leadership.
One pivotal chapter is that by Sara Parkin (6.3). She stresses that the
economy, democracy, and politics are social systems designed for collective
betterment so are not beyond human engagement and improvement. But
she bemoans the intellectual failure to fuse social and environmental
outcomes as the purpose of economics. She finds the denial and fear of
politicians as they struggle to resuscitate conceptually and practically bankrupt economies understandable, but questions the capability of leadership
to reconfigure the environmental challenge as one of social and economic
opportunity. Promise lies through new strategies to build confidence
around a new logic for how the economy could work. A logic that has a
good story to tell about the long term, can guide decisions in the near term,
and which builds on the best of people. She is optimistic that multiple social
tipping points could come about, but only if the guardians of all the
intellectual and evidential elements – universities – concentrate effort on
supporting this civilization-determining effort.
Chapter 6.1 grapples with what is inevitably a highly contentious issue.
This is the effectiveness of the markets to foresee, to anticipate, to avoid,
and to adapt to tipping points. There will be many readers who see in
already well-regulated but essentially liberated markets the qualities for

Politics, the markets, and business
achieving this. They will extol the propulsiveness of creative competition,
innovation, and enterprise. They will champion the scope for technology,
communication, and rapid data processing at the touch of an interactive
phone, to open up whole new vistas of prosperity and social betterment.
This has been the way of the markets over the years.
Others will share the feelings expressed in Chapters 6.1, 6.2, and 6.3,
namely that there is no guarantee of deep learning and transformation in
modern markets and polities. Paul Ekins (6.2) sees the likelihood of repeat
failures of financial markets, as the sobriety of contrition gives way to a
false euphoria of renewed bonuses and hence repeated mistakes. We take
the view that only the spectre of real economic trouble coupled to the
continued costs of maintaining international security, national social order,
and containing the scope for socially disrupting economic migration on a
mass scale, will cause politicians to rethink, and local communities to
regroup.
But we recognize that this is not a widely held perspective. So we asked
a number of business leaders and commentators to offer their perspectives
on the discussions of the contributions in the book as a whole, as well
as the controversial interpretations of markets and politics outlined
in Chapter 6.1. Their overall reaction was both positive and optimistic.
Two former chief executives, Amanda Long (6.4) and Keith Clarke (6.5),
offer the pragmatic necessities of short termism and of the need to hold
on to valued employees and to feed their families, whilst creating real
wealth. Both see the scope for transformation, Keith Clarke through
enlightened regulation with equal opportunities for creative competition
within agreed and monitored frameworks. Amanda Long and John
Elkington (6.6) as well as Thomas Lingard (6.8) from a company perspective, all see the unleashing of a breakthrough revolution towards sustainable capitalism, as information is better organized as to the possible malign
and benign outcomes of their actions on social and ecological well-being.
They hold a vision of a new form of ecologically framed and socially
improving capitalism which can indeed flourish as sustainability science
offers better advice and guidance. It is vital that they are right.
The other pivotal commentary (6.7) in this collection is that by Charles
Clarke, a former UK cabinet minister. With the wisdom of perspective he
offers seven reasons why it is so difficult for governments to grapple with
tipping points even when they are menacing on the horizon. He identifies
the monumental struggles of analysing and articulating issues when they
are not fully nested in the public and media mind. He points to the power
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Politics, the markets, and business
of disenchanted lobbyists when their interests are threatened, and the everpresent meddling of oppositions, often with opportunism as their guide.
He also emphasizes the need to respect international treaties and obligations, not least associated with the European Union. These slow down and
often weaken the kinds of spearing initiatives which the challenge of
tipping points often demands.
Charles Clarke calls for the same kinds of bold and determined
leadership advocated by Sara Parkin, but echoed by all of the contributors
to this Part. What is missing is the politics and economics of the long term,
the ethics of the compassion for those generations to come who have no
democratic voice at present, and the sensitivities and scientific scenarios
for estimating the resilience of the planetary life-support processes in times
to come, especially if actions are taken now which are unpopular and
unwelcome. This is why there are moves in both polities and markets for
better capacities for evaluating the well-being of ecosystems and societies
in the trajectories of addressing tipping points. This could amount to
formation of an ‘ombudsman for the future’, or for processes of policy
evaluation which explicitly encompass resilience and restoration of both
ecological and social well-being.
But such ideas lie mostly in the domains of political institutions and
processes. They do not nestle in the hearts of business and the many
collectivities of people we loosely refer to as ‘society’. When a systematic
care for a better interconnected ecological, social and economic future in
the round becomes embedded in markets, polities, and a real fusing of the
private, public, and civic sectors: maybe then, this will be seen as one test
of successfully addressing tipping points.

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6.1
Sustaining markets,
establishing well-being, and
promoting social virtue for
transformational tipping points1
TIM O’RIORDAN

The chapters and commentaries which compose this Part are concerned
with the social, political, and economic conditions that might be best able
to identify, anticipate, and cope with tipping points. Part of this process is
to consider the changing roles of markets and of the political structures in
which they function.
In approaching this coupling, this chapter looks at the evolving linkages
between markets, citizens, and politics as means of making decisions about
the economy, via the uses of concepts such as ‘prosperity’, ‘progress’, and
‘citizenship’. It ends with some suggestions for restructuring the relationships between markets, regulation, incentives, civic virtue, and responsible
government for guiding us towards positively transformational tipping
points. In doing so, this introductory chapter and Chapter 6.3 by Sara Parkin
consider not only the strengths and weaknesses of markets as means of
making economic decisions, but also the strengths and weaknesses of the
many influences of political systems and cultures which are shaped by markets, as well as the appropriate role for individuals and groups of citizens.
These arrangements are, of course, always linked together in some way.
Political institutions are always occupied in regulating and responding to
the workings of the market. Markets develop within expressions of values
and aspirational contexts created by the activities and cultural outlooks of
1

This chapter greatly benefited from the ideas of Victor Anderson.

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Tim O’Riordan
civil society and its political structures. Individuals, in their own lives and
as citizens, both respond to and influence the market and politics. The ways
in which the three currently combine give little attention to long-term
sustainability. It is therefore vitally important to address their very basic
deficiencies so that they function cooperatively to create the conditions for
successfully addressing positively transformational tipping points.

Markets and the future
The ‘market’ is a mechanism for guiding behaviour and investment, for
encouraging a constructive relationship between buyers and sellers and
supply and demand, for promoting innovation, productivity, and competition so as to encourage efficiency and to minimize inflation, and to
guide behaviour through prices, incentives, and other regulatory measures.
Broadly there are three forms of markets:
•

•

•

Markets which are open to exchange processes, via buying, selling, and
bartering, essentially informal markets of huge variety, including
‘black’ markets;
Markets which seek a more formal social contract between the economy and the citizen, through a combination of political and market
processes, the socio-democratic markets;
Markets which seek to free up exchange and innovation in a more
unrestrained manner, the so-called ‘neoliberal’ markets.

Markets can act locally, or through national and multinational agreements,
or globally. All markets are regulated to one degree or another, but none
is regulated to ensure the sustainable long term, or, indeed, a socially fair
and redistributive present. Markets currently consider the uncertain future
in a number of ways, as outlined below.

1. Insurance and the spreading of risk
This is normally only tackled where profits are reasonably guaranteed. In
general, this process is based on relatively short-term planning and
calculation of returns. So very long-term notions, such as those connected
to malign or benign tipping points, are not automatically included. Markets
are just beginning to recognize that climate change will introduce a whole
series of ‘normal abnormal’ weather-related events, such as droughts,
floods, storms, and fires, which will have to be factored into costs and
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Markets, well-being, and promoting social virtue
opportunities. This is a key role for the tipping points science offered by
Tim Lenton in Chapter 2.1.

2. Futures contracts
Futures contracts, whereby prices are fixed in advance of goods and
commodities being supplied, are also fairly short-term in perspective – for
example, for periods of three months. Futures contracts do not normally
take into account long-term tipping point considerations, even when there
are some (admittedly imperfect) measures on offer. This point is made
clearly from the perspective of a CEO of a global company, Keith Clarke,
in his commentary (6.5).

3. Investment geared towards future returns
Investment geared towards future returns, provided reasonable guarantees
are thrown in, is nearly always based on models of investment where there
is a presumption of growth, innovation, and overall betterment of income.
Indeed, these are important preconditions. Up until now investment for
the future has always been predicated on a reasonable guarantee of future
returns on the funds committed. In a world of unstable financial markets
and diminishing ecosystem functioning, as well as growing social tension
and increasing political distrust, it may no longer be possible to guarantee
long-term payback from a given investment. Yet, as Dolphin and Nash
(2011: 20–21) argue, there is no apparent shift in the prevailing economic
paradigm to give attention to this danger. Indeed they go further. They
argue that unless those who seek a more ‘eco-centered’ economics of the
kind promoted by Tim Jackson (2011) apply their new paradigms to realworld evidence, their propositions will not be heard by top-table
economists who prefer to tweak the more conventional approaches. We
address this conundrum in Part 8.

4. Lending at interest, depending on positive interest rates
The charging of interest also depends on a critical basic assumption. This
is that borrowers will normally have more money (even after taking the
effect of inflation into account) when they come to repay the loan than they
had when they took it out in the first place, enabling them to pay the
interest as well as repaying the loan. On the scale of the economy as a
whole, this depends on economic growth, and continuing investment. And
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such growth in turn ultimately depends on stable amounts of available
ecological and natural resources, as well as reliable social relationships and
justice. If these two conditions are not met, or are not calculated in pricing
and regulation, or are not monitored by markets, then interest rates cannot
do their intended job. The discussion in the concluding chapter (8.1) over
planetary boundaries and social floors is not apparently yet incorporated
in any setting of interest rates, which currently are geared to the very short
term.
The UK government has established a Natural Capital Committee,
reporting to the Treasury, which is asked to report on the unsustainable
trajectory of natural resources use, to offer procedures to halt such losses
based on robust cost-effectiveness measures, and to encourage scientific
research to buttress its work. If this Committee is allowed to do its work
effectively, this will mark the beginning of an important shift in national
economic accounting, which may be emulated elsewhere and hopefully
by the UN. The test will lie in the length of the time-framing of the
Committee’s scenarios, and how much it will take into account the precursors of possible tipping points outlined in Chapters 1.1 and 2.1.

5. Trading in shares, commodities, and currencies
This is based on guesses about the future, in which 90 days appears as
‘long-term’, and trading is often within daily cycles and perturbations. The
recent convulsions in global commodity and stock markets show that these
are subject to speculation and manipulation, on confidence and despair, on
top of the basic influences of supply and demand. Commodities appear to
be a form of currency and not just a natural resource. This will be another
test for the Natural Capital Committee to prove its spurs.

6. Self-interest and short-term objectives
The market consists largely of individuals attempting to secure selfinterested and/or short-term objectives. So there is no inherent sense of the
collective interest. Indeed, it can be argued from the events of the past few
years, that ‘markets’ predominately expose an ideology favouring the
greed of the shareholder and the boards of directors, not a fundamental
concern for the wider and longer-term public interest or social fairness.

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Markets, well-being, and promoting social virtue

7. Undervaluing of future costs and benefits
Interest rates, and discount rates based largely on them, usually lead to an
undervaluing of future costs and benefits by comparison with the short
term. This point was graphically illustrated by the Stern Report (2007),
which showed that delay in reducing greenhouse gas emissions would
result in increasingly higher costs in the future. These costs would escalate
both in the expenditures for removing the gases as well as for the consequences to societies and economies of greater climate change. In such a
case, claimed Stern, discount rates should be lower than normal ‘market’
rates.
Konrad Ott (2003) notes that ‘rationality’ tends to dictate ‘prudence’ in
discounting. This brings the maximization of the present value of net
benefits to the fore. This is a prescription for short-termism, high interest
rates and ‘sure bets’. But Ott also notes that ‘reason’ may amend this
perspective when the future of the quality of life is at stake. Furthermore,
if a moral outcome (such as social justice and ecological resilience) is to be
retained (sustained) then a zero-discounting process may be used. Hence
discounting may have to be much more dependent on context, especially
where huge uncertainties over the well-being of the unborn are involved.
Paradoxically, the current commitment to very low interest rates may
penalize the scope for investment for the betterment of future generations,
as scarce investment funds are diverted to present gains rather than
providing buffering funds for possible tipping point outcomes.

8. Externalities
‘Externalities’ are, by definition, factors the market does not take into
account. These include some very important considerations from environment and sustainability perspectives. This is the essence of the new moves
to incorporate natural capital accounting into mainstream economics
(Kumar et al. 2010; HM Government 2011: 36). What some economists see
as ‘externalities’ others see as ‘cost-shifting successes’, an outcome of an
essentially political process in which firms, and some other economic
actors, are able to shift costs away to someone else, and/or to the
environment. As noted above, the possible pioneering reports of the newly
formed Natural Capital Committee could open up exciting new approaches
to long-term adaptation to avoid degradation of nature. It will have its
work cut out. The very persistence of the term ‘externality’ suggests that
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such effects are regarded as essentially peripheral to the mainstream of
prosperity formation.

9. Abrupt basic change
Abrupt basic change is difficult for markets to cope with because of their
inherent lack of coordination, unless they either take the form of a highly
organized monopoly or oligopoly, or depend on large-scale government
intervention. This suggests that ‘tipping points’, or abrupt and reinforcing
shifts in Earth system processes, are not readily handled by market procedures. As was outlined by Tim Lenton in Chapter 2.1, not only are tipping
points highly uncertain, they are also potentially catastrophic in effect, over
relatively short time periods. Markets at present contain few cushioning
mechanisms for such eventualities.
What is particularly revealing is the current fixation with the short term,
and the hedging against future uncertainty. A survey for the UN
Environment Programme (2011) found that both the demands of the
shareholders and the needs to ensure current profitability are seriously
limiting both the ability for businesses to plan for sustainability, and to
prepare for anything close to tipping points.
A global survey of 642 senior executives, campaigners, and academics
conducted by consultancies GlobeScan and SustainAbility found that 88
per cent of respondents regarded pressure to deliver immediate financial
results remained a significant barrier to firms’ sustainability efforts.
Dolphin and Nash (2011: 16–18) offer an interesting perspective on this
theme. They claim that the mainstream economists and their polity
bedfellows have faith in technology and investment, that they put to one
side climate change and resource limitations, believe that ecological
economics has no firm deliverable foundation, and in any case cannot cope
with the current fiscal and sovereign debt crises. So they see the economics
of a regulated market as continuing well into the real crises to come.
Complexity economics seeks to understand how interactions at the
micro level lead to particular macroeconomic outcomes. Change and
adaptation at the individual level are viewed as the cause of emergent
patterns that can only be seen at the macro level. Most non-economists
would recognize this as a reasonable description of the real world and
accept that ‘without an adequate understanding of [the inherent dynamics
and instability of economic systems] one is likely to miss the major factors
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Markets, well-being, and promoting social virtue
that influence the economic sphere of our societies’ (Colander et al. 2008:
3). They would be surprised, therefore, to discover that the vast majority
of economists continue to cling to the orthodox or traditional neoclassical
economic view of the world, which simply fails to provide for such an
understanding.

How do polities deal with tipping points?
‘Polities’ rather than governments are the issue here. What we are concerned with is not simply governments themselves, but governments in
the context of whole political systems, including the values and behaviours
of citizens and organizations involved in those systems. This combination
is what is referred to here as ‘polity’.
Again, as with markets, there are both strengths and weaknesses. The
strengths and weaknesses of a polity concern not only the merits of its
institutions and their procedures, but also the political culture within which
the institutions function. Political parties generally play an important part
in shaping the culture, as well as the workings of the institutions. Polities
consider the future in a number of ways:
•
•

They generally exist for longer than the lifetime of an individual, and
therefore can take a more long-term view.
They can draw on senses of loyalty, identification, and idealism which
favour long-term approaches – e.g. building up an industrial base at
the expense of individual consumption, sacrifice in wartime for the
good of the nation, the sense of a ‘long march’ of national or social
progress, and perhaps ‘environmentally virtuous’ behaviour for the
good of the planet.

However there are weaknesses:
•

•

There is a constant temptation for politicians to prioritize short-term
considerations – generally made worse by the behaviour of the mass
media, but also often by the expectations of citizens as well, especially
when in consuming mode.
Many actors within political institutions are concerned with their own
self-interest and/or short-term perspectives. Ministers do not easily
arrange to promote multi-departmental initiatives where the gains may
go to other departmental budgets. Yet such arrangements are often the
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hallmark of sustainable investment. Virtually all tipping point issues,
such as food and ecological security as revealed in Part 4, combine
many aspects of government and economy, and hence departmental
responsibilities. One outcome here is that crises may have ominously
to rear up into attentive reality before avoiding action is taken.
The Commons’ Public Administration Committee (PAC) bemoan the
lack of capacity in government to create policy coherence for strategic
vision:
We have little confidence that Government policies are informed by a clear,
coherent strategic approach, itself informed by a coherent assessment of the
public’s aspirations and their perceptions of the national interest. The Cabinet
and its committees are made accountable for decisions, but there remains a
critical unfulfilled role at the centre of Government in coordinating and
reconciling priorities, to ensure that long-term and short-term goals are
coherent across departments. Policy decisions are made for short-term
reasons, little reflecting the longer-term interests of the nation. This has led
to mistakes which are becoming evident in such areas as the Strategic Defence
and Security Review (carrier policy), energy (electricity generation and
renewables) and climate change, child poverty targets (which may not be
achieved), and economic policy (lower economic growth than forecast).
(Public Administration Committee 2012: 1)

Tim Jackson (2011: 183) argues convincingly that the building of social
capital with an equivalent committee to the Natural Capital Committee,
can only take place with the provision of a consistent policy framework for
building resilient communities and supporting social cohesion. This should
have been the broader message of the PAC. It is still not in the work of
central government, where a long-term approach to building well-being
is not yet in evidence. The nearest effort is being developed by the
Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the department with
a sustainability remit in government (see Figure 6.1).
Indeed this is the central message. It appears that the institutional lockin effect, introduced in Chapter 1.1, may take us to a point of genuine crisis
before transformation is even contemplated. As Dolphin and Nash conclude:
Consequently, one might be inclined to presume that change will only come
if it is driven from outside the profession by demands for economics to
provide solutions to problems in the real world, rather than models of
hypothetical worlds that bear little relation to reality.
(Dolphin and Nash 2011: 21)

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Markets, well-being, and promoting social virtue

Investment (+)

Produced
Capital

Goods and
services in the
market

Human capital

Social capital

Production
and other
activity

Private nonmarket goods
and services

Social goods
and services
Natural capital

Well-being
Consumption

The Office for
National Statistics is
developing multiple
measures of well-being

Environmental
goods and
services

Depreciation (–)

Stocks

Flows

Figure 6.1 The approach to well-being in the context of evolving natural and social
capital (personal correspondence by Gemma Harper, 2012). Note that the links are
not fully connected to social coherence and neighbourhood resilience.

Comparison of markets and polities
The essence of political decision-making is that it depends on conscious
choice – so consideration for the future comes about only if that is what
citizens and governments wish. Markets appear to operate more ‘automatically’, beyond the will of individuals. In reality they are the consequence
of individual behaviour and decisions, but these are aggregated (in the
form of ‘supply’ and ‘demand’ and various financial structures), rather
than being developed or transcended through deliberation and conscious
interchange of opinions (Lyotard 1984).
This is particularly true of ‘free’ markets, which provide the basis for
pure market theory in neoclassical economics, and have often guided
economic policy, especially in the USA and UK. There are, however, other
types of markets, summarized at the outset, which differ from this. These
are social markets and ‘informal markets’, in which free market principles
are mixed in with the operation of social institutions and connections
between people, principally the state in ‘social markets’ (e.g. through high
levels of welfare provision or economic planning), and local communities
in the case of ‘informal markets’. These forms of market therefore incorporate some of the characteristics of a polity into the workings of the
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marketplace. Where contrasts are drawn in this chapter between ‘markets’
and ‘polities’, they are therefore principally between polities and the ‘free
market’. There seems to be huge untapped scope for enabling more
informal and socially framed markets to rise to the challenge of transformational tipping points as introduced in Chapter 1.1.

The notions of well-being, virtue citizenship, and
virtue politics
The concept of ‘well-being’ raises many issues. The most central is the
question of whether well-being can serve as the primary aim of policy,
perhaps as a rival to GDP, or perhaps as one corner of a triangle in which
GDP growth, well-being, and sustainability have equal status.
There is some scepticism about this. Rather than attempt to measure
well-being in some overall way, it may be more reliable separately to
investigate different ‘domains of well-being’ based on responses about
what factors people feel affect their well-being. It would then be possible
to monitor trends in these different sectors affecting well-being, monitoring
each separately, although perhaps combining them into some overall
index. Laurence Freeman addresses these matters in Chapter 5.1. The
strands within ‘well-being’ include:
•
•
•

self-esteem, self-respect, and personal awakening, built into a setting
of social justice and civil rights;
security of person, of safety, of income, of health, employment, and
home, set in the context of a supportive community or neighbourhood;
responsibility for others, for the future of the human family and for the
betterment of the life-support functions of the planet, set in an
empathetic, moral and spiritual context.

These three elements – esteem, security, responsibility – lie at the heart of
virtue, the notion that existence is a matter of social obligation and not just
personal gain.
In his treatise, On the Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith defined
‘virtue’ through a combination of four qualities as the basis for both virtue
and well-being: prudence, careful planning and satisficing consumption
(enough but not too much and guided by considerations of tempering
indulgence); justice, the careful avoidance of knowable harm to others;
beneficence, the unconditional giving to others to promote their happiness;
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Markets, well-being, and promoting social virtue
and self-command, the personal moderation of any excesses in behaviour or
desire. The virtuous know by what means to reach satisfaction, and not to
strive for everything, which only leads to dissatisfaction, and ultimately
unhappiness. Laurence Freeman develops this theme in his examination
of meditation and contemplative consciousness.
Nevertheless, virtue is a treacherous concept. For many it is a route to
citizen compulsion, on the basis that altruism is not often voluntarily
followed. For others, such as Michael Sandel, virtue is akin to searching
out what is ultimately the common good:
We can’t decide any of the questions we argue about, without implicitly
relying on certain ethical ideas, certain ideas of justice; certain ideas of
common good. We can’t be neutral on those questions even if we pretend
to be.
(Sandel 2012)

Virtue will remain argued over as it divides those who see it as an entry
point to some form of regulated coercion, while others regard it as the basis
of sustainable citizenship.
This leads to the role of citizens as individuals and members of families
and other small units. Citizenship aims to bind sets of individual freedoms
and responsibilities to a secure and safe human family and community. All
societies combine rights and responsibilities.
Andrew Dobson (2009) (and 8.2) suggests that ‘good’ citizenship does
not just stem from particular patterns of behaviour. It is spurred by
profound values of care, compassion, and justice. Moreover, it requires a
sympathetic and supportive form of representative government that extols
such qualities and sets the examples for citizens to follow. So virtue in
citizenship is promoted by virtue in governance. This combination is
almost non-existent in such ‘democracies’ where ‘government’ is seen as
synonymous with sleaze, deceit, or duplicity.
Dobson promotes the notion of a cosmopolitan citizen, outward-looking,
somewhat independent of locality, nationhood and time dependency,
yet in a zone of conflict over rights, civil care, ecological sensitivity, and
spirituality. In essence, Dobson is looking at a new concept of political
space – ‘the space in which citizens move, and the space in which citizens’
rights and obligations are noticed’. The notion of the safe operating space
outlined in Parts 1, 2, and 8 means that nations as well as individuals are
unavoidably confronted with the injustice and immorality of absorbing too
much ecological and social space. This means knowingly reducing the
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ecological-social space for today’s impoverished peoples, and particularly
for all future generations This is the essence of the Brundtland concept of
sustainability, namely, enabling future citizens to be able to use the planet
and meet their social requirements without being avoidably prohibited
from doing so by our present actions and outlooks.
To get to benign tipping points, we need to address virtue through three
primary concepts:
•

•

•

Autonomy, criticality, rationality, awareness of self in a social and
spiritual context. Freedom to choose, but to do so with care and understanding.
Responsibility based on an extended notion of utility and satisfaction
from being concerned about the general well-being of others. This
includes building self-respect by taking greater responsibility for
others’ livelihoods. This also touches on human flourishing as a basis
for living a good life; and fairness – ensuring that the interests of the
self are also related to the interests of others.
Awareness and accountability linked to better information and moral
interpretation of the consequences of actions on others and on future
societies and ecologies. The key here is moral sentiment as well as
understanding and recognition of outcomes of any behaviour. Not just
arriving at a judgement and then labelling accordingly, but also
alerting the conscience.

All of this places an emphasis on the institutions and values that contribute
to the shaping of individual choice and behaviour. ‘Virtue’ provides a
concept of social transformation that better aligns the individual to the
interests of others and to the natural world. This in turn breeds consideration and respect for the interests of others. This leads to a better ‘wisdom’
and a wish to be more active in participation for a better life for self and
others.
The possible implications of virtue ethics and citizenship for effective
democracy and for any shift towards transformational tipping points are
these:
•

184

Schools should be effective learning experiences for civic virtue and
sustainable values. So all schools should live out virtue and sustainability. This is beginning to happen in the energy and climate change
arenas, where responsible behaviour is being learned and rewarded,
and where notions of good citizenship are being introduced to inculcate social and cultural tolerance.

Markets, well-being, and promoting social virtue
•

•

Every active citizen, emboldened by this school experience, should
find, and be offered, opportunities to participate in the design and
success of sustainable consumption and living (Hobson 2003). So the
institutions of effective engagement in sustainable community design
are central to the practicalities of virtue citizenship.
Acting sustainably becomes acting virtuously. It is the sense of fairness
and rightness about sustainable behaviour that adds to its energy.
Thomas and Brown (2011: 18) encapsulate this in a new culture of
learning where the bounds of conventional classroom teaching become
transformed to open networks of fun, play, imagination, creativity, and
open-ended exploration, but set within bounds of well-being and the
safe operating space introduced here and in the introduction. Their
exuberant analysis opens up learning to exchange, to all manner of
networks face to face, forming communities, and across cyberspace. If
we can get the framework right, this new culture of learning will pay
mighty dividends.

There is a case for re-introducing the notion of governments co-evolving
with virtuous citizens to shape a common virtue destiny. Governments
should act to enhance the human aspects of human nature. This raises the
issue of what is a ‘political context’ for being prepared for benign tipping
points:
•

•

•

Build a new trust between politics and citizens so that each sees the
other as a part of the same quest for reliable and fair futures. At present
this is a long shot, given the antipathy to politicians. But as we cover
in Chapter 8.1, ‘islands of hope’ are being formed, which provide the
confidence to others that there are successes out there.
Establish a series of opportunities for civic engagement in the
visualization, design, and content of creating a stepwise progression
to a sustainable future.
Enable citizens to effectively become part of the legislature by coexisting with elected representatives in interesting and novel coalitions.
Again, this is a long shot at present. But as localism in governance
begins to take hold, there is scope for creative incorporation here.

In order to change this model, political systems need to re-engage and
activate citizens. Currently, governments tend either to follow public
opinion through jerking to opinion polls, or to try to lead it through
asserting political manifestos and campaigns. Because of this, political
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Tim O’Riordan
systems and markets feel constrained and directed by public demand.
However, the whole point of positive transformational tipping points is
that public demand can be harnessed in cooperation with government and
business for positive, long-term benefits.
A genuine move towards a participative democracy, where government has a more open debate on complex issues with the public, is one of
the key ways that can shift the emphasis away from consumerism to
responsible citizenship; by using debate to construct a wider consensus,
political space for more radical action can be created. Sadly all the signs are
that in most democracies there is declining public faith in politics and
political institutions, especially at the local level. So creating a more effective and willing participative democracy is, at present, a herculean task.
Of course there are still conflicting interests and competing points of
view in any democracy, and it is healthy that there should be. But it is also
healthy that this should be complemented by a developing sense of the
common good, arising out of discussion, deliberation, and a willingness to
listen to other people’s opinions.
As global political institutions develop, and as citizens are increasingly
brought to focus on long-term and global questions as a result of
impending climate change and a possible collapse of the conventional
economy, so this sense of the common good will need to shift from a purely
national and short-term perspective – as in the notion of ‘social partners’
negotiating about wages and social benefits, for example – to a primary
concern for the future of the planet and its human family.
The more successful the efforts at bringing about these shifts in focus
are – from consumer to citizen, from self-interested to virtuous, from shortterm to long-term, and from national to global – the more likely it is that
political systems will be adapted so that they take action to contribute to
long-term sustainability.

References
Colander, D., Föllmer, H., Haas, A., Goldberg, M., Juselius, K., Kirman, et al. (2008),
The Financial Crisis and the Systematic Failure of Academic Economics, http://
www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/wcontent/uploads/papers/Dahlem_Report_
EconCrisis021809.pdf.
Dobson, A. (2009), ‘Citizens, Citizenship and Governance for Sustainability’, in N.
Adger and A. Jordan (eds), Governance for Sustainability (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press), 125–41.

186

Markets, well-being, and promoting social virtue
Dolphin, T. and Nash, D. (2011), All Change: Will There Be a Revolution in Economic
Thinking in the Next Few Years? (London: Institute of Public Policy Research).
HM Government (2011), The Natural Choice: Securing the Value of Nature (London:
Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs).
Hobson, K. (2003), ‘Competing Discourses for Sustainable Consumption: Does the
Rationalization of Lifestyles Make Sense?’, Environmental Politics 11 (2), 95–120.
Jackson, T. (2011), Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet (London:
Earthscan Publications).
Kumar, P. et al. (2010), The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (London:
Earthscan Publications).
Lyotard, J.- F. (1984), The Postmodern Condition (Manchester: Manchester University
Press).
Ott, K. (2003), ‘Reflections on Discounting: Some Philosophical Remarks’,
International Journal of Sustainable Development 6 (1): 50–58.
Public Administration Committee (2012), Strategic Thinking in Government: Without
National Strategy, Can Viable Government Strategy Emerge? (Twenty Fourth Report)
(London: Stationery Office).
Sandel, M. (2012) What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of the Markets (New York:
Macmillan).
Stern, N. (2007) The Economics of Climate Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press).
SustainAbility GlobeSpan (2011) ‘Keys to Transformative Leadership’ (London:
SustainAbility), http://www.sustainability.com/library/keys-to-transformativeleadership.
Thomas, D. and Brown, J.S. (2011), The New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the
Imagination for a World of Constant Change (self publication, ISBN-10: 1456458884).
UN Environment Programme (2011), Annual Report 2010 (Geneva: UNEP).

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6.2
Some socio-economic thoughts
PAUL EKINS

In Chapter 2.1, Tim Lenton defines a tipping point as a ‘critical threshold
at which the future state of a system can be qualitatively altered by a small
change in forcing’. I would suggest that this is a definition that works best
for natural systems, especially those currently in a broadly stable condition
but which could be shifted from that condition by some ‘forcing’ once the
tipping point has been reached.
Socio-economic systems seem to be less amenable to tipping point
analysis, as I think emerges from much of the sustainability analysis of the
last two decades. All readers will be aware of the characterization of
sustainable development as having three pillars or dimensions: the
environmental, the economic, and the social. My perception is that it has
been relatively straightforward to identify sustainability criteria and
thresholds for the environmental dimension (even though the overall
science remains incomplete), as is shown in Chapter 8.1 in the discussion
of planetary boundaries, and these can be quite well represented by the
tipping point metaphor. For both the economic and social dimensions, the
sustainability criteria are quite well-defined, or at least may be hypothesized, but the threshold values for these criteria are much more difficult,
or even impossible, to establish. This is well illustrated in the ‘social floors’
complement to the planetary boundaries debate.
To take the economic dimension first. In straight economic terms, the
idea of sustainability has some fairly well-established principles, such as:
•
•
•
•
188

Borrow systematically only to invest, not to consume;
Keep money sound: control inflation, public borrowing, trade deficits,
indebtedness;
Establish transparent accounting systems that give realistic asset values;
Maintain or increase stocks of capital.

Some socio-economic thoughts
However, as has become apparent since 2008, every one of these principles
has been spectacularly broken over the last few years in both the financial
sector and the mainstream money economy. The financial crash of that year
could well have been a tipping point. But in fact it is not at all clear that a
qualitative change in the global financial system has in fact been brought
about by the crash. Rather it could be argued that the financial system has
shown astonishing resilience in the face of breathtaking mismanagement,
such that huge bonuses in the financial sector are again the order of the
day. And there is no shortage of speculation that new asset bubbles are in
the making (e.g. in the social networking sector) or have not been fully
exploded (e.g. in the housing market). While it may be still too early to
make a definitive judgement, I currently do not see the global financial
system being fundamentally changed by the social and economic mayhem
it has brought about.
In terms of threshold values it is not at all clear what the tipping point
values of inflation, public borrowing, trade deficits or indebtedness might
be. Clearly a lot depends on size, power and context. For example, any
nation whose currency was not the global reserve currency could not run
anything like the level of trade deficit of the USA for any length of time
without its currency being assigned junk bond status. But the USA persists
with both trade and fiscal deficits that seem to defy financial gravity. In
contrast, the UK government clearly regards its fiscal deficit (in 2010 of
similar per cent of GDP to that of the US) as some kind of potential tipping
point. Yet UK personal indebtedness has been allowed to grow to exceed
UK GDP, without seemingly anyone perceiving tipping points on the
horizon.
Many of the same arguments apply to the social dimension. It is quite
easy to identify issues that would seem to be important for social sustainability. For example, there must be limits to the levels of violence, crime
and unemployment that any country can experience without social
breakdown. But it is not at all clear what those limits are. Nor is it clear
how such conditions are related to broader issues like inequality (if at all).
The Wilkinson and Pickett (2009) correlations between inequality and
various social evils say nothing at all about causation, so that it is not clear
how long societies can go on becoming more unequal before they break
down: perhaps for ever.
In fact, it is not even clear what ‘social breakdown’ is. Did Iraq experience ‘social breakdown’ following the most recent Iraq War. The tens of
thousands of civilians who lost their lives, if they could speak, would
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Paul Ekins
probably say ‘yes’. If they are right, is Iraq still experiencing social
breakdown? If not, what would social breakdown have looked like, or
when did Iraq stop experiencing it? Or was the Iraq War itself a tipping
point that resulted in the qualitative regime change from that of Saddam
Hussein to that of, now, Nouri al-Maliki?
In fact, around the world there are societies experiencing momentous
qualitative change all the time. Certainly the end of the Cold War was one
such change at a global level, but what was the tipping point? Would it be
the election of Gorbachev as Russian president, or his announcement of
perestroika? And how does one characterize the collapse of the Russian
economy that followed its wholesale transfer into the ownership of the
oligarchs? What were the tipping points for the recent and current
upheavals in North Africa and the Middle East?
Then there is the issue of foresight or prediction. Tipping points in the
world of natural science may be identified in principle through models of
the relevant system, although in practice the tipping points of interest relate
to such complex systems that the models cannot identify them with any
degree of precision. This greatly reduces the usefulness of the tipping point
concept and presumably is why we continue to refer to tipping points as
metaphors. In the social sciences, including economics, the relevant ‘laws’
that might lead to tipping points are much less well-established, so that
socio-economic tipping points are less easy to predict even in principle.
Why did the Soviet Union collapse in 1989 and not in 1946? Why was the
velvet revolution successful but not the Prague Spring? There are doubtless
learned answers to these questions that fill the pages of foreign affairs
journals, but they are partial and highly contested. Those who predict these
changes tend to predict them far more often than they actually occur (and
therefore they are sometimes right but much more often wrong), and they
therefore tend not to be believed. E.P. Thompson predicted the end of the
Soviet Union in 1985, a good four years before it actually occurred, but he
was not believed even by many of those in the anti-nuclear movement from
which he came. Those who predicted the financial crash before 2008 were
either marginalized in their companies, which could not afford to get off
the treadmill while it was turning, or sacked.
This leads me to the conclusion that it is quite impossible to do more
than speculate, perhaps through scenarios of how the world’s different
socio-economies, all now highly connected, would respond were any of
the tipping points in the natural world actually to come to pass. The
Japanese people seem to have responded to their tsunami tragedy in a spirit
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Some socio-economic thoughts
of huge social solidarity and desire for constructive renewal. The associated
meltdown at Fukushima has certainly provoked a re-think of nuclear policy
in Germany and some other countries, as well of course as in Japan itself
(see The Economist 2012). But it is doubtful that it will prove a tipping point
for the global nuclear industry, or for energy policy, as a whole. Returning
to natural (or human-amplified) disasters, their absence from the headlines
suggests that the Pakistani people and Queenslanders have reacted in
similar vein to the Japanese to their widespread flooding in 2010–11, as
Emily Boyd considers in Chapter 7.2. How often would this have to happen
before their society broke down or they migrated en masse? And where
would they go? And how would they be received?
To take an extreme case, if with global warming of 5 o C or more (above
pre-industrial levels), the world will only support 1 billion people because
of the ravages of climate change (as a result of a number of tipping points
being reached), as John Schellnhuber suggested at the Copenhagen Climate
Science meeting before the 2009 UNFCCC Conference,1 and if this occurs
by 2100, which some IPCC emissions scenarios indicate is possible,2 what
would the trajectory of 2050 (with 9 billion people) to 2100 (with 1 billion)
look like? Is it possible to say any more than that the trajectory would
almost certainly be very unpleasant, even for the 1 billion people who lived
through it?
The conclusion of these initial thoughts is that in the socio-economic
domain the idea of a tipping point is not even a metaphor, but merely an
intellectual construct indicating the increasing likelihood of disruptive
change. As such it is able to shed very little light on when the relevant forces
will bring about that change or what the outcome of it will be. We are here
deep in the territory of unknown unknowns. But humans have to cope with
and provide for the unknown as best they can.
The first unknown is the current robustness of the global economic
system, both in itself and in the context of economic and environmental
challenges in coming decades, whether they be the result of the shift of
global economic power to China and Asia more broadly, the demise of the
1
Reuters reported the speech by writing ‘Professor John Schellnhuber of the Potsdam Institute
for Climate Impact Research . . . said a warming of five degrees would mean the planet could
support less than 1 billion people’ (see http://in.reuters.com/article/2009/03/12/us-climatestern-idINTRE52B37Q20090312). Schellnhuber’s presentation, showing the world’s carrying
capacity of humans stabilizing at below 1 billion people is at http://climatecongress.ku.dk/
speakers/schellnhuber-plenaryspeaker-12march2009.pdf/.
2
See http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/tssts-5-2.html.

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Paul Ekins
US dollar as the global currency, or continuing instability in the major oilproducing regions.
Whatever the circumstances, we would undoubtedly do well to observe
the basic principles of economic sustainability stated earlier. But the
evidence of the last two hundred years suggests that, even if human
societies are more inclined to observe them after economic crises such as
the world has being going through since 2008, they become increasingly
heedless of them once the crisis seems to have passed, thereby precipitating
the next crisis. One unanswerable question is whether one such crisis might
prove a real tipping point, and actually cause the fundamental structure
and nature of the global economy to change from its current basically
capitalist and market-driven mode of operation, and whether such a
change would be for the better or worse, and for whom.
Specifically in respect of the environment, human societies would be
well advised to try to take care to stay within what has been called the
planet’s ‘safe operating space’ (Rockstrom et al. 2009), as is introduced in
Chapter 8.1. But clearly such advice amounts to little more than recommending the avoidance of tipping points. Its importance lies in the counselling of a far more precautionary approach to human economic and other
activities than human societies have shown heretofore.
It is far from clear what system of governance of human societies would
be likely to develop a more precautionary approach to their use of the
natural world and its resources. Certainly the command economy of the
former Soviet Union was an unmitigated environmental disaster, while the
state-planning of China has also until quite recently paid little attention to
the environmental consequences of its economic expansion. There are
encouraging signs, however, that this is now changing, with China taking
a technological lead in the development and deployment of both solar and
wind technologies, but so far this is proving nothing like enough to halt its
meteoric rise in carbon emissions.
More market-based governance systems could in principle foster radical
environmental conservation through the price mechanism, and there have
been many experiments in this direction, ranging from the European
Union’s Emission Trading System (EU ETS) to the carbon taxes and
environmental tax reforms that have been implemented in a number of so
far mainly European countries. However, such measures have to date
proved impossible to implement at a federal level in the world’s largest
market-driven economy, the USA, and even in Europe the emissions
reductions to which they are leading are not putting the continent on the
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Some socio-economic thoughts
required trajectory of an 80 per cent reduction in emissions (from the 1990
level) that is consistent with a majority chance of limiting global warming
to 2 oC. And the first steps at globalizing the EU ETS, in the absence of
meaningful global action, by including aviation emissions within it, are
being fiercely resisted, despite the currently very low carbon permit price,
by both the market-driven USA and state-led China.
It is clear that a new momentum for collaborative global governance,
whatever the national economic dynamics, is required, if the chances of
avoiding environmental tipping points, or responding to them constructively, are to be increased. But it is not at all clear where such new
momentum is to come from. It was certainly not apparent in the preparations for the Rio+20 Conference in 2012, the danger of which is that rhetoric
about ‘green growth’ will simply translate into the ‘business as usual’ of
economic growth at any environmental cost, which will make the
achievement of such growth evermore difficult as the century progresses.
Can a new global alliance between businesses and civil society push the
policymakers into an adequate response to these global environmental
challenges, so that the institutions that have been established, such as the
UN Conventions on Climate Change and Biodiversity, begin to fulfil their
potential of keeping humanity within the Earth’s ‘safe operating space’?
The answer to this question is clearly ‘yes’ in principle. But principle needs
to be turned into practice very much sooner than is apparent from current
institutional developments.

References
The Economist (2012), Special Report: Nuclear Energy (The Economist, 10 March).
Rockström, J., Steffen, W., Noone, K., Persson, Å., Chapin III, F.S., Lambin, E.F.,
et al. (2009), ‘A Safe Operating Space for Humanity’, Nature, 461: 472–75.
Wilkinson, R. and Pickett, K. (2009), The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost
Always Do Better (London: Penguin).

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6.3
Leadership for sustainability
The search for tipping points
SARA PARKIN

‘The crisis is in implementation’
(Kofi Annan, 2002)
‘The key challenge is implementation’
(Ban Ki-moon, 2012)

Despite the human preference for the ‘quiet life’, our lives are nevertheless
action-packed, full of events (big and small) that may tip trends one way
or another: in love affairs, business dealings, in government. It is the same
in any system, be it environmental, human, or a complex mixture, as in
how we get food, use energy, or manage finance. Those who see the world
from an ecological systems perspective see negative global trends of such
magnitude they portend catastrophe; those who don’t (or don’t want to)
stay absorbed in the hiccoughs and bumps of everyday life.
I don’t think it helps to muddle the metaphors of tipping points in the
natural systems that sustain life on Earth with those in social or even
psychological systems. Because if we hope to find benign ways to mitigate
environmental tipping points, as discussed in the introductory and final
chapters of this volume, then we have to find them in our human systems.
The logic here is that as the creators of the institutions and processes
(including economic ones) which enable people to live together happily
and to thrive, we have the power to change them when they go wrong as
well as benefit when we get them right. As evidence demonstrates things
are going seriously awry, the question becomes how to intervene in order
to steer, if not tip, human behaviour in a direction that has sustainability
as an objective? That is the central question I address in this chapter.
First we need to understand why the concept of sustainability is proving
so hard to put into practice. Although a larger discussion is merited here,
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Leadership for sustainability
an important reason is that too many articulations of sustainability ‘permit’
interpreters (either innocently or wilfully) to maintain clinical levels of
separation between its environmental, social and economic components.
Yet sustainability, like resilience in social and natural systems, is about
relationships, so the task, surely, is to achieve our environmental, social
and economic goals at the same time. It is the ‘at-the-same-timeness’ that
persistently eludes us. Establishing why economic outcomes consistently
trump progress on the other goals will be key to understanding what needs
to change.
We also need to reclaim the original meaning of some important words
that have been kidnapped by economists to refer solely to money. For
example, Tim Jackson (2009) points out that ‘to prosper’ means to succeed,
to do well, to thrive or flourish.1 The Anglo-Saxon root of the word ‘wealth’
has a meaning beyond abundance of resources (not just cash): wela also
means bliss, welfare and well-being. And, although ubiquitously used as
a synonym for finance, ‘capital’ means head (from the Latin caput),
originally of livestock, but meaning a stock of any resource – as in natural,
human or social capital.
This is not just pedantry. Tipping human behaviour, policy, and
economic systems based remorselessly on the logic that has locked us into
the worst-case scenario advertised by the 1972 MIT report Limits to Growth
(Meadows et al. 1972)2 will not disappear if sustainability is unable to
propose a future that is prosperous and wealthy in the fullest meaning of
those words. Nor will any effort to correct for limits emerge unless we stop
behaving as if capitalism is a force akin to gravity and so beyond our
control.

Can benign tipping points in human behaviour
happen in the context of conventional economics?
The answer to this particular question – a necessary element to resolving
the central question about how to manufacture multiple sustainability-

1

Jackson, T. (2009), Prosperity without Growth (London: Earthscan).
Meadows, D.H., Meadows, D.L., Randers, J., and Behrens III, W.W. (1972), The Limits to
Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicaments of Mankind (London: Earth
Island Press). See also Turner, G.M. (2008) ‘A Comparison of The Limits to Growth with 30
Years of Reality’, Global Environmental Change, 18: 397–411 for an update.
2

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Sara Parkin
oriented interventions – lies in the intellectual chaos amongst economic
theories and their policy implications. This chaos was exemplified in
speeches on capitalism given by the three main UK political party leaders
in January 2012. They more than fulfilled the old canard that you always
get more definitions of capitalism than there are definers when, between
them, Messrs Cameron, Clegg, and Miliband came up with nine sorts of
capitalism: three they didn’t like – crony, turbo, and irresponsible; and six
they did – moral, responsible, popular, productive, balanced, and liberal.
No leader considered that the capital behind the ‘isms’ might be anything
but financial. All put growth and employment as an immediate priority,
apparently unaware they were advocating more of the same as a route to
something they wished to be different. Only Miliband mentioned a future
with a new relationship between finance and the ‘real’ economy; but he did
not elaborate much beyond saying it was a longer-term ‘agenda that must
be led’.3
It is paradoxical that ideas about how our economy might be different
from its under-delivering present have ended up in an intellectual
quicksand. It is not as if the observation that our dominant economic model
has limits is a new one: an argument minted by modern subversive treehuggers. As Robert Heilbronner (1986: 143–44) points out, all the great
economists saw that whatever ‘regime of capital’ they promoted, every
single one had limits:
Adam Smith describes the system as reaching a plateau, where the
accumulation of riches will be “complete”, bringing about a deep and lengthy
decline. John Stuart Mill expects the momentary arrival of a “stationary state”
when accumulation will cease and capitalism will become the staging ground
for a kind of associationalist socialism. Marx anticipates a sequence of
worsening crises produced by the internal contradictions of accumulation ...
Keynes thought the future would require a “somewhat comprehensive
socialization of investment”; Schumpeter thought it would evolve into a
managerial socialism.4

3

The speeches can be seen at: Cameron: http://www.politics.co.uk/comment-analysis/2012/
01/19/cameron-s-moral-capitalism-speech-in-full; Clegg: http://www.libdems.org.uk/
latest_news_detail.aspx?title=Nick_Clegg_speech_on_responsible_capitalismandpPK=3659d
490-82ef-412c-80e6-6dd5240659e0; and Miliband: http://www.labour.org.uk/ed-milibandon-responsible-capitalism,2012-01-19.
4
Heilbronner, R.L. (1985), The Nature and Logic of Capitalism (New York and London: W.W.
Norton), 143–44.

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Leadership for sustainability
So why, regardless of our political stripe or theoretical bias, is it still so
difficult to contemplate the probability that our economic system – that
which mediates the relationship between capital and people – might not
have the capacity to continue, in its own terms, never mind from a
sustainability perspective? That it may have reached the limits of its logic?
Indeed, so grave have become the negative consequences of political
inaction in the face of economic gazumping of the environment and people,
that in 2008 the US National Intelligence Council (NIC) elevated the
resources and services of the natural world into the heart of international
geopolitics and diplomacy when it warned the incoming Obama administration to expect ‘scarcity’ to dominate US international relations over the
coming 25 years – scarcity of land, oil, food, water, and air-space for GHG
emissions. From the history of the twentieth century the NIC brought
forward three lessons:
•
•
•

Leaders and ideas matter.
Economic volatility introduces major risks.
Geopolitical rivalries trigger discontinuities more than does technological change.

‘[T]he greatest of these is leadership’ concluded the report: ‘no trend is
immutable, and . . . timely and well-informed intervention can decrease
the likelihood and severity of negative developments and increase the
likelihood of positive ones.’5
Without being naive about how power works – internationally and
nationally – the positive news is that the way out of the mess we are in is
not through thrashing around in rapidly sinking intellectual sands of
different shades of conventional economics, but through the creation of a
new logic for capitalism, one capable of providing firm ground for making
sense of what to do next, and how to do it in a way that does have the
capacity to continue.6 As anyone who tries to implement sustainabilityoriented solutions – intellectually, practically, or politically – knows, there
are legions of ready-to-go ideas, policies, and projects capable of being

5
US National Intelligence Council (2008) Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World (Washington
DC: US Government Printing Office), 5, or online at www@dni.gov/nic.
6
Although ‘isms’ like socialism and communism are conventionally figured as alternatives
to capitalism, they are, in reality, just different views on the relationship between capital and
people. In that they all consider capital’s relationship to be primarily with people as labour
and consumers, ‘sideline’ human well-being in a broader sense, and more or less ignore
nature, I view them all as similarly ‘conventional’.

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Sara Parkin
brought to scale, but which are stuck in the slough of an economy that
simultaneously asks for less resource use and more consumption.

A new logic within which to make sense of what
to do next
So, starting with Ed Miliband’s evocation of a future new relationship
between finance and the ‘real’ economy as a leadership proposition, I
would like to elaborate a new logic for capitalism. This is a logic that helps
us all make sense of how to decide and act in the here and now as well as
for the long term. And then I shall end by illustrating some ways leadership
could work within the new logic to trigger multiple ‘tipping points’ via
policy and other interventions.
Figure 6.2 offers an illustration of the relationships involved in conventional definitions of capitalism. The pale shaded ‘CAPITAL’ box shows
MONEY/
CAPITAL
OUT OF
SYSTEM

FICTITIOUS
MONEY
created out
of money
and debt

CAPITAL
IN-MONEY
cash, gold
credit/debt
shareholders
recycled OutMoney (profit)

owns/
invests

pays

land
raw materials
factories
offices

produces goods
and services

PEOPLE as
LABOUR

PEOPLE as
CONSUMERS

physical
intellectual

buy the output of
capital made
possible through
investment of
money, labour,
the state

PEOPLE as
STATE
subsidizes

governance
institutions
infrastructure
security

PEOPLE as
BENEFICIARIES
OUT-MONEY
surplus value
(profit)

Quality of life
The means to
enjoy a good life,
well lived

taxes
corrects system failures

Figure 6.2 Conventional capitalism: model showing how the conventional
economics sees the relationships between physical (natural) capital, people, and
finance. Success is measured by a continual increase in (a) goods and services
produced and consumed by people, and (b) the volume of financial capital.

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Leadership for sustainability
the economically orthodox interpretation of physical capital. The lines and
the dark shaded boxes show the circulatory and facilitating roles of finance.
The white boxes and thick lines the various relationships people have with
physical capital, showing the central relationships (as far as conventional
notions of capitalism are concerned)7 to be with people as labour and as
consumers. The state is in close support of that central relationship, doing
everything necessary to keep the productive and consuming activities
increasing (i.e. growing). Illogically, the purpose of human economic activity
– human quality of life, welfare, bliss even – is sidelined, with the state
organized to compensate the worst consequences of this marginalization.
So when Messrs Cameron, Clegg, and Miliband promise to secure growth
and jobs, to restore markets and boost business, production, and consumption, they are trying to repair a capitalistic logic that stops short of
serving human benefit (in its fullest sense). Instead they are concentrating
on the shallower relationships capital has with people as only workers and
consumers. Human well-being has been relegated to a sort of ‘spin off’ – nice
to have but not essential to the success of the economy. Nature is nowhere.
It is only when considering a different ‘regime for capital’ that a new
logic capable of tipping capitalism in a more sustainable direction emerges.
In his revealing book, The Mystery of Capital, Hernando de Soto (2000: 61)
points out that ‘capital’ originally meant the store of wealth represented by
a herd of livestock. The endeavour of the stockman/woman is to keep the
stock in good enough condition to maintain a flow of benefits (milk, blood,
offspring, meat, hide), even in hard times.8 The goal is resilience. By
broadening the idea of capital to mean all natural capital, plus human and
social capital, plus that represented in existing infrastructure and buildings,
as Seregeldin and Steer, Ekins, and others have done, it is only a short step
to seeing the flow of different types of benefits possible if all human activity
were concentrated on repairing, maintaining and enhancing those capital
stocks – at the same time9 (Figure 6.3).
7

See note 6.
De Soto, H. (2000), The Mystery of Capital (New York: Basic Books), 41.
9
Serageldin, I. and Steer, A. (eds) (1994), Making Development Sustainable: From Concepts to
Action (Environmentally Sustainable Development (World Bank Occasional Paper Series, No. 2),
epilogue. Ekins, P., Hillman, M., and Hutchinson, R. ([1992] 2000 edition), Wealth Beyond
Measure: An Atlas of New Economics (London: Gaia Books). See also Ekins, P. (2000), Economic
Growth and Environmental Sustainability: The Prospects for Green Growth (London and New York:
Routledge). There is a hinterland of innovative thinking about the economy that should be
acknowledged, including Daly, H.E. and Cobb, J. (1990), For the Common Good: Redirecting the
Economy Towards Community, the Environment and a Sustainable Future (London: Greenprint);
Schumacher, E.F. (1973), Small is Beautiful (London: Abacus, 1975 edition).
8

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Sara Parkin

NATURAL
CAPITAL
– resources
– waste absorption
– ecosystem stability
HUMAN CAPITAL
– knowledge/skills
– motivation
– health
– happiness

PEOPLE as
BENEFICIARIES
Able to live a good life
now and in the future

flows of benefits from well-maintained stocks of capital

SOCIAL CAPITAL
– family/community
– governance
– institutions, security
– economic system

human economic and other activity maintains stocks of capital

MANUFACTURED
CAPITAL
– infrastructure
– buildings
– tools/machines

facilitates

values accurately

Some writers
considering human
functional needs to live
a good life

Max-Neef (1991)
Being
Having
Doing
Interacting
Jackson (2006)
Spiritual
Reproductive
Physiological
Social
Psychological

FINANCIAL
CAPITAL
– cash
– investment
– credit

Figure 6.3 Sustainable capitalism: model for a sustainable regime for capital,
showing how the relationship between physical (natural) capital, people, and
finance would work. Success is measured by a continual increase in the quality of
human and social capital and of physical capital (natural and manufactured).
Finance facilitates rather than drives this model.
References: Manfred Max-Neef (1991) Human Scale Development (London and New York: Apex
Press) pdf http://www.max-neef.cl/download/Max-neef_Human_Scale_development.pdf;
Tim Jackson (2006) ‘Consuming Paradise? Towards a Socio-Cultural Psychology of
Sustainable Consumption’, in Jackson, T. (ed.) Earthscan Reader in Sustainable Consumption
(London: Earthscan).

Crucially, this new regime for capital restores the intimacy between
capital and human well-being. As Figure 6.3 illustrates, the economy is no
long conceptualized as some elemental force that intrudes between capital
and human well-being, but as a feature of social capital which, like
democracy, can add directly to the flow of benefit to people and be subject
to continually improving processes. In the diagram, people as beneficiaries
of a happy relationship with capital are seen as a ‘pull out’ of human and
social capital (as is finance). The circle is thus virtuous and a new internally
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Leadership for sustainability
coherent logic is created in which the economic process is treated as social
capital. Removed are the intellectual and practical barriers to seeing the
purpose of life to be human well-being, flourishing, bliss, prosperity, wealth,
health, and happiness. Also banished are the impediments to comprehending that achieving those outcomes requires effort to be directed at
building all the stocks of capitals to a good enough condition so they provide
resilience in hard times and for the longest of times. The process may
involve ownership, commerce, and markets, and making and exchanging
stuff and services in different ways in different places, but not always and
never as a moral or a quasi-scientific principle or theory, nor as the motor of
the whole system, nor for ideological reasons. Finance flourishes in a
facilitating role, instead of floundering in a ‘real’ capital-usurping role.

Change is in the system: leadership for
sustainability
Nicholas Stern (2006) has said that climate change is the greatest market
failure the world has seen.10 He is wrong. As the US NIC (2008) report
points out, the greatest failure is a leadership failure. Here I consider what
leadership – intellectual and practical – could be doing to steer, hustle, tip
human behaviour in a different direction, so that we mitigate the
anticipated worst and set course for a sustainable future. Some ideas that
‘make sense’ from the perspective of the proposed new logic for capitalism
are discussed here.

Leadership for sustainability means being able to work
against the perverse logic of conventional capitalism and
work within a new – internally coherent and timeless –
logic for achieving sustainability
Gandhi urged people to be part of the change they wished to see in the
world. Others have made the same point differently. For example, the late
Vaclav Havel promoted ‘living in truth’ as the only way to live even under
a communist regime, and American philosopher Susan Neiman (2009)
argues that if the world is not what it should be, it is up to us to open our
10

Stern, N. (2006), The Economics of Climate Change (London: HMSO).

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Sara Parkin
eyes and close the gap between what is, and what ought to be. If we
want moral clarity, we have to put it there.11 Waiting for a new regime for
capital to be installed is not an option; it will only happen if we act as if
it were.
Thinking about how the future should be, in the shape of a flow of
benefits from healthy stocks of all the capitals (see Figure 6.4) translates
into the taking of decisions and subsequently acting in ways that contribute
simultaneously to restoring or building healthy stocks of all capitals. Figure
6.4 forms a suitable framework for designing policies and projects, as well
as analysing problems. This figure shows the headline stocks and related
flow of benefits, and reveals interrelationships that have benefit-doubling
potential. For example, squeezing waste out of the system makes the
economic process more efficient, reduces the need for resource mobilization
and concomitant pollution, improves human health, and builds local
economies. More and better social organization and human interactions
will lead to better governance, more resilient communities and local
environments, improved mental health.12
There are implications of working for and within this new logic for
scientific research and university teaching. While we need to track the
potential ecological consequences of human impact on the environment,
we run the risk of becoming the only species to have minutely monitored
its own extinction. Far more resources need to be shifted into building
‘sustainability literate’ human capital. As Eugen Rosenstock-Heussy
(1888–1973) said: ‘the goal of education is to inform the citizen. And the
citizen is a person who, if need be, can re-found his [sic] civilization.’ The
scale of change implied by sustainability is evidence that a re-founding
moment for the human enterprise is overdue.
There are very many theories and models for organizational and other
social change. Strip them back to their basics and they all involve three key
steps:
(a) Understanding the need for certain (new) behaviours;
(b) Having the knowledge and skills to behave differently;

11

Neiman, S. (2009), Moral Clarity (London: Bodley Head).
Examples from Forum for the Future, see project with Technology Strategy Board for
example: http://www.forumforthefuture.org/blog/getting-sustainable-innovation-heartbusiness, and Parkin, S. (2010), The Positive Deviant: Sustainability Leadership in a Perverse World
(London: Earthscan).
12

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Leadership for sustainability

Stock of capital
(resource)

Natural
Renewable and non-renewable resources
Services: climate, nitrogen, waste, other
cycles

Human
Health, knowledge, skills, motivation,
spiritual ease

Social
Organizations and associations for living
together: families, communities,
government, unions, voluntary groups

Flow of benefits
(if stock in good condition)
Food, energy, clean air and water, stable climate,
beauty, inspiration, sustainable provision of
resources, waste recycling

Adept at relationships and social participation,
satisfying work, lifelong learning habits, personal
creativity, recreation, healthy lifestyles
Trusted, accessible systems of justice,
governance, economy, shared positive values,
sense of common purpose, institutions promoting
stewardship of natural and human capital

Manufactured

All infrastructure, technologies, and processes
make minimal use of natural resources, maximum
All human fabricated ‘infrastructure’
already in existence: roads, rail, machines, use of human innovation and skills
buildings where people live and work, etc.

Financial
Credit/debt, shares, banknotes, coins

Accurately represents value of natural, human,
social, and manufactured capital. Facilitates the
restoration, maintenance, and enhancement of
those stocks

Figure 6.4 Capital stocks and benefit flows

(c) Having confidence that right behaviour is positively recognized and
(sometimes at least) rewarded.13
As regards to sustainability there is arguably progress on (a), but few would
contest that we are next to nowhere on achieving (b), never mind (c).
In the light of the government inaction noted by the US National
Intelligence Council, the leadership role of universities gains consequence on a geopolitical level. This is an academic publication about
tipping points, so readers are invited to imagine the almighty shove to
social change that could come from a concerted effort by higher education.
Given the magnitude of the challenge – and one that lies not in the
environment, but with people – where else is the intellectual leadership
to come from that will give others confidence to join in?
13

See Kotter, J. (1996), Leading Change (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press), for
just one example, and O’Toole, J. (1995), Leading Change: The Argument for Values-Based
Leadership (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass), for another. O’Toole also looks at why people prefer
things to remain more or less the same.

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Sara Parkin
It should be borne in mind that there is nothing more difficult to handle, more
doubtful of success, and more dangerous to carry through, than initiating
change.
(Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, ch. 6)

Leadership for sustainability understands this is a social
project – about how people behave – so is well versed in the
psychological and sociological insights about how change
happens – or not
The argument for putting the benefit of people as the purpose of sustainability is not to downgrade the primordial fact that if we do not have a
life-supporting environment then we are dead. The point is that proclaiming
this in various ways for decades has not encouraged any change in human
behaviour sufficient to slow any major negative environmental trend, let
alone tip it in the direction of sustainability. On the contrary, the arguments
for protecting the environment are being recast as a case for putting people
second, and increasingly used to support conventional economic theories
and practices. Protagonists of this case range from climate naysayers to those
who claim the environment movement is dead. Both are arguing within the
logic of conventional economics, and neither gets practical about solutions
that will benefit people and the environment together.14 A new strategy is
called for. One that puts human welfare (in the fullest sense) and an explicit
compassion for people at its heart but which also makes it illogical for the
environment to do anything but benefit too.
Compassion can start with the terrible mess that everyone – from
scientists to campaigners to government to business – makes of communications around sustainability. Psychologists recognize the cognitive
dissonance (and loss of personal agency) that arises from conflicting
messages, such as simultaneous exhortations to consume more stuff for
economic reasons, but to consume less for environmental ones. Clumsy
campaigns also mix up opposing motivating value sets. For example, to
say energy efficiency saves money taps into self-interest but also selfish14

For a denier, see Lawson, N. (2008), An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming
(London: Duckworth Overlook). For environmentalists at war with one another, see the
seminal 2004 article by Shellenberger, M. and Norhaus, E. (2011), The Death of Environmentalism,
along with their 2011 follow-up at their website http://thebreakthrough.org/ (accessed
25 February 2012).

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Leadership for sustainability
ness, while to say it is good for everyone taps into desires to belong, to
share, and to be seen as caring.
Psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (1969) championed a cycle of grieving
that, if amended, offers a way to identify different emotional and consequent
practical responses to the huge implications of the sort of change we need
to make to our lifestyles and the systems with which we live. For example,
she notes that the most common response to hearing one has a terminal
disease is denial. The next emotion on the way to acceptance is usually fear.
Consider these two in relation to the response of governments to the idea
we should transfer the way we secure the services of energy (heat, power,
and light) from one that is centralized around fossil fuels to a system that is
localized, hyper-efficient, and based on renewable sources. Despite the
evidence of a dangerously changing climate there are deniers still. But many
governments accept the evidence and reside uncomfortably at the fear stage.
For example, the tax take from the big energy companies is huge, so big that
subsidies are considered worthwhile. Can similar sums flow from
decentralized systems? If so, how could they be collected? If not, where will
they come from? Power and money mobilize strong emotions and
behaviours, but fear of loss of control affects governments no less than a
person contemplating their own mortality or that of a loved one.15
For years, the UK department responsible for sustainability, the
Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), was
bamboozled by the gap between people’s positive attitude to reducing their
known environmental impacts and what they actually did (comparatively
little). The belief–attitude–behaviour linear relationship was exemplified
by Harry Triandis in 1977, with more recent writers exploring the
intention/action gap and expanding on ideas about how to close it. For
example, Elizabeth Shove (2003) underlines the importance of habits. The
greater the habitual frequency of past behaviour (in, say, using a car or
living in uniformly warm houses) the more difficult it is to change. Others
point out that without clear ‘facilitating conditions’, however great the
intention to change, adopting different behavioural practices is logistically
– and maybe psychologically – impossible.
The relevant facilitating conditions are:
•

Material (infrastructure);

15

Kübler-Ross, E. (1969), On Death and Dying (New York: Scribner). For adaptation of the cycle
for use in understanding human behaviour in relation to news about major environmental
problems, see Parkin (2010: 216) (full reference note 25).

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Sara Parkin
•
•

Meaning (symbolism);
Competencies (knowledge and skills).

The classic illustration is the making of a cup of tea. Material inputs include
kettles, teapots, teabags, water and means of heating it, with a certain
amount of pre-knowledge and skill required to create a satisfactory
beverage. But most important is the pleasurable connotations around
making and drinking a cup of tea – refreshment, break from work,
convivial company – the things that enter people’s minds when it is
proposed. The Japanese have elevated the symbolism of tea drinking to
ceremonial and artistic levels.16 Apply these three facilitating conditions to
behaviours associated with eating local or organic food, using public
transport instead of a car, extreme energy efficiency, and it can be seen that
the material infrastructure is not there for many people, nor is a level of
knowledge and skills that make it easy to operate, even if it were. Consider
the debates between the environmental impacts of local compared with
long-distance food, whether wind-farms are a good idea or not. Such
debates are continually confused by wilfully spread misinformation,
government equivocation, and even disagreements between protagonists.
Is it any wonder that it is hard to find a meaning embodying pleasure,
belonging, or agency behind pro-environmental behaviour?
A comforting antidote is to be found in the growth, despite recessive
economic times, of the market for Fairtrade products, though whether they
are in addition to, or substituting for, non-fair-traded products, is not
entirely clear. Nevertheless, the fact that big retailers are stocking,
sometimes exclusively, Fairtrade staples like sugar, coffee, chocolate, and
bananas, is evidence of change in the ‘material infrastructure’ which makes
pro-sustainability consumption possible for more people.17 Perhaps too it
is evidence that the connections Fairtrade makes between consumers in
countries like the UK and the benefits to people growing the products, as
well as the environmental benefits, give a deeper meaning to the transaction.
Organic cheerleaders, like the UK Soil Association, do make the link

16
Triados, H.C. (1977), Interpersonal Behaviour (Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole); see also
Hargreaves, T. (2008), ‘Making Pro-Environmental Behaviour Work: An Ethnographical Case
Study of Practice, Process and Power in the Workplace’ (Ph.D. thesis, Norwich: University of
East Anglia); and Shove, E. (2003), Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: The Organisation of
Normality (Oxford: Berg), and their bibliographies.
17
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/feb/28/fairtrade-sales-rise-despite-recession
(accessed 27 February 2012).

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Leadership for sustainability
between the benefits to the environment and health of consumers. But the
drop in the UK’s organic food market share over the same period suggests
that, in a world of enforced cost cutting, the benefit to the environment and
personal health may not inspire the same depth of meaning as is associated
with fairness to poor people through the purchase of Fairtrade products.18
Two related observations on the manner in which leadership can act to
multiply the chances of benign behavioural tipping points derive from
what Samuel Scheffler (2001) calls the ‘infrastructure of responsibility’, and
the need for a more sophisticated approach to localism. Scheffler is neither
alone nor recent in discussing how to be a moral agent when structures
around you are amoral or immoral. At the most abstract level, he explores
‘the capacity of liberal thought, and of the moral traditions on which it
draws, to accommodate a variety of challenges posed by the changing
circumstances of the modern world’.19
For ease of understanding the applicability of his arguments, I propose
the unlikely metaphor of a dry stone wall – that is, a wall constructed
without mortar and held together through careful positioning of the stones
in relationship, one to another. It is the relationships between the stones
that create the integrity of the wall – just like the relationships which make
up a social system. As an individual member of society, understanding
who we are is tightly caught up in the relationships we have with other
people, other organizations, and with the rules and processes that govern
how we behave, one to another. All our encounters – in shops, schools, golf
clubs, concert venues, nightclubs, courtrooms, banks; with government
local and national, news outlets, advertising – are structured to reinforce
the message that our responsibility is to conventional capitalism as the
mainstream, the normal, somewhere to which we unquestioningly belong.
There are examples of different types of relationships we could have
(ethical banking, green energy firms, rambling clubs, Fairtrade, green
theatres, social enterprises, time banks, one-to-one loans, ethical investment, and so forth), but they are not brought together and promoted in a
way that inspires confidence that a wall – a whole society – built of them
would be strong enough to become the ‘new normal’, a place where we
very much want to belong.
18
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/feb/28/fairtrade-sales-rise-despite-recession
(accessed 1 March 2012).
19
Scheffler, S. (2001), Boundaries and Allegiances: Problems of Justice and Responsibility in Liberal
Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press). See also Sandal, M. (2009), Justice: What’s the Right
Thing to Do (London: Allen Lane).

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Sara Parkin

Figure 6.5 The infrastructure of responsibility: how individuals relate, one to
another, to create a strong society.

My final point here is the need for a more sophisticated approach to
localism. Environmentalists and social entrepreneurs alike laud the focus
on local (usually small) initiatives as the bedrock for creating global change.
They are right as far as they go, but a broader concept of the role of localism
is needed, as is a deeper analysis of how relationships between the local
and the global will have to work if resilience anywhere is to succeed. Emily
Boyd takes this further in Chapter 7.2.
Take the example of the ‘local to local’ relationships that make Fairtrade
popular with both the rich and the poor. The UK is promoting Local
Enterprise Partnerships to promote local economic development. If local
economic resilience is the goal, just what are the relevant proportions for
locally traded goods and services, and those traded in the wider UK, or in
Europe, or globally? Does 60:20:10:10 feel right, or would it be different for
different products and different places? Who decides? For example, what
are the ethics of Ghana becoming economically dependent on exports of
pineapples to Europe, even if they are grown under Fairtrade rules? Should
trade – at close and long distance – be governed by rules that support
increased diversification as well as other social and environmental
outcomes at both ends?20
20

There is no indication of this sort of thinking in the UN briefing document on Trade and

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Leadership for sustainability
Legally, local governments are considered potentially to be increasingly
important actors in the emerging global order, not least because they are
seen as ‘prime vehicles for the dissemination of global capital, goods, work
force, and images’, and where policy and political ideas are put into
practice.21 Former UN Ambassador Jeremy Greenstock considers disillusionment with the capacity of the nation state’s ability to deal with the
major issues of our times (‘culture, identity and politics are going local’),
and points out that it is in local communities that the global challenges of
terrorism, crime, or climate change will be addressed effectively.22 For most
people their locality is the place with which they identify most easily. Boil
down the now extensive literature of what it is that makes people happy
and/or satisfied with their lives and three things stand out: feeling good
about oneself; having a knot of enjoyable relationships with other people;
and feeling good about the place we live.23
Leadership aimed at stimulating the sort of social changes that will avoid
the negative geopolitical consequences feared by the US NIC will need to
take a less laissez-faire approach to localism, and how people feel about
where they live, if global security (in its broadest sense) is to be constructed
on an aggregate of resilient localities – which is the only sustainable option.

Leadership for sustainability means being able to use a
broad canvas to diagnose and tackle the ‘wicked’ problems
of unsustainability, and use measures of progress that
anticipate (and therefore encourage) scale change
Keith Grint is not alone in pointing out that the job for twenty-first-century
leadership is to prevent ‘wicked problems’ turning into critical ones. ‘Tame’

the Green Economy published in the run-up to the 2012 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, for
example. See http://www.uncsd2012.org/rio20/index.php?page=viewandtype=400and
nr=13andmenu=45.
21
Blank, Y. (2006), ‘Localism in the New Global Legal Order’, Harvard International Law Journal,
37 (1): 264–81.
22
Greenstock, J. (2008), ‘Nations Have to Act Locally in a Globalised World’, Financial Times,
16 May.
23
For examples only of the extensive ‘happiness literature’ see Layard, R. (2005), Happiness:
Lessons from a New Science (London: Penguin); Goleman, D. (2007), Social Intelligence: The New
Science of Social Relationships (London: Arrow Books); Argyle, M. (second edition 2001), The
Psychology of Happiness (Hove, East Sussex: Routledge).

209

Sara Parkin
problems are solvable; leaders will probably have met them before.
‘Critical’ problems are so bad that only a command and adjust strategy will
do. ‘Wicked’ problems are complex, involve a high degree of uncertainty
and don’t appear to have clear solutions that avoid generating a new set
of problems.24
Interventions to tip human behaviour towards sustainability fall largely
into the ‘wicked’ category. There are ways, not of taming the wickedness
(as many risk strategies try to do) but of increasing the chances that it does
not degrade to a criticality. I offer some examples and further references
elsewhere (Parkin 2010) though one pathway here is particularly relevant
to thinking about tipping points in human behaviour.25 That is to consider
every problem in the broadest possible context. The larger canvas does not
necessarily increase the complexity of the problem. On the contrary it
can suggest other, perhaps more tangential but nevertheless effective,
solutions. For example, the Co-Directors of Princeton University’s Carbon
Mitigation Institute offer a series of initiatives designed to stabilize
emissions of CO2 by 2060.26 Only one is concerned with growing natural
capital, the rest concern energy efficiency or technological shifts and
innovations. None refers to the contribution of human or social capital
building, despite the fact that without the participation of people any
energy-focused solutions will be impossible to implement. To use one
rarely mentioned contribution to mitigating any environmental impact as
an example: providing contraceptives for women who say they want them
but can’t get them. Rich and poor countries alike report 40 per cent of
pregnancies to be unplanned. Just meeting that need, without coercion,
would mean that global population by 2060 could be 8 billion instead of
the projected 10 billion. It would be a very inexpensive intervention to
lower demand for the services of energy that also delivers significant
24

Grint, K. (2000), The Arts of Leadership (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
See Parkin, Sara (2010), The Positive Deviant (London: Earthscan), for examples of tools for
thinking and deciding from a full sustainability perspective, including: Forum for the Future’s
Five Capitals decision-making; an expansion of the Impact on Nature = Population x Affluence
x Technology (IPAT) to include human and social capital (based on Ekins, P. and Jacobs, M.
(1995), ‘Environmental Sustainability and the Growth of GDP: Conditions of Compatibility’,
in Bhaskar, V. and Glyn, A. (eds), The North, the South and the Environment (London: Earthscan);
an adaptation of Pacala and Socolow ‘wedges’ (based on Pacala, S. and Socolow, R. (2004),
‘Stabilization Wedges: Solving the Climate Problem for the Next 50 Years with Current
Technologies’, Science, 305: 968–72.
26
Carbon Mitigation Institute, Princeton University, http://cmi.princeton.edu/about/
(accessed 27 February 2012).
25

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Leadership for sustainability
benefits to the health and economic status of women and to the life chances
of the children they do have.27
Last, but by no means least, the importance of being ready to take
interventions to scale, either in size or through multiplication, is rarely seen
in organizational or government planning. Preparations for disaster and
recovery are there, but not preparations for quick and substantial success.
And it is in this direction that social tipping points must go if environmental disaster is to be averted.
The tendency has been either to develop large complex methodologies
for capturing data about how an organization is performing vis-à-vis its
sustainability impacts, or to focus on just one element – such as CO2
emissions.28 Neither, however, is appropriate to systematic promotion of
or response to a rapid shift to pro-sustainability behaviour – that is, speedy
building of all capitals, including a full exploitation of positive interconnections between them.
Bearing in mind Einstein’s mantra, ‘not everything that can be counted,
counts, and not everything that counts can be counted’, three areas are
identified where data (qualitative as well as quantitative) should be
collected with an eye to stimulating improvement at scale while also
tracking it:
1.
2.
3.

Contribution to sustainability – What has been done to build stocks of
capital (all of them)?
Ubiquity – How widespread is pro-sustainability practice (i.e. building
stocks of capital) in the organization, government, etc.?
Influence – How significant has been the effort (of organization,
individual) to influence change in others?

Using these three areas of organizational activity for evaluating progress
also offers a good structure for telling a story from which others might
learn. Unlike many existing evaluation models, they remain relevant in
conditions where progress to sustainability is rapid and/or bumpy. Using
the new interconnected logic for capitalism and measuring progress in an

27

http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/unpp/p2k0data.asp (accessed 27 February 2012).
Global Reporting Initiative, https://www.globalreporting.org/Pages/default.aspx, and
Carbon Disclosure Project, https://www.cdproject.net/en-US/Pages/HomePage.aspx. This
is not to criticize such initiatives, which are steps in the right direction, but to question
whether, given the speed and scale of change implied by negative environmental trends, they
are sufficient.
28

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Sara Parkin
integrated manner sets reliable parameters within which leadership can
allow thousands of initiatives and innovations to flourish – while being
fairly confident that most of them will be headed in the right direction.
Inevitably, this section is only able to cover a few headline ideas about
different models for and approaches to changing human behaviour. The
intention is to demonstrate that seeking positive tipping points in human
behaviour is a frontline strategy for avoiding negative environmental ones,
and to signal areas where more research or trials can hasten change.

Conclusion
This chapter started as a short address to the Kavli seminar which opened
by challenging the metaphor of tipping points, arguing (along with Joe
Smith and Paul Brown in Part 7) that using fear of negative consequences
from environmental degradation has clearly failed to change human
behaviour so far. At the same time I promoted psychological and sociological insights into why people decide and act in certain ways, and
proposed new strategies for putting human well-being as the lead
motivation for pro-sustainability behaviour, along with a range of tools
and techniques that leadership could deploy.
I have elaborated on the original talk here, but further argue that none
of this will make a difference on the scale needed as long as environmentalist and sustainability scientists and activists argue and operate within
the illogicalities of conventional notions of capitalism. Instead, by radically
reinterpreting the relationship between capital and people, a new logic
emerges that is not only internally coherent but also potentially timeless.
One that means we all can use this new logic to decide and act straightaway, and so help create the way we want the world to be by acting as if
it was so.
At our peril we underestimate the challenges inherent in galvanizing
the magnitude and speed of change needed to avert environmental and
human catastrophe(s). This places a huge onus on the current guardians of
all the necessary intellectual and evidential elements – universities. How
will they alter their own practice in order to tackle, as a priority, this
‘wickedest’ of problems – how to re-found human civilization in a way that
is sustainable into the longest of terms? This is a mission of sustainability
science that is explored in Part 8.

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Commentary 6.4
Leadership by business for coping with
transformational tipping thresholds
AMANDA LONG

We know that, in order to survive and thrive, we will all have to live and
work in ways that are very different from those we have experienced in
the past. As Sara Parkin introduced in Chapter 6.3, this presents a real
leadership opportunity for transformational approaches to sustainable
business.
Marcel Proust said: ‘The real magic of discovery lies not in seeing new
landscapes, but in having new eyes.’ In providing leadership for coping
with transformational tipping thresholds, I believe that it is essential to look
with new eyes at our business models and our approaches to our customers, and to discover how can we catalyse and drive active partnerships
for social good.
Business needs to embrace the reality of sustainable business. That it is
not just an extension of corporate responsibility. It is about fundamental
understanding of the interconnectedness of our world and the central
role all business should play. Business needs to understand where and
how it can make a positive difference and drive that change. Clarity
and consensus in the boardroom are keys to success in developing a
sustainable business.
Business needs to be open to innovative, creative, cross-societal forms
of collaboration that engage public–private–civil connections in new ways
and develop regulatory frameworks and incentives to support them.
Indeed it is business which is taking the lead in seeking more reliable and
appropriate regulations from governments (as commented by Keith Clarke
(6.5)). This is a trend which will benefit from cooperation with the dynamic
nature of third-sector organizations. So I see more formative alliance

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Amanda Long
between these two surprisingly compatible sectors so long as their shared
beliefs are synchronized.
In today’s world, broadly speaking, our related shared beliefs are:
•

•
•

•
•

•

The third sector are stewards of the community and people in need,
but have to be enabled to fulfil their roles in today’s difficult economic
circumstances.
The private sector’s prime drive is making short-term money, at least
for their shareholders, but its linked drive is for reliable continuity.
The Big Society is an idea associated with David Cameron, UK Prime
Minister and local volunteering, but has yet to catch on with
community organizations because government has yet to offer the
appropriate supporting regulations, cooperative funding, and effective
communications.
The main way that companies can help charities is by giving cash.
Philanthropy is primarily about selfless giving to charity, though the
benefits of doing so are also reputational and may be economically
advantageous to the donor.
Philanthropy helps fund charities who create interventions to support
people in need.

We need to replace our old beliefs with new beliefs:
•
•

•
•
•
•

•
•

214

We are all stewards of the future, so we cannot avoid a sense of virtue
and responsibility as outlined in Chapter 6.1.
Our shared focus should be on real social betterment and especially on
ensuring that the circumstances for succeeding generations are not
knowingly jeopardized.
The only way to achieve that is through collaborative action, not just
one-way giving.
Sustainable business needs to be placed in a long-term context and is
about nurturing society in a resilient nature.
Our shared prime objective is to do whatever we can to help each of
us help ourselves and help others.
The public, private, and civil sectors should be working together to
help companies achieve long-term success across the board for local
communities and the economy.
This is an age of continuous transformation; staying the same is not an
option.
Transformation requires game-changing thinking, so where we are
currently at is not where we can continue to be.

Leadership by business
New models for collaborative engagement will centre on co-ownership,
new products and services, transformational philanthropy, community
outreach, collaborative social marketing campaigns, and social action.
Figure 6.6 sets out this transformational vision.
New approaches must also recognize the power of the market and how
the necessary collaboration between business and customer behavioural
change will play an important role in delivering positive outcomes for the
future of the planet. We need to create new business norms – such as
engaging social marketing or customer behavioural-change programmes
in place of more traditional approaches to marketing and cause-related
marketing. This will require collaborative engagement across business and
with civil organizations, schools, and colleges, and working charitably with
community organizations.

Our
sustainable
world

New
models

Charities

Government

Companies

Each of us

Others

Figure 6.6 A new model for collaborative engagement
Source: Long and Drummond, Corporate Culture

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Amanda Long

Setting the tone
Some businesses are already engaging – coming out of the economic crisis
and reinventing the way they think. Unilever’s work (see Thomas Lingard
(6.8)) on developing their Sustainable Living Programme and pioneering
‘brand imprinting’ sets the tone for a new approach from multinationals –
still recognizing the commercial imperative but bringing the moral
imperative into play too.
Post ‘peak oil’, post the 2008 economic crash, there is no uncertainty about
the fact that the age of abundance is behind us. Wherever we look, tougher
climate change regulation, stricter policies on forestry, and growing water
shortages constitute a situation where food companies, for example, face a
reduction in earnings – so even if a company’s moral compass doesn’t
trigger action, economic interest highlights the necessity to act.

Defining a preferred future
The big question for business in this new world is – What is our preferred
future operating environment and what do we need to do to bring it to life?
I worked with Anglian Water to create the ambitious and holistic ‘Love
Every Drop’ sustainable business programme. Its approach is designed to
help to open eyes to the possibilities of a new definition of responsibility
for business, where the real value of water as a gift from nature is recognized and water is no longer seen as a disposable commodity. Anglian
Water wants to put water at the heart of a whole new way of living. This
is not just about the company becoming sustainable, it is about the
interconnectedness of the future of the business and the future of the region
– Anglian Water is championing a sustainable region and encouraging
sustainable living. To achieve this will demand a whole new engagement
with customers. The company is investing in ground-breaking behaviourchange programmes which include some of the plethora of necessary
interventions to drive sustained behaviour change.
Here is where collaboration with third-sector charities and social
enterprises comes in, as one way forward is to develop sustainable water
ambassadors who can work with households and neighbourhoods on
new ways of conserving piped water and better ways of deploying the rain
that falls on roofs and hard surfaces. Anglian Water is testing out the
provision of home water butts to be linked to overall care for in-home water
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Leadership by business
use, with community-based water ambassadors trained through funding
partnerships.
Many of us do not get the opportunity to consider the true value of water
as an intrinsic element of ecosystems functioning. We only realize how
much we rely on it when our supply is disrupted in some way. Yet water
is at the heart of everything we do. Every cup of coffee in the morning;
shower after the gym; or clean shirt before a day’s work. Water is such an
inspiring, engaging product – ideal for the task at hand – to reach out across
society and start to engage people to think differently about the resources
we all consume.

Going large
There is a pressing need to push the development of new sustainable
business models right up the agenda across the private sector. A decade ago,
Business in The Community (BiTC) established ‘Workplace, Marketplace,
Community and Environment’ as core to its Corporate Responsibility Index.
Along with other organizations promoting sustainability in responsible
business, this played an important role in engaging business to drive the
agenda forward. To push for progress now, new approaches are needed to
shape and facilitate new economic sustainable growth. It is important that
‘corporate responsibility’ reporting doesn’t become a ‘tick box’ activity and
in doing so act as a drag-anchor on innovation.
Embracing long-term timeframes and context greatly helps to improve
business resilience and identify new business opportunities. Leadership by
business in coping with transformational tipping thresholds can come
when businesses engage in ‘Big Picture’ thinking. By taking the approach
of highlighting business opportunities and new business models,
businesses can consider the opportunities and issues they face and how
they might overcome them.
We are now seeing a growing body of work which outlines visions and
roadmaps out to 2050 (for example, the World Business Council for
Sustainable Development Vision 2050). At its Responsible Business
Convention in 2011, BiTC rolled out the first phase of its ‘2050 Vision for a
Sustainable Future Project’. Through the provision of a series of visioning
tools and cross-business collaboration, BiTC are seeking to stimulate
businesses to develop shared positive visions of 2050 and a routemap to
get there.
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Amanda Long

Going beyond ‘shared value’
If we are going to accelerate progress and encourage leadership in business
on the sustainability agenda there is a real need to open up the debate
around going beyond ‘shared value’. The concept of ‘shared value’, as set
out by Porter and Kramer (2011), is a strong starting point for building the
business case for sustainability: that long-term sustainability relates to
business creating economic value in a way that also adds value for society
by addressing its needs and challenges. The list of high or worthwhile
achievers in this area is growing annually, which is good news. However,
context is critical in this discussion. As austerity bites even deeper into
society and resources become scarcer, the reality of the need to change
fundamentally our approach to business in this age of transformation is
ever more urgent. The focus for business needs increasingly to be on how
business can help create more sustainable communities by making it easy
for customers to live more sustainable lives, thereby helping to build
stronger, more sustainable markets, with no separation between what is
termed as ‘business value’ and ‘social value’.
When Unilever CEO Paul Polman held the one-year review for its
Sustainable Living Plan in April 2012, he talked of going beyond ‘shared
value’ and responding more directly to the needs of a frugal resourcechallenged society first. Some of the big players now understand that a real
business model shift is required, although delivering on this in mainstream
business is still ‘work in progress’. GlaxoSmithKline, Centrica, General
Electric, Kingfisher, and a handful of others, are all part of the picture of
progress.
Sustainability must increasingly mean businesses focusing on what they
can do to help customers live more sustainably and thereby contribute to
creating stronger markets – a clear sense of long-term sustainable business
success. Driving the creation of sustainable communities and sustainable
living is core to creating sustainable markets within which to prosper.
Businesses can no longer operate outside the context of a society with
limited resources and hope for long-term sustainability. But when they
work within that society, they can take advantage of the opportunities to
become the life support of nations for the long term: for example, by
moving from simply supplying food to helping people eat better and
reduce waste.
There is a tangible sense of change within the private sector these days,
as John Elkington (6.6) reinforces. However business needs to be much
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Leadership by business
more proactive in stepping up to the challenges humankind faces with
bold, mainstream ‘at scale’ solutions. To deliver on this in the long term
will require the courage of leadership, the willingness to take some flak
from shareholders, communicating more effectively the real value of
sustainability to investors, and the need to seek collaboration with thirdsector and social enterprises. It will require new approaches to how we all
do business and an honest reassessment of the values that underpin why
we do business and what business means to society. To make progress
faster we need to face these big questions and respond with new business
models and new approaches to sustainable economic activity. We need to
be increasingly open to trialling creative and cooperative experiments and
new approaches to sustainable economic growth.

Reference
Porter, M.E. and Kramer, M.R. (2011), ‘Creating Shared Value’, Harvard Business
Review, 89, 1/2: 2–17.

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Commentary 6.5
Private sector failure and risk
management for tipping points
KEITH CLARKE

I used to run a global multinational company, with 10,000 employees to
maintain and many shareholders to please. Ensuring a monthly payout and
a stock market return are legally binding requirements on any chief
executive. Tipping points have to be placed in context. Building up the
corporate portfolio is the job description. If we are going to get anywhere
we need to realign science, social science, regulation, and the markets in a
fresh alliance with business, governments, and civil society organizations.
The introductory chapters to this book make a credible case that there
are significant tipping points, which climate change and other Earth system
adjustments are likely to trigger, which are system changes (arguably
failures) that are abrupt and inevitably have unforeseen, and, to date,
unforeseeable consequences on other systems. Not only are their consequences unpredictable, the prediction of when they may occur, or the
criteria for showing that they have occurred, is effectively impossible to
determine in the near term.
The private sector, composed of organizations that make things or
provide services as a group, simply do not invest in avoiding system
tipping points. The recent banking crisis has demonstrated this. Banks as
global organizations that should arguably have seen system failure points,
did not do so. History has shown repeated boom and subsequent bust of
stock markets. The basic means for allocating capital in most economies
has failed before, and all the evidence suggests that it will fail again.
There is one trend embedded in these failures. As economies become
more connected and tend towards globalization, the highs and lows
become more extreme, and their consequences increasingly unpredictable.
Climate change has all of these characteristics. Individual companies do
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Private sector failure and risk management
however manage risk with varying degrees of aggression and successful
results. It is the variability of performance which is the basis of the private
sector. Good markets attract more companies and more capital; wellmanaged companies do even better in any market. However, the essence
is that poor markets cause disinvestment, and badly managed companies
fail. This is basic economic theory: to rely on the private sector en masse to
invest in mitigating the potential consequences of non-immediate tipping
points and to do so effectively has, to put it mildly, no historical precedent.
Accepting these limitations, there is a role that the market can and
should play. The best companies do anticipate demand, and do create
products prior to the demand being evident, and do so within the bounds
of imperfectly functioning markets. To prepare for future events outside
of the known operating parameters cannot be left to individual companies.
It is a collective responsibility to explore the edges of the ‘system’. This
anticipatory work should provide an understanding of how potential
failures are occurring, something that did not occur in the Great
Depression, nor in the recent financial collapse. Both were relatively simple
system failures compared to any of the currently identified climate-changeinduced tipping points. Markets do not and will not manage risk or
anticipate risk in a politically, socially, or environmentally effective
manner.
So here I turn to the power of regulation. Businesses can work with
targets and structures which can be implemented on reasonable timescales
and where there is reliable and consistent government leadership and
legislative commitment. For addressing tipping points, the process of
regulation is flawed as it tends to lie in the hands of particular interests,
and is often controlled by the whims of political expediency. Where we
need to go lies in the field of co-implementation; this involves bringing in
a wider group of players.
In this simplistic view there are two other parties; academia and government. But they also have severe limitations on how they can influence
the management of tipping points. Academic research is fundamentally
important to the progression of knowledge and tells its story to a wider
public in a language that is incomprehensible at best. Probability and risk
are not items humans logically deal with, but much research is about likely
outcomes. Without research we are a dead society, but it does not mean
society can or should be changed because of better stories in the Mail on
Sunday. Whilst the internet gives extraordinary access to information, it
does not always lead to accurate knowledge dissemination. The percentage
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Keith Clarke
of US citizens who continue to believe their president is a Muslim is an
interesting example. To convince, even with scientific evidence, that the
melting of the permafrost is human-derived, that it is likely to cause a major
global-wide problem, and that it will seriously affect their children’s lives
in a not particularly beneficial manner, is probably a stretch when it comes
to US public opinion.
In recent years it has been the NGOs who have provided the link between
science and society. They have the mission and the ability to synthesize
research into an action agenda. The entities beginning to take note here are
our professional institutions, The British Academy, The Royal Society,
Confederation for British Industry, and the Institute for Civil Engineers.
They not only have the ability to communicate meaningfully with government and the private sector, they can transcend the extraordinary tribalism
in the academic world.
Governments globally have begun a change to commit to a decarbonized
global economy. It is progress when for the first time governments collectively look to avoid a problem rather than mitigate the after-chain of its
effects. The rate of change required in the next ten years is unprecedented;
however, it is fair to assume no single world order will suddenly come to
pass but we will continue with a whole gamut of political, social, and
economic models.
The potential for both lessening the likelihood of reaching tipping
points, or preparing for the consequences of when they occur, lies in the
interface between academia, government, and companies. This means
effective concentrations at the interface – not singular, but also not as
hopelessly informal as exist today. NGOs provide the glue at this interface:
they can change companies and governments. They started the decarbonizing revolution and provided stunning leadership in setting the
question. To set the answers we need to supplement this glue.

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Commentary 6.6
Creating a roadmap for sustainable,
transformational change
JOHN ELKINGTON

One of my favourite quotations comes from the late Kurt Vonnegut, born
some 90 years ago. ‘We have to continually be jumping off cliffs’, he said,
‘and developing our wings on the way down.’ I used it when kicking off
our first Breakthrough Capitalism workshop, co-hosted by the Value Web,1
in April 2012. The idea was to challenge the growing consensus among
business leaders that they had already understood the sustainability
agenda – and embedded the necessary responses in their organizations.
My perspective on the nature of the challenge can be found in a New York
Times op-ed published around the time of the UN Rio+20 Summit.2 The
content of the Breakthrough Capitalism initiative to date can be found on
the dedicated website.3 The richness of the discussion at the Breakthrough
Capitalism Forum, which followed in May, is indicated by the sample of
the Knowledge Wall (Figure 6.7).
Participants in that first workshop included some fifty people from
companies (including Actis, Atkins, BP, Fenton, HP, SolarCentury), finance
groups (Friends Provident, Goldman Sachs, Zouk Ventures), impact
investment organizations (Big Issue Invest, Investors’ Circle, Investing
for Good, Social Finance, Tellus Mater), government (the Cabinet Office),
social enterprises (More Associates, Polecat, the Social Stock Exchange),
NGOs and think-tanks (Carbon Tracker, the Climate Group, Forum for the
Future, the Foundation for Democracy and Sustainable Development,

1

http://www.thevalueweb.org.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/22/opinion/global-agenda-magazine-going-green.
html?pagewanted=all.
3
http://www.breakthroughcapitalism.com.
2

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Source: Breakthrough Capitalism Forum/Value Web 2012

Figure 6.7 A sample of the Knowledge Wall at the Breakthrough Capitalism Forum, London, May 2012

A roadmap for sustainable transformational change
SustainAbility, WWF), and networks like Green Mondays and the UK
Youth Climate Coalition. The Breakthrough Capitalism Forum the following month attracted almost five times as many people, to hear nearly thirty
speakers, with videos of the presentations available on the website.
The idea behind all of this is that even as competition helps drive change,
it also gets in the way. So the time has come for the giant sustainability
mash-up – to create a basic roadmap and toolkit for everyone investing in
transformational change. Clearly, we don’t expect to achieve the mash-up
in one or two workshops, or even during the course of our Forum. Instead,
our ambition is to catalyse a process many of us now know needs to happen
– and help provide a sense of direction.
The workshop process, designed by Value Web/Innovation Arts and
Volans, took participants through various stages, including a backcasting
exercise from 2022. Then it dug into personal (and group) perceptions of
the need for system change, the trajectories of breakthrough innovation –
and the key barriers that stand in the way of progress. What was clear to
participants was that we are at a key inflection point, that political leadership
is often lacking, and new constellations of change agents are emerging. So
we concluded that some form of leaderless revolution would be part of the
way forward, offering better direction and support than is the case right
now. But there was also a feeling that we need to get a better sense of what
these constellations are doing, to avoid making them so big that they slow
progress down, and to audit progress in key areas, as a means to better
direct effort and resources.
A couple of breakout groups (out of eight) generated fairly dystopian
scenarios for the future. There was a sense here that some form of
meltdown (for example, a global pandemic that isn’t put back in the bottle
like SARS) would be needed to catalyse change of the nature and scale now
needed. Among the identified brakes on breakthrough change, here are
ten:
1. Many key people still do not feel the present system is broken – or
‘broken enough’.
2. There is pervasive short-termism, fuelled by short electoral timescales
and amplified by the economic crisis that began in 2007–08.
3. Intergenerational frictions cloud the picture.
4. Still-powerful incumbents are failing to adapt and lobby fiercely to
block change.
5. The culture of ownership suppresses collaborative consumption.
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6. There is competition between solution-providers (for example, we
compete to develop our own language and are often unwilling to share
that developed by others).
7. Transparency, accountability, and reporting mechanisms remain weak.
8. There are too many perverse incentives, including misdirected taxes
and subsidies.
9. Our global governance mechanisms and institutions are precariously
weak.
10. There is growing nationalism, protectionism, and xenophobia in some
quarters.
Among the potential accelerators of breakthrough innovation and change
we identified scores, but here are ten:
1. There is a collective sense that change is in the air – and that breakdown
triggers breakthrough.
2. Some major companies and super brands are taking courageous
leadership roles – and organizations like the World Business Council
for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) are publishing interesting
roadmaps identifying future risks and opportunities, in their case in
the form of Vision 2050.4
3. New business models are emerging (e.g. B Corporations5), alongside
the revival of co-ops and similar.
4. The right sort of corporate rating and ranking schemes can drive
change.
5. There are encouraging emerging trends in design, including cradle-tocradle and bio-mimicry, though they aren’t yet viral.
6. We see a coming standardization of global sustainability-related
standards.
7. There will be new forms of valuation, pricing and accounting.
8. There is energetic discussion of ‘stranded assets’, for example in
CarbonTracker’s work6 and Generation Investment Management’s
white paper on ‘Sustainable Capitalism’.7
9. The system is under creative pressure from new social movements (e.g.
Arab Spring at its best, and Occupy).

4

http://www.wbcsd.org/vision2050.aspx.
http://www.bcorporation.net.
6
http://www.carbontracker.org/news/environmental-stranded-assets.
7
http://www.generationim.com/media/pdf-generation-sustainable-capitalism-v1.pdf.
5

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A roadmap for sustainable transformational change
10. There is interesting innovation taking place in such areas as behaviour
change (take the example of Recyclebank’s8 relationship with Transport
for London).
The workshop concluded with a brainstorm of some of the weak signals
that are currently being overlooked or actively ignored. Here are ten of
those:
1. A new paradigm is surfacing – with many of the apparently weak
signals linking back to its emergence.
2. Technologies exist (or are in development) that can help solve many
of our problems, if properly deployed, but are dismissed as unworkable or uneconomic.
3. There is new potential to tap into what Clay Shirky calls ‘cognitive
surplus’9 – offering new ways of developing our ‘Future Quotient’.10
4. New forms of communication, transparency, accountability, and
reporting are evolving that promise to be crucial in driving and
informing breakthrough change, but are adopted on a voluntary basis
rather than regulated by governments.
5. Many governments are abdicating their responsibility to use the data
and information that are already being produced to steer transformative change.
6. Under the radar, unusual partnerships are beginning to emerge (for
example, sportswear and retail brands convening around a Zero
Discharge of Hazardous Chemicals agenda, aiming to detoxify supply
chains into China by 2020).11
7. There is often an obsessive focus on problems, when a more optimistic
focus on solutions – a ‘glass half-full’ approach – could help switch on
the unconverted. For example, Daniel Goleman encourages us to
analyse not just the negative footprint of a business, but also its
‘mindprint’ and, at the potentially strongly positive end of the
spectrum, its ‘handprint’.12
8. The ageing trend is being investigated in terms of the implications for
health care and pension provision, but not in terms of the potential for

8

https://www.recyclebank.com.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_surplus.
10
http://futurequotient.tumblr.com/report/.
11
http://nikeinc.com/news/nike-roadmap-toward-zero-discharge-of-hazardous-chemicals.
12
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2108015,00.html.
9

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John Elkington
growing political conservatism among baby boomers – how do we
counter that?
9. Young people (e.g. Generation Y) are often keen to be involved in
transformative change, but could become deeply frustrated and/or
angry where high levels of unemployment persist. So we need to
discover from them how to engage with them before they disengage
from us.
10. While we tend to avert our eyes from some of the areas of greatest
current failure (e.g. Detroit or developing countries), their resilience
may also turn out to become the sources and incubators of breakthrough solutions that could have a profound impact on the rest of the
world, through what is now called ‘reverse innovation’.13
Our aim is to use the insights we have captured so far, but also to create
more, to generate an open-source Prospectus for Breakthrough Capitalism.
Our latest book, The Zeronauts: Breaking the Sustainability Barrier, identifies
fifty breakthrough innovators working in such areas as population growth,
pandemics, poverty, pollution, and the proliferation of weapons of mass
destruction.14 We are not just sitting back and waiting for a ‘leaderless
revolution’ on this front: a key aim is to identify, convene, and network
leaders working in very different areas. And at a time when the
mainstreaming of the sustainability agenda risks the dilution of ambition,
we aim to triple distil the agenda, map the areas where ‘the future is already
here’, and help jump innovation to the point where it drives truly
transformative change.

13
14

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_innovation.
http://www.zeronauts.com.

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Commentary 6.7
Tipping points and ‘Too Difficult Boxes’
CHARLES CLARKE

Analysing tipping points is both interesting and potentially illuminating.
Amongst other things, such a process rightly respects the importance and
practical significance of an enormous range of government decisions
which, to varying degrees, certainly have an impact on the economic, social,
and environmental conditions of billions of people.
Government is not the only player. Indeed you could argue that it is
becoming less important over time; but it certainly is a major one, probably
the most important. This vital fact immediately draws attention to the quality
of government decisions. Do national governments properly address the
magnitude of the challenges their country faces? At a global level, do governments have the capacity to work together to meet truly global challenges?
Where solutions cannot easily be identified and implemented, national
governments often dispatch strategic problems to the ‘Too Difficult Box’.
This is not simply where there is rapid alternation of governments, though
that makes things more difficult. Even longstanding governments, such as
the eighteen Conservative years from 1979 to 1997 and the thirteen Labour
years from 1997 to 2010, failed fully to address a wide range of important
issues. These include climate change, the relationship of Britain to Europe,
nuclear disarmament and terrorist threats, immigration control, regulation
of the banks, social exclusion of certain groups, and the ageing society,
including public sector pensions and long-term care for the elderly. There
are many more.
In each of these cases, failure to grasp the nettle of change can bring the
whole society closer to a tipping point which means that decisions finally
have to be taken in an atmosphere of crisis or, worse, not taken at all.
What all of these subjects have in common is that change is needed,
change is difficult, and time is not on our side. Moreover the solutions will
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Charles Clarke
require at least some people to suffer some loss. And that means that in
democracies change becomes difficult. Even longstanding governments
have to face elections every four years or so.
All governments, whatever their electoral mandates, come to appreciate
that it is indeed their responsibility to address the challenges I have
described. They then need to establish how best to do that. They have to
go through a series of stages. The starting point is to identify clearly the
problem that needs to be addressed. This identification is itself not easy.
The issues are themselves very complicated and intertwined. For example,
the demands for energy sustainability and energy security, at one level
entirely mutually compatible, can lead to quite different, even opposed,
policy solutions.
Once the problem that needs to be addressed has been identified,
government then needs to overcome seven further hurdles, any one of
which can provide the obstacle which stops a government in its tracks.
First, the solution needs to be clearly identified. This will involve
controversy, as honest people can differ about the best solution. Wherever
possible, scientific analyses should offer better ways of addressing options
than mixes of prejudice and media platitudes. Criticisms need to be
properly dealt with, not ducked, by the scientists as much as anyone else.
Second, the challenges of implementation need to be understood. In
some cases implementation is simple, in others very complex. It is rare that
it is only a matter of decree, a simple stroke of the pen, even after a law is
passed or an executive decision legally taken. Moreover the potential longterm advantages of change may well be outweighed by short-term
disadvantages, which cause political problems.
Third, a variety of vested interests need to be placated or overcome. The
vested interests who are losers will organize, and an iron rule of politics is
that potential losers will organize against a change. Potential gainers will
leave it to the government to make the case. The losers are likely to have
at least some good arguments and they will maintain that their concern is
actually the public interest, not their own. They will seek to undermine the
overall argument for the proposed solution. They will often use pretty
effective campaign techniques to mobilize hostile public opinion.
Fourth, a range of legal constraints, for example in international or
European law, need to be circumnavigated. Ministers, rightly, have to act
within the law. The United Kingdom is part of a wide range of international
legal regimes, such as the European Convention on Human Rights. Many
of these were established soon after 1945 in circumstances very different
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Tipping points and ‘Too Difficult Boxes’
from those which govern our lives today, and they create a very real set of
constraints within which Parliament and governments have to act. And
renegotiating international agreements is a very difficult and time-consuming process.
Fifth, in many cases the international dimension of the problem has to
be appreciated. This is particularly true in relation to the European Union,
which is the main actor in relation to many areas of our national life, for
example the environment, agriculture, competition policy, consumer protection, employment law, health and safety, and energy. The same is true,
to a lesser extent, of our other international relationships and obligations,
for example in the United Nations and the World Trade Organization.
Sixth, the political process is complex and its vicissitudes have to be
overcome. Every policy proposal needs to be enacted. This is not just a
question of a clear statement or speech, nor is it only a matter of determination. A law has to be passed, and at all points in the process political
theatre will be present, parliamentary rebellions will happen, rethinks
will go on, and retreats will take place. The Opposition will normally
retreat to the opportunism of opposition. This is a real power: since in
most Parliaments this is enough, together with rebellious sections of the
governing party, to make votes tight in the Commons and to defeat
government in the Lords.
And seventh, underlying everything, the government needs to sustain
the political energy and creativity which is so essential if change is to be
successfully accomplished. Divisions of ideology or ambition can make
that difficult, as can the simple passage of time.
This is an impressive range of obstacles, which explains why governments, even with large majorities, have not been able to address comprehensively the problems which society faces.
When we turn to the problems of securing international cooperation, the
problems become even greater, since definitions of common interest are so
much more difficult to identify than at the level of the nation state. Even
the European Union, the most sophisticated effort to do that in the last
century, has found it very difficult to sustain itself against national
preoccupations. The experience of the two World Wars led the whole world
to try and create institutions which would express the common ambitions
of all humanity. But they too have not found it easy to change in a way that
reflects the wider changes in the world.
But, ultimately, it is simply not good enough to leave unsolved too many
big and fundamental problems. The real-world problems are just too great,
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the pace of change too urgent. There are too many areas in which a tipping
point approaches. Decision not to act, to delay, or to postpone are choices
too, with their own consequences which may be very serious. It is now
obvious that reform of the banking system, a classically difficult issue, was
just such an example. Failure to reform across the world led to economic
disaster which was far worse than it need have been. Inadequate government action meant that a tipping point was passed. The same may happen
in the Eurozone. This is even more the case with some of the proposals
discussed in this book. Climate change will not go away. Nor will nuclear
proliferation or food insecurity.
It is important to emphasize that democracy offers the best means of
making the necessary changes, though it also creates difficulties. Unlike
authoritarian or dictatorial political methods, democracy seeks to take
account of all aspects of society. But democratic politics has to face up to
long-term problems. It has to be a long-term provider of solutions rather
than a short-term scorer of political points. That is the message for
politicians in both government and opposition, who have to show political
courage and leadership in articulating that tough problems need to be
addressed even if that means losing short-term popularity.

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Commentary 6.8
It tips both ways
THOMAS LINGARD

Tipping points got us into this mess; tipping points will have to get us out.
That, in a nutshell, is what I would like to argue in this commentary.
From a business perspective, tipping points are tricky. Management is
essentially the art of making decisions based on imperfect information.
Most information tells you that the future will be like the past. In fact, that
assumption is so ingrained into how we think that most investment
products are compelled by law to point out that this is not true.
Please note that past performance is not a guide to the future. The value of
investments and the income from them may go down as well as up.

It is probably fair to say that such warnings are now so ubiquitous as to
make not a jot of difference, except to the lawyers who use them to fend
off legal action.
For businesses, spotting and responding to fast-approaching tipping
points in the ecological systems on which they depend is very hard.
Responding to gradually increasing stresses on systems, even well before
tipping points are reached, is hard enough. It is never clear that an
emerging trend is indeed a trend until the trend is firmly established as
normal. Businesses that fail to spot trends can sometimes catch their
competitors up, but species that fail to adapt to tipping points in their
environment tend to become extinct sooner than might otherwise have
been necessary. Not existing makes catching up harder.
Fortunately, businesses are much better at responding to proxy indicators of approaching tipping points than to the tipping points themselves. This is because such proxies often bring shorter-term implications
than the ecological tipping points themselves. Campaigning activities
(about tipping point issues) by non-governmental organizations (NGOs),
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which threaten brand and reputation, can prompt rapid and helpful
responses from companies. Regulatory and legislative interventions, or
even the threat thereof, do indeed help to focus the mind of business
executives.
But most influential of all is customer demand. A framing of opportunity
and competitive advantage drives business action of several magnitudes
beyond what is possible with a ‘doom and gloom’, doomsday scenario. The
vaguest hint from consumers and customers that a concerted response to
ecological issues will be rewarded with custom, brand preference, and
loyalty is all that a well-intentioned business needs to change gear in its
response. That is the power of the market. I had been working on sustainability issues in Unilever for five years when in 2007 Lee Scott, then
CEO and President of Wal-Mart, Unilever’s single largest global customer,
gave the keynote speech at a high-level event hosted by the Prince of
Wales’s Business and Environment Programme. The next day it was as if
someone had flicked a switch inside our organization. People understood that change was coming. It was a tipping point in a journey that had
begun in the 1990s, when Unilever’s sustainability programmes in water,
agriculture, and fisheries were first established. People saw that the niche
might just become the mainstream, even if they were not ready to admit
that the people who had for a decade been pushing the idea of a more
socially and environmentally responsible version of business were not
simply conscience-troubled do-gooders but the early pioneers of a new way
of doing business fit for a new century.
It is astonishing to think that no one was able to tweet anything from that
speech. It is unlikely that anyone started a conversation about it even on
Facebook. Few if any people in the audience were on LinkedIn, and the
invitation to attend the event arrived in the post. In just five years there has
been a complete transformation in how people collaborate, and an
exponential change in the speed of conversation and the exchange and
spread of ideas, thanks to the revolution in social media. If the challenge
facing us was to find a way to radically raise awareness of the need for
action, uncover the world’s best insight into what action really works, and
to make that action desirable, then the social media revolution is the single
biggest gift for which we might have wished. Change leaders all over the
world and in every sector have been handed a weapon for this fight, the
power of which we have barely even begun to explore and understand. This
is in my view a particularly inspiring tipping point, and we are right in the
middle of it.
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So far I have described tipping points in business cases and tipping
points in communication. Many believe this will be enough to make the
changes we need, on the scale we need them, in time to avert the other
varieties of tipping points that haunt us in our darker moments, and which
are described in Chapter 2.1. It is a view which is understandable, given
the sheer force that both of these will unleash. But it is ultimately a view
which I believe is wrong. This is because the inertia within the system
dynamic is so far out of proportion with the forces pushing for change, that
even if such transformational forces can rise to match it, I see no evidence
that they will be able to overcome it completely.
This observation points to a third area where exponential change is
necessary: the relationship between the public and private sectors. In John
Elkington’s commentary (6.6) he summarizes a number of blockers to
breakthrough change identified at a recent workshop. Three of them are
relevant to this challenge, and I have reordered them into the following
narrative description of this problem:
•
•
•

Our global governance mechanisms and institutions are precariously
weak.
There are too many perverse incentives, including misdirected taxes
and subsidies.
Still-powerful incumbents are failing to adapt and lobby fiercely to
block change.

None of these insights is either particularly new, or contested. But what
has been changing in the past few years is the growing realization that it
is the combination of them that makes the situation particularly dangerous.
Global governance ought to resolve the issues of perverse incentives, yet
at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de
Janiero in June 2012, governments largely ignored the major global
campaign calling for an end to fossil fuel subsidies, acknowledging it only
with a line, in paragraph 225 (of 283), reaffirming previous commitments
to take action on this, but with no sense of a deadline, or indeed urgency
of any kind. That is a simple failure of leadership.
Even without functioning global governance, perverse subsidies ought
to be an attractive target for cost-cutting at the national level in times of
global economic austerity, and yet the lobbying efforts of those powerful
incumbents make this far less than straightforward. It is a painful irony
that the direct and indirect subsidies afforded by governments to the fossil
fuel industry are in part what ensures it remains cash-rich and able to
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outspend the lobby efforts of more progressive business groups and NGOs
who persuasively and painstakingly argue for transformational change in
the system.
Even here, where it can seem we are far from where we need to be, I see
evidence of positive tipping points. The World Economic Forum’s report,
More with Less (WEF 2012), argued that:
Governments must act to shape demand for sustainable products and services directly through public procurement, and indirectly shape behaviours
and attitudes through policy.

This is a direct plea for regulatory interventions to drive sustainability. The
World Business Council for Sustainable Development, which for many
years argued for progressive action on sustainability by business (rather
than by government, as was some people’s interpretation), saw a subtle
but significant change in narrative at the Rio+20 Summit with the launch
of Changing Pace (WBCSD 2012). This is a document whose primary
purpose is to make it clear that transformational, scalable, and rapid change
by business is only possible with the right policy frameworks, regulations
and incentives. It felt like real progress, and time will tell whether it really
was a tipping point in this critical global conversation.
I opened this commentary with the thought that tipping points got us
into this mess and that tipping points are going to have to get us out. The
triple tipping points of the new and real business cases, the social media
explosion, and a change in discourse in the conversation between the
businesses that create value for the world and the governments that we
elect to create the rules by which they are required to operate; these three
acting together give me great hope that the next great tipping point may
be just around the corner.

References
World Business Council on Sustainable Development (2012), Changing Pace
(Geneva: WBCSD).
World Economic Forum (2012), More with Less (Davos: WEF).

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Commentary 6.9
Perspective of a global retailer
MIKE BARRY

Business is used to the idea of tipping points, insofar as it is exposed to the
constant possibility of upheaval. From steam power to the computer, the
financial Big Bang in the City of London to the internet, moments of
transformational change have always happened in the world of business.
We talk of ‘game-changing’ or ‘disruptive’ innovations. These might be the
arrival of new technologies, of new ways of managing, of new market
arrangements, or of radical changes in the operating environments of
business. As ever, the strategic challenge to business leaders is to spot these
moments before their implications undermine their position and prospects,
or to respond nimbly to take advantage of the impacts of major change. In
business as in other sectors, it is extraordinarily difficult to anticipate the
onset of a transformational change and to assess the implications in a timely
way, still more so to respond effectively.
Individual companies have always come and gone in the wake of such
developments. Indeed whole sectors (think of manufacturing offshoring in
Western economies in the 1980s) can go through seismic shifts. Are we
facing such a profound shift now in the business world as a result of
ecological and socio-economic ‘tipping’? What makes the present moment
different, why describe it as a time of tipping points rather than a period
of ‘business as usual’ change?
I would contend that we are now entering a time in which several takenfor-granted fundamentals of business life are being undermined. They are
assumptions, values, outlooks, and expectations that have become so
embedded in business thinking – and far beyond business – that they are
almost invisible. What are they?

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•

•

•

That ‘the environment’ would always be available as business’s biggest
‘factory’, a constant 24/7 source of bountiful low cost ‘inputs’ (energy,
water, raw materials) that business converts relentlessly into economic
value whilst avoiding paying for any externalities.
That Government would always be there as the ‘backer of last resort’,
bailing out the financial sector that underpins the economy when
things got tough, and a guarantor of progress and security when life
was uncertain for business.
That people would be content to coexist in separable lives as consumers, citizens, and employees, with the economic system sustaining
order by giving them a little more of seemingly guaranteed comfort
each year.

All these ‘certainties’ are now threatened.
Our bountiful environmental ‘factory’ is running out of capacity.
Ecosystems are evidently unable to keep up with the need to provide
resources or absorb wastes as global consumption relentlessly mounts.
What has been obvious to environmentalists for many years is becoming
a reality for businesses coping with high and volatile resource costs and
the disruption caused by extreme weather events.
Although governments have stepped in to ‘bail out’ the banks during
the economic crises of the last four years, many now can sense that political
patience (not to mention financial reserves) is running out. Will the public
sector reach its own tipping point in relation to dysfunctional banks and
financial systems deemed ‘too big to fail’, and let them go under? More
likely, governments will increasingly ask business to pick up the external
costs of making and selling its products. This will not be done on the basis
of some moral imperative. It will be because the state does not and will
not have the cash to pay for the externalities of business practice – climate
change, an obesity epidemic, etc. And governments have already sent a
powerful signal that they are neither able nor willing to set a policy
direction to tackle major environmental challenges such as climate change.
A bickering multi-polar world just looks too daunting to corral. So
businesses, relying on state action to organize a strategic and coordinated
response to ecological disruption, are likely to be disappointed.
The Romans had ‘bread and circuses’ to keep the masses happy. We
have strung along through rising income levels and the disarmingly ready
availability of products to consume. But in many Western markets real
disposable incomes are predicted to flat-line – at best. For many in the US
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middle and lower classes, real household wealth and income have been
falling for years. The same story is being played out in the EU, as the
Eurozone crisis and the impact of high personal debt levels make
themselves felt at every level. The slogan ‘We are the 99%’ and the rise of
the Occupy movements were signals that the basic compact between
business and society is threatened.
No longer can business lazily assume that the griping will come from
the edges, from the few who reject a consumerist life. Instead it will come
from the mainstream, from citizens whose expectations of rising or at least
stable income, wealth, and prospects are being dashed, for themselves and
for their children. The disaffection probably won’t manifest itself as violent
revolution. Instead consumers will drift away from intense consumption,
starting instead to select more carefully from whom they buy. Increasingly
we will see people turning to a ‘sharing economy’ where goods are no
longer possessed and disposed of in the classical sense. Rather they will be
shared, bartered, rented, and exchanged in a parallel, not for profit, and
often community-based economy.
Rising resource costs, the retreat of government, a re-definition of
consumption collectively create an enormous visible tipping point for
business. This is not to say that business as we know it will disappear, far
from it. But it does mean that for today’s incumbents the journey through
the next decade will be that much harder and in all likelihood much more
destructive of many more traditional business models. But seen another
way, the next decade is incredibly exciting. New business models (not just
businesses) will have to be developed, based on a much closer relationship
with environment and society. They will be based on collaboration, not allout competition. New technologies will emerge that offer fantastic rewards
because they solve these enormous challenges. Tipping points offer opportunities as well as crises and threats. For the private sector, understanding
the nature of these changes is a matter of life, death, and urgent adaptation.

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PART 7
COMMUNICATING TIPPING
POINTS AND RESILIENCE

Communicating tipping points is tough. The two chapters and four commentaries which follow cover the difficulties and the possibilities of using
communications and media, as well as social networking, as a means for
offering both the characteristics of convulsive change as well as the scope
for telling the world about how to anticipate and to adapt. The real test, as
Joe Smith (7.1) thoughtfully explains, is not to scare or to bore. In a world
of constant bombardment, the possible dangers of ice melt, sea-level rise,
extreme weather events, and human distress, even on a large scale, are
easily lost in competing news stories, multiple distractions, the tedium of
repetition, and the wish for peace and quiet.
The value of these contributions lies in their careful and intelligent
approach to the ways in which good news can come out of possible threat
and disruption. The power of this Part lies in the scope for anticipation and
adaptation. This requires fresh approaches by the media as well as by
governments and communities, as Emily Boyd (7.2) explains.
We need to say more about adaptation. In Chapter 2.1, Tim Lenton offers
ways in which Earth-system tipping points may be addressed through
early warnings. He especially points to the sluggishness of the manner in
which a return to previous conditions following disturbance takes place,
and the increasing randomness and unpredictability of reactions. This can
be transported to the financial stage in the context of the capacity of banks
to retain assets in the face of fluctuating stock markets and exchange rates
as well as in increasingly demanding regulatory requirements for accessible
capital to hedge against default or failure to bail out. In both cases there is
a combination of randomness and sluggishness of response which is
reminiscent of the early warnings scenarios.

Communicating tipping points and resilience
What Emily Boyd reveals is the need for reliable warning of possible
hazard, the capacity for delivering community-based civil defence in the
face of flood or storm, the back-up of contingency measures (food, medical
supplies, evacuation arrangements), and, above all, the resources and
organizational abilities to restore a viable economy and functioning
infrastructure. This is her heartening story of Mumbai in the wake of
devastating floods, a city which also responded remarkably to two terrorist
attacks.
What we cannot be sure about is how well really impoverished and
ephemeral settlements can cope with prolonged and devastating aftereffects. The 400,000 homeless in Haiti following the earthquakes of 2009
suffer all manner of deprivations, including tropical storms and almost
unimaginable public health and security dangers. Yet somehow they
survive, even though the conditions of survival must be dire. And much
also depends on a vital combination of continuing aid and extraordinary
personal courage. How such people build resilience in the face of vulnerability is very much part of what we need to know more about, and to learn
from. As Emily Boyd notes, we are good at dealing with the aftermath, but
still very weak at anticipating and designing in resilience for the ‘foremath’.
The two commentaries by Paul Brown (7.3), a former environmental
correspondent to the Guardian newspaper, and Jonathan Sinclair-Wilson
(7.5), a former managing editor of Earthscan Publications, offer important
suggestions. Brown is keen for analysts of tipping points to be very clear
as to their prognoses and interpretations, as there is little room for getting
it wrong initially, even if eventually proven right. Sinclair-Wilson is equally
keen to begin a dialogue of mutual respect and understanding, the essence
of sustainability science, to begin the search for anticipatory solutions, no
matter how clumsy. He also argues we should not try to skirt around
planetary boundaries and social floors, but address head on the bonds
which tie us to a uniquely habitable Earth and to our progeny. All value
the scope for tipping points to reveal our inadequacies of preparedness, our powers of creating irreversibility, and our inherent scope for
redemption.

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7.1
Media coverage of tipping points
Searching for a balanced story
JOE SMITH

Humanity tends to be fearful of change, yet change is our constant companion. What seems to be new about change is that climate science and
linked policy research are indicating the possibility of abrupt and
hazardous transformations. Yet change can be exhilarating if embraced
with a spirit of creativity. In personal and working lives, and in business
and public institutions, change is not just accepted, it is often actively
sought. It is central to any notion of modernity. The media struggle to
imagine or represent potential broad system changes, yet are constantly in
search of apparently new ‘stories’. This volume contains plenty of examples
of the kinds of difficult new knowledge that climate research and other
Earth-system adjustments are generating. Such alterations are novel threats
and have, at times, generated fearful accounts of possible futures. However,
there are also many ideas, innovations, and long-established practices that
can permit human thriving, whatever may come its way. In this chapter I
seek to cover both the media dilemma of how to inform and engage yet not
panic, and the growing body of optimistic research which reveals how well
humanity can cope.
Here I consider the ways in which the media might limit or enable
learning and debate about the causes and consequences of climate change
tipping points, and of ways of adapting to them. It is written during a
period of widespread ‘climate change fatigue’ when cynicism and
suspicion infect influential portions of the media and substantial minorities
of public opinion. Yet it also takes place at a time when an unprecedented
body of intellectual and creative effort is going into making sense of
anticipating and responding to global environmental changes more
generally. In short, humanity’s relationship with the non-human natural
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world is being dramatically revised in a very short space of time. If that
isn’t a story – what is?
I begin with a summary of six distinct features of the cultural politics of
climate change. These are the ground-conditions for media production and
consumption. I subsequently consider the quality of media performance
around these issues. This includes a discussion of the scope of media
coverage about, and for, those people who are most vulnerable to the social
and physical impacts of abrupt climate change. In this chapter I conclude
with a discussion of how society might balance media accounts of
potentially doom-laden environmental presents and futures which have
been at the core of environmental politics in the past, with stories from the
‘islands of hope’ referred to in Chapter 8.1. This paves the way for Emily
Boyd’s chapter (7.2) which looks at the scope for exercising resilience in
adaptation to extreme stresses in local and more distant factors affecting
the quality of living for those who sometimes are termed (erroneously) as
being ‘vulnerable’. These experiences offer some insights to the ‘islands of
hope’ which may benefit from more sensitive and full-hearted media
coverage. Paul Brown’s commentary that follows (7.3) muses on the
possibilities for such coverage to become more relevant for the benign
aspects of the tipping points debate.

Six elements of the cultural politics of climate change
Beard sank into a gloom of inattention, not because the planet was in peril –
that moronic word again – but because someone was telling him it was with
such enthusiasm.
(McEwan 2010: 36)

Ian McEwan’s protagonist in his novel Solar (McEwan 2010), the Nobel
physicist Michael Beard, summarizes how many people feel when at the
receiving end of a lecture on climate change. Perhaps it shouldn’t puzzle
us that the promise of rapid environmental and social change is greeted
with a ‘gloom of inattention’. The topic introduces a novel cultural politics
whose features have gone under-recognized and unresolved. The term
‘cultural politics’ is employed here to indicate the various ways in which
values and meanings that underpin economic, political, and social
discourses are generated and disputed. Much of the current discussion
about climate change falls between the overstated rhetoric of jeopardy,
which is now having a diminishing public impact, and more sober and
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open-ended discussions of risk and uncertainty, which are largely
unreported because they do not readily fit media conventions.
Climate change has produced many unexpected responses, one of which
resembles the ‘Stockholm syndrome’ – the phenomenon of hostages
becoming emotionally attached to their captors:
We are held captive by our own fears and misgivings and yet grateful for the
small mercy of continued survival . . . Like the hostages in the 1973 bank
robbery, we have started to show affection for the thing that is trapping us.
(Tyszczuk 2011: 25)

A good deal of discussion about climate science and policy has an
excited, even breathless tone as it conjures images of social and ecological
jeopardy, wrapped up in sober scientific prediction. NGOs and commentators argue that devastation is inevitable unless action is taken in response
to specific scientific diktats. For example, the website for the network
‘350.org’ suggests that:
350 is the most important number in the world – it’s what scientists say is the
safe upper limit for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere . . . the planet face[s]
both human and natural disaster if atmospheric concentrations of CO2
[remain] above 350 parts per million.

Andrew Simms, who writes a monthly blog for the ‘One Hundred
Months’ campaign, argues that time is ‘fast running out to stop irreversible
climate change . . . We have only 100 months to avoid disaster’ (Simms
2008). Insistent arguments such as these have been allied to a very
simplified representation of the state of climate science. Phrases such as
‘the science is finished’ or references to ‘the IPCC consensus’ have been
used to foreclose debate, so that everyone has to move on to the next stage:
taking action. Indeed the notion of a ‘tipping point’ often functions as a
rhetorical trump card (Morton 2011: 86).
Giles Foden (3.1), whose novel, Turbulence (Foden 2011a), deals with the
special significance of meteorology for the 1944 D-Day landings, suggests
that there is ‘a kind of hubris’ in the reference to ‘tipping points’: ‘it invests
too much in human predictions of the nature and consequences and scope
of the event’. He suggests that the doom-laden term might be replaced by
other metaphors ‘which are generative and work positively as an invitation
to action’. Similarly, research suggests that taking shortcuts to public
attention through dramatic disaster imagery – such as photos of drowning
polar bears or drought-stricken children – delivers diminishing returns in
terms of political engagement, as well as carrying other costs in terms of
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the dignity of the subject and our relationship to it (see, for example, Cohen
(2000) in relation to poverty, or Manzo (2010) on the iconography of climate
change).
The phrase ‘climate change’ is put to work in complex ways, and the
issue generates multi-layered cultural politics. This was demonstrated by
the Climate Camp protestors objecting to a proposed third runway at
Heathrow airport. They held up large-scale portraits of potential climate
victims from around the world alongside a large banner stating: ‘We are
armed only with peer-reviewed science’. The banner was intended to
underline the non-violent nature of their protest, but also sought to enrol
climate science in their politically radical cause. In his pioneering
examination of these issues, Mike Hulme suggests that climate change has
become ‘an idea that now travels well beyond its origins in the natural
sciences. And as this idea meets new cultures on its travels . . . [it] takes on
new meanings and serves new purposes’ (Hulme 2009). Interpretation of
those meanings and purposes is made easier by acknowledging the
distinctiveness of the cultural politics of climate change. The novelty lies
perhaps not in any one of the following six features, but in their combination.
The first distinguishing feature is global pervasiveness: climate change
discussions get everywhere – from doorsteps to boardrooms – and pervade
all layers of formal politics from parish and local councils to parliaments
and international conference halls. Climate change reaches across the world
and across generations in ways that no other public policy concern does –
even more immediate, universal, and profound concerns such as poverty
and injustice (though these prove to be intimately connected). The pervasiveness of the issue is frequently noted in both popular and professional
contexts, but the quality of our anticipation of change would be helped by
a more intent focus on how climate change poses unique ethical and
political questions.
A second element is uncertainty, in both science and policy. Media
representations in the past have more often than not failed to acknowledge
that the sciences of global environmental change are not just ‘unfinished’
but ‘unfinishable’. Climate change research is not unique in this respect,
but it is a particularly dramatic and important example of what Funtowicz
and Ravetz (1991) have termed ‘post-normal science’. Climate change
should not be responded to as a body of ‘facts’ to be acted upon (with the
IPCC acting as prime arbiter). Instead it should be considered as a
substantial and urgent collective risk-management problem. Projecting
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climate change as a risk problem rather than a communication-of-fact
problem helpfully deflates ‘debates’ about whether climate change is or is
not a scientific fact. Such an approach doesn’t walk away from the science:
rather it opens more possibilities for people to be tolerant of the unsettled,
developing relations between climate science, policy, and politics.
Thirdly, knowledge of climate change emphasizes the interdependencies between human and non-human systems, both near and far.
Acknowledgement of humanity’s state of interdependence can be traced
back at least as far as the depiction of city life as dependent on its rural
hinterland in Virgil’s Eclogues, written over two thousand years ago. There
have been numerous invocations of interdependence across the last century
in relation to, for example, food and farming, civil rights and biodiversity.
However, climate change calls up interdependence both as a description
of environmental processes (e.g. relating to the consequences of the release
of anthropogenic greenhouse gases) and, inextricably, as a political
problem (Smith et al. 2007).
The potential for substantial changes in Earth systems outlined in the
introductory chapters of this book forces us to acknowledge that we live
on a dynamic earth. It would be a mistake, nevertheless, to replace the
hubristic assumption of human separateness from nature with an account
of evenly balanced interdependence between the natural and the human.
Acknowledging our new place in the world includes understanding and
respecting the subtle differences between truly interdependent relations
and those ‘earthly imperatives’ which might have huge consequence for
humans, but not, ultimately, for nature.
A cultural politics that is rooted in a rich understanding of global
environmental change is likely to look quite different from our current
state. As Nigel Clark puts it:
We are still a long way from the cosmopolitan thought we need, the kind that
might point the way to forms of justice and hospitality fitting for a planet that
rips away its support from time to time.
(Clark 2010: 219)

Reportage of tsunamis and earthquakes in recent years starts to hint at
how media production and consumption behaviour changes may allow for
fuller telling of both interdependency and dynamism in the realms of
Earth–human relationships.
It is also important to note that interdependency does not imply an
uncomplicated convergence of interests around action. This leads to my
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fourth point: the cultural politics of climate change echoes a post-colonial
discourse, by paying attention to histories of vulnerability and responsibility. The fossil-fuelled development of the last century shaped
individual life chances and national opportunities for good and ill across
the planet, but these chances were patterned by the pre-existing political
economy of development. When Arctic Inuit assert their ‘right to be cold’,
and Pacific Islanders argue for action to protect their land from rising sea
levels, they do so in the knowledge that the threats they face have been
generated by the rich world’s exploitation and consumption of resources
over centuries. These questions about ethics of responsibility and vulnerability serve to shift the boundaries of political community. Ultimately we
are all in this together, whoever we are, and wherever/whenever we live.
However, there is a danger of complacency in the assumption that climate
change means ‘there is no other way’ and that we will inevitably ‘form a
global community with a set of shared beliefs’, as Tim Flannery (2011) has
suggested.
It seems likely that international climate change politics will become far
more antagonistic in the future. The unevenness of the historical responsibility for and capability to adapt to climate change, and unevenness of
experiences of environmental and social transitions (the latter introduced
both by impacts and climate mitigation) seem certain to sharpen the
intensity of climate change discourse. This need not halt progress on
climate change action: indeed it may help to generate the ‘real’, honest and
urgent politics that would permit climate change to feature in a more
sustained way in mainstream media.
The fifth distinctive feature is the interdisciplinary nature of the knowledge upon which climate change science is founded. As one climate expert
remarked in 1961:
The fact that there are so many disciplines involved, as for instance
meteorology, oceanography, geography, hydrology, geology and glaciology,
plant ecology and vegetation history – to mention only some – has made it
impossible to work . . . with common and well established definitions and
methods.
(quoted in Weart 2008: 33)

The IPCC process represents one of the most ambitious attempts at
global peer review of a specific set of questions, and draws together a very
broad body of scientific research. The panel’s reports summarize an
extraordinary body of intellectual achievement. However, even that
process is limited by its failure to integrate adequately the social sciences,
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arts, and humanities with practical politics. This is all the more surprising
given how heavily the processes of the IPCC, as well as of the United
Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, rely on ‘scenarios’,
and hence involve acts of imagination about possible futures in human as
well as natural systems. I acknowledge Giles Foden’s important
contribution to Part 3 in this regard. This raises the question of how the
media can open up thinking about what it means to construct imagined
futures, and the intellectual and creative work it might require.
The sixth distinctive feature of the cultural politics of climate change
centres on the very particular mix of representations of time, and of the
particular interests of other generations. Economists and policy specialists
have sought ways to give future generations a voice in the present, albeit
through very attenuated or clumsy proxies such as discount rates and
policy targets (see 6.1). Past generations can also be heard: from our
prehistoric ancestors, who coped with earlier changes in climate with
doggedness, to the more recent ancestors who bequeathed inventions and
discoveries that have resulted in changes both in climate and our
understanding of it, such as the invention of steam engines or techniques
for retrieving and interpreting ice cores. Although contemporary human
interests are more audible than those of the past, this expanded ethical,
political, and cultural community is increasingly present in our thoughts
and actions. Mike Hulme says: the future ‘is a place that we all live in, in
our imaginations’ (Hulme 2011: 76). This invites media experiments that
allow for research, policy, and politics to play in new ways with time. Just
as climate change prompts us to extend the boundaries of politics in space,
so it also requires that we extend them in time.
These six features – global pervasiveness, uncertainty, interdependency,
the reverberations of history, interdisciplinarity, and temporality – form
the cultural foundation on which media engagement with climate change
has developed and will continue to unfold. These are the conditions within
which different media will absorb and re-present what we know about
climate change, about future threats and our current and future capabilities
for coping with them.

Climate change – media change
What do we want? . . . Gradual change! . . . When do we want it? . . . In due
course!
(Armando Iannucci tweet, 5/4/2011)

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Joe Smith
Given the demanding components of the cultural politics of climate change
it is perhaps surprising that the subject has achieved any media attention
at all. The issue has emerged as a topic during a period of dramatic change
in the nature of media consumption and production. Despite all this, the
media have played a substantial role in establishing a global public
imaginary concerning the capacity for everyday human actions to influence
the functioning of Earth systems in hazardous ways. International polling
shows a steady rise in concern about climate change in the developing
world, and, albeit with some fluctuation, a stable body of opinion in the
developed world. A Globescan (2011) poll, for example, shows 64 per cent
in the developing world and 51 per cent in the developed world viewing
climate change as ‘very serious’. Within the EU, opinion polling in 2011
found that 89 per cent viewed climate change as very or fairly serious
(Eurobarometer 2011).
James Painter’s (2011) broad international study of the press coverage
of science surrounding the Copenhagen climate conference of December
2009 showed a dramatic leap in coverage in the run-up to the meeting. This
spike was particularly significant in the developing world and specifically
emerging economies, with large press corps attending from China and
India. Painter gathers evidence of a rebalancing of uneven global coverage
at the conference:
India and Bangladesh had more media representatives registered than Russia
and South Korea; China and Brazil more than Italy, Spain and Australia. At
the very least, the numbers suggest a re-evaluation of the widely held view
that news consumers in the countries most vulnerable to the impacts of
climate change always suffer an information deficit and have to depend on
Western news agencies.
(Painter 2011: 8)

Boykoff and Mansfield (2012) have been tracking newspaper stories
featuring climate change internationally since 2004, and their graphs show
a convergence over the 2006–11 period between developed and developing
world coverage. Painter’s study of climate scepticism has demonstrated
that climate change science is currently represented more consistently in
the developing world than the USA, UK and Australia. Indeed, developing
world coverage is more firmly rooted in mainstream science and has far
less tendency to report outlier views that take issue with, for example, the
conclusions of the IPCC reports (Painter 2011).
Nevertheless, there is evidence that media coverage about adaptation
and resilience is weakest and least frequent in the countries that are likely
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to experience the worst effects of possible climate change tipping points.
Mike Shanahan (2009) has worked to support developing world journalists’
engagement with climate change for many years, and has suggested that:
It is a great irony that the countries, communities, and citizens that have
contributed least to climate change will suffer most from its impacts. It is in
these settings that the media is least prepared for the challenge.
(Shanahan 2009: 157)

He has summarized the specific challenges for journalists seeking to tell
climate change stories in the developing world media as: lack of training;
unsupportive editors; limited access to information; and the biases of
selecting and reporting interviewees. Shanahan (2009: 154) notes that while
there is an increasing research base in relation to English-speaking and
urban populations in the developing world ‘there has been little study of
how much reaches rural or non-literate people who depend more on radio
and television, and on information in local languages’.
A notable exception is the evidence from a ten-country study of
awareness of the topic in Africa. This work took an original approach to
sharing interviews and research findings publicly in multimedia form (BBC
2010). Given the uneven distribution of the risks associated with tipping
points in the climate system, weighted substantially against those already
most exposed in terms of poverty and marginal environments, this is a
critical area that calls for urgent attention from researchers as well as for
investment in media training, bursaries, and knowledge exchange.
As with HIV/Aids, researchers found that the most vulnerable groups
have the least access to appropriate information. One significant conclusion
in the report is that climate change terminology is poorly understood and
often does not have standard translations in African languages. ‘Existing
translations apparently do not clearly convey the concept’ (BBC 2010: 3).
Focus groups (both rural and urban) and interviews with opinion leaders
showed considerable confusion about climate change science concepts,
pointing to the need to ‘build simple, correct mental models of how climate
change works’. The report echoes research conducted in very different
societies that emphasizes the need to ‘be mindful of people’s existing
knowledge (e.g. in relation to trees, God, ozone depletion, pollution, and
heat) which can function as a barrier or facilitator to effective climate
change communication’ (BBC 2010: 18). The researchers also concluded
that communications should confirm the very wide experiences amongst
African publics of changing weather patterns.
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These researchers were exploring the state of understandings and
experiences of climate change in the present. Preparing vulnerable
societies, regions or groups for potential physical or related social tipping
points adds a further layer to the communications challenge. However,
there is relevant experience to draw upon in terms of research on information needs in the context of natural disasters. Assessments of humanitarian relief in the wake of the Asian tsunami of December 2004 and the
Pakistan earthquakes of 2005 confirm that communications should be
considered part and parcel of effective immediate post-disaster actions.
A review of this field found that information is a ‘critical and unmet
need’ (Wall and Robinson 2008: 3) and that international agencies should
‘treat communication equipment as a lifesaver’ (Wall and Robinson
2008: 6).
The oldest of broadcast media has continued to prove its simple merits
in these situations: in Aceh, Indonesia an entire radio station was installed
and made operational very rapidly in a converted shipping container.
Radios can be distributed quickly and cheaply, and local shortwave radio
can be produced at high speed in local languages. At the same time the
almost universal distribution of mobile telephony has created very different
but no less powerful two-way communications networks that are acutely
well-tuned to community concerns. These examples of supporting
populations facing sudden challenges and changes are not only pertinent
to the task of responding to malign tipping points. They are also capable
of supporting the free flow of knowledge, experience, and questions at a
grassroots level that can multiply the number and forms of ‘islands of hope’
(see Chapter 8.1).
It is possible to gain some idea about the strengths and weaknesses
of mainstream media by considering their coverage of disasters such as
the Asian tsunami of 2004, the Pakistan earthquakes of 2005, and the
Fukushima nuclear incident of 2011. In each of these instances, intense
media coverage at the time of the event allowed global audiences to share
some understanding of the experiences of the people facing threats. These
focus on human interest and they struggle to communicate the wider context and complexities within the narrow communication spaces available
within mainstream media. There is also the danger that these are shaped
into spectacles that amount to a form of terriblisma; ‘the strange, gratified
awe one feels when beholding dreadful disasters and acts of God from afar’
(Steffen 2003). Crucially, media attention tends to be short-lived, with
perhaps some return to the locale or storyline at anniversaries. It is a
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curious but important fact that while these instances of intense media
coverage do frequently seek to communicate human suffering, and point
to means of its immediate alleviation (through fundraising appeals, or
stories of triumph against adversity), there is a general failure to thread
together experiences of such events in such a way as to support the pursuit
of resilient or adaptable social systems and infrastructure. More sustained
attention by the research and policy communities to storytelling, phrasemaking and visual communication around resilience and adaptability
promises to deliver substantial benefits in terms of public understanding
and debate.
The media have already played a significant role in spreading awareness
of climate change science and policy. This is despite the fact that the cultural
politics of climate change present the media with one of their most
demanding challenges. However, it is not sufficient that mainstream media
communicate the possibility of ‘malign tipping points’. They will need
to play an equally substantial role in supporting social learning and
imagination about what it is to inhabit the ‘benign’ equivalents. For media
producers, consumers and, in the context of social media, producerconsumers to show any interest in these issues, the content will have to be
as compelling as the disaster narratives of real or anticipated disasters that
established environmentalism in the first place.

Imagining futures
DIANE: . . . Stars are thick. Which star came up with the idea of using the
energy stored in a lump of fossilized swamp to power the internet? Which
star invented air travel, the internal combustion engine? Which star split the
atom? The stars are God’s mistakes. We are the miracle. Life: human
intelligence: human innovation, creativity, inventions. That is why every
night the stars gaze down on us in awe.
(Bean 2011: 115)

In his play The Heretic (Bean 2011), Richard Bean deploys a sharp and funny
provocateur in the form of earth scientist Diane to puncture the slack-jawed
naivety of some prominent strands of environmentalist rhetoric. Diane’s
appeal for a celebration of human ingenuity at the close of the play can be
understood as a riposte to those narratives. Faced as we are with the varied
risks associated with the tipping points literature, her stance could be seen
as a foolhardy over-correction. But there is something exhilarating –
compelling – in her lines. To insist that mainstream media decision-makers
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show leadership, and ‘move ahead’ of the state of the political or public
conversation, is to fail to understand their professional and cultural setting.
To have any chance of enabling stories of adaptability and resilience, and
of an imaginative preparedness for potentially sudden and devastating
changes of state, requires that these become ‘good stories’ in the eyes of a
journalist as much as in those of the policy analyst.
Giles Foden (2011a) proposes that: ‘Effective narratives, which tend to
have strong metaphors, dynamic human interest (“tension”) and the ability
to be abbreviated or simplified (so that they can be easily communicated),
eventually begin to condition large parts of the total system.’ He notes that
art narratives ‘can take a while to “open” into “ends” or become executive;
and often the ends are counter-intuitive’. On this reading we might consider the ‘set texts’ of 1970s environmentalism, and the resonant iconography that they are associated with, as art narratives. Hence the blue marble
images of the Earth and the T-shirts and posters featuring threatened
charismatic megafauna are all the work of an imaginative and entrepreneurial movement that sought new narratives. They were trying to ask
very demanding questions of a political economy that almost entirely failed
to represent the interests of the non-human natural world and the interests
of future generations and distant others.
Their impact has been impressive but, having had ‘executive’ consequences in terms of the greening of mainstream political and media
discourses, it may now be having ‘counter-intuitive’ consequences. Most
of environmentalism has done little new work in over a decade, and its
tendency towards hyperbole, and its reliance on a narrow stock of fearbased narratives, appears to have left portions of the public apathetic and
fateful, and others hostile. Moreover their inhabitation of the imaginative
space around environmental change has to a significant degree inhibited
others from introducing different kinds of narratives. The intermittent
enthusiasm for ‘solutions’ stories does not amount to an antidote. Rather
the problem–solution dualism that is implied narrows the public conversation to handfuls of actions by a generalized ‘government’, or ‘business’, or public. It may serve to reduce one of the most substantial revisions
of humanity’s understanding of its place in the world to a bland and forlorn
exercise in social marketing.
Environmentalism has sought to win a working global majority around
to one way of looking at the world. Yet Foden (2011b) argues that ‘what is
necessary in facing wickedly complex problems is not just one metaphor
or story but many’. From a different starting point William Connolly (2002:
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199) argues against ‘thick universals’ and in favour of ‘a plural matrix of
cosmopolitanisms’. This plural mix is an apt way of inviting people to
engage with the range of scenarios generated by the tipping points
literature. It also has integrity as a framework in which to hold the diverse
human ideas, experiences, and institutional responses outlined by Boyd
that are relevant to coping with, even flourishing in the face of, global
environmental changes.
Changes in media culture, practice, and institutional forms carry pros
and cons in terms of telling these stories. It is becoming harder for
new stories to reach some audiences. Furthermore there is diminishing
space and journalistic resource available in mainstream media outputs.
Increased concentration of mainstream media outlets within fewer hands
only intensifies this process, and public service media have to fight to
maintain audience share. Corporate media’s engagement in environmental change is fickle. For example, News Corporation can simultaneously sustain Fox News’s assault on the legitimacy of mainstream
climate science at the same time as running public engagement activities
in other outlets and instituting ambitious carbon-reduction programmes
within the business. At the same time, digital and social media are opening
up new places for, and means of, storytelling. Although this is allowing
interests and publics opposed to climate change science and policy to
organize, and then feed content back into mainstream media, the
opportunities presented by this ‘cognitive surplus’ (Shirky 2010) are
resulting in substantial gains in terms of environmental understanding
and action.
The opportunities won’t be taken, however, unless a sense of entrepreneurialism, initiative, and imagination is applied to storytelling about
the new knowledge that humanity is gaining at the messy intersections
of economic, political, social, and environmental change. While environmental tipping points amount to important cautionary tales that people
need to hear, they are difficult to act on, on their own account. Indeed it
seems that they actually become disabling if they are the only story that
people hear. There is a need for balancing narratives. In other words, the
environmental research and policy community have tended to draw
heavily on environmentalist ‘beware of the wolf’ stories that are driven by
the fear of negative outcomes, and have done too little cultural work with
what might be termed ‘golden goose’ arguments. The golden goose stories
would emphasize the wisdom – indeed necessity – of recognizing the real
underlying foundations of human flourishing.
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There are examples of policy and economic documents that could
underpin such stories. The UK Government’s Stern Review on the
economics of climate change (Stern 2006), and UN-sponsored reports on
the economics of ecosystems and biodiversity (TEEB 2010) are prominent
examples of carefully researched studies of the costs of environmental
degradation and benefits of protection. They clearly demonstrate how the
economy is founded on the functioning of a set of ecological systems that
are barely represented in day-to-day decision-making. Media representations of this central piece of environmental knowledge remain too
sparse. This is in large part because such thinking has not yet enjoyed
the kinds of cultural investment that would see them amount to widely
shared ‘Tools for Change’ (the strapline of the late 1960s Whole Earth
Catalogs). These accounts need to be geographically and thematically
diverse, and rooted in ‘human interests’, if they are to translate into a
regular flow of media stories. It is helpful that Connolly’s argument
in favour of a ‘plural matrix’ maps neatly on to the characteristics and
capabilities of contemporary media. The telling of diverse narratives of
bold human ambition and capabilities, applied to the nurturing of
humanity’s ‘golden goose’, might move even The Heretic’s hard-nosed
Diane.

References
BBC (2010), ‘Africa Talks Climate’, http://africatalksclimate.com/ (accessed 10
August 2012).
Bean, R. (2011), The Heretic (London: Oberon Modern Plays).
Boykoff, M. and Mansfield, M. (2012), ‘Media Coverage of Climate Change/Global
Warming’, http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/media_coverage/ (accessed 10
August 2012).
Clark, D.N. (2010), Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet (London: Sage
Publications).
Cohen, S. (2000), States of Denial: Knowing About Atrocities and Suffering (London:
Polity Press).
Connolly, W.E. (2002), Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press).
Eurobarometer (2011), ‘Special Eurobarometer 372: Climate Change’ (Brussels:
European Commission).
Flannery, T. (2011), ‘We Will Form a Global Community with a Set of Shared
Beliefs’, Guardian, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/video/2011/
apr/04/tim-flannery-global-shared-beliefs-video.

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Foden, G. (2011a), Turbulence (New York: Alfred Knopf).
Foden, G. (2011b) ‘Narratives, Metaphors and Tipping Points’, unpublished paper
presented to the Tipping Points workshop, British Academy, January 2011.
Funtowicz, S.O. and Ravetz, J.R. (1991), ‘A New Scientific Methodology for Global
Environmental Issues’, in R. Costanza (ed.), Ecological Economics: The Science and
Management of Sustainability (New York: Columbia University Press), 137–52.
Globescan (2011), ‘Greater Climate Concern in Developing Nations Persists’,
http://www.globescan.com/findings/?id=40 (accessed 10 August 2012).
Hulme, M. (2009), Why We Disagree About Climate Change: Understanding Controversy,
Inaction and Opportunity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Hulme, M. (2011), ‘Futures’, in R. Butler et al. (eds), Culture and Climate Change:
Recordings (Cambridge: Shed).
Manzo, K. (2010), ‘Imaging Vulnerability: The Iconography of Climate Change’,
Area, 42 (1): 96–107.
McEwan, I. (2010), Solar (London: Jonathan Cape).
Morton, O. (2011), ‘Futures’, in R. Butler et al. (eds), Culture and Climate Change:
Recordings (Cambridge: Shed).
Painter, J. (2011), ‘Poles Apart: The International Reporting of Climate Scepticism’
(Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism).
Shanahan, M. (2009), ‘Time to Adapt? Media Coverage of Climate Change in NonIndustrialised Countries’, in T. Boyce and J. Lewis (eds), Climate Change in the
Media (London: Peter Lang).
Shirky, C. (2010), Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age
(London: Allen Lane).
Simms, A. (2008), ‘The Final Countdown’, Guardian, 1 August, http://www.
guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/aug/01/climatechange.carbonemissions
(accessed 15 February 2012).
Smith, J., Clark, N., and Yusoff, K. (2007), ‘Interdependence’, Geography Compass, 1
(3): 340–59.
Steffen, A. (2003), ‘Terriblisma’, Worldchanging: Change Your Thinking, http://www.
worldchanging.com/archives/000089.html (accessed 10 August 2012).
Stern, N. (2006), The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press).
TEEB (2010), ‘The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity: Mainstreaming the
Economics of Nature: A Synthesis of the Approach, Conclusions and
Recommendations of TEEB’ (Nairobi: UNEP).
Tyszczuk, R. (2011), ‘On Constructing for the Unforeseen’, in R. Butler et al. (eds),
Culture and Climate Change: Recordings (Cambridge: Shed).
Wall, I. and Robinson, L. (2008), ‘Left in the Dark: The Unmet Need for Information
in Emergency Response’ (London: BBC World Service Trust).
Weart, S.R. (2008), The Discovery of Global Warming (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press).

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7.2
Exploring adaptive governance
for managing tipping points
EMILY BOYD

A tipping point – a process that starts off slowly and rapidly speeds up
leading to cascading effects – was identified in the 1970s in the context of
neighbourhood race relations and the spread of group behaviour through
social networks. In more recent years the concept has gained traction in the
frameworks of development planning, climate change, and ecological
resilience. Resilience theory suggests that to anticipate better and avoid
tipping points or thresholds in social-ecological systems will require
adaptive governance. This is where adapting institutions, networks, and
processes generate social learning about changes in social ecological
systems. This chapter considers how governance in the context of tipping
points differs from conventional forms of adaptation governance. While
there are an increasing number of networks and partnerships underway,
it appears that governance institutions are on the whole unable to integrate
local-level adaptation solutions with large-scale ecological governance
approaches.
In this companion piece to that by Joe Smith (7.1), I examine how
adaptive institutional responses to climate shocks may act as proxies for
institutional responses to tipping points. I offer a number of illustrative
examples of how adapting institutions can offer positive coping mechanisms through learning feedbacks that avoid maladaptation following
climate shocks. The illustrative examples presented are of systems that are
in the phase of reorganization (the ‘back loop’ in the adaptive cycle). The
idea is that a shock may result in a reorganization that maintains the system
within the desired state, yet shifts thinking to new ways of governing and
adapting to climate change. Examples of institutional reorganization
following shocks are given from the Mumbai floods of 2005, dieback in
Amazonia in 2005–10, and the Sahel drought in 2012. In the discussion, I
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reflect on the weak linkages that exist between local-level adaptations and
large-scale environmental change problem-framing, and current barriers
to adaptive governance.

The context
Environmental change is increasingly interpreted in terms of urgent,
abrupt, and large-scale transformations, or tipping points. It is also
conceived in the context of biophysical limits, as outlined by Tim Lenton
in Chapter 2.1. Tipping points feature prominently in the literature
addressing: climate change (Lenton et al. 2008; New et al. 2011); Amazonian
forests (Nepstad et al. 2008; Nobre and De Simon Borma 2009, Mahli et al.
2009; Betts et al. 2008; and Toby Gardner (4.3)); and ecological resilience
(Rockstrom et al. 2009). The idea of tipping points first originated with
Tom Schelling (1971) who applied a dynamic model of segregation in the
racial composition of neighbourhoods in the United States. Others have
used the concept to model the spread of behaviour and innovation
through social networks (e.g. Granovetter 1978; Gladwell, 2000; Watts
2002, 2003).
Where there is a tipping point, a threshold condition is overstepped and
cascades into a runaway set of events. This could be a rapid U-turn in a
policy, which is driven by protests expressing fundamental societal
preferences. The Arab Spring – a wave of revolutionary protests across the
Arab world which began in December 2010 – is an example of such a
runaway process whereby critical masses in people lead to the rapid
collapse of existing political regimes. Other chapters in this volume – Paul
Ekins (6.2), Joe Smith (7.1) – and commentaries – Paul Brown (7.3) and
Jonathan Sinclair-Wilson (7.5) – comment on the social interpretations of
this urgency. In this chapter I examine what is new about coping with
environmental tipping points by looking at the ways in which governments, businesses, and civil society are building strategies at all scales
to respond, adapt, and transform as we enter the Anthropocene. It is the
first time in human history that a complex array of global, national, and
local institutions and networks are preparing with foresight to govern the
Earth system for an uncertain future. The challenge for these institutions
is that there is limited knowledge about what types of social, political, and
economic enabling conditions need to be met to enable the successful
handling of anticipated response strategies in a timely manner.
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Emily Boyd
One challenge to governance institutions involves accounting for
biophysical threshold conditions, e.g. how a flood might trigger a change
in institutional learning. History shows that society is not always successful
in the ways that it manages change. Trade-offs, maladaptations, and
externalities are all risks that result from taking action in one arena that
may have unintended negative consequences elsewhere in space and/or
time. For example, managing water supply in one part of a river basin may
result in people downstream losing out on the benefits of improved water
availability for their upstream neighbours. Another example in the global
south is where trees and forests are protected to act as carbon sinks,
resulting in the social exclusion of entire communities, including women
and the elderly who have limited access to natural resources under
traditional land-tenure regimes. In the global north, an example would be
building an eco-village on a floodplain, which is exposed to flood risk, and
is insured currently but may not be in the future, as climate change alters
the timing and ferocity of flooding. The introductory chapter (1.1) explains
why such malfunctions in governance occur and may be becoming even
more brittle.

Adaptive governance
Adaptive governance theory explains change processes as being driven by
feedbacks mediated through leadership, networks, and social learning
(Folke et al. 2005; Boyd and Folke 2012). The overarching feature of adaptive
governance is the ‘adaptive’ dimension of governance. In order to buffer
change, resilience provides insights into the importance of diversity,
modularity, and feedbacks in governing complexity in social-ecological
systems. It is defined by Folke et al. (2005) as global in scale, in terms of the
converging trends of rapid, interconnected global change (Duit et al. 2010),
and in relation to how institutional responses and constraints interact
between scales and levels (Termeer et al. 2010), and it is inherently a
response to uncertainty and vulnerability of social and biophysical systems.
These features make adaptive governance an interesting framework for
considering how to manage tipping points. It is inherently about the
function of networks (and shadow networks) as mechanisms of learning
and building adaptive capacity. Adaptive governance stipulates comanagement and collective actions across scales (interdependence). It is a
way of thinking about preparing societies, businesses, and governments
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for large-scale and fast onset change; thus it has a temporal dimension of
great importance to managing tipping points.

Resilience and panarchy theory
Resilience and ‘coupled social ecological systems’ thinking offers ideas for
understanding the adaptive nature of change in institutions, organizations,
and groups in the context of tipping points. Resilience may be introduced
here as the ability of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while
undergoing change, and without losing its identity, function, structure, and
feedback. It can be considered as the way that communities respond to
crises and progress their pathways of development (Folke et al. 2010).
Olsson et al. (2008) drew on resilience theory to explain how the management of the Great Barrier Reef in Australia reached a tipping point, fuelled
by a sense of urgency about the increased pressure from terrestrial runoff,
overharvesting and global warming so that the reef, as a coupled social
ecological system, was transformed into a sustainable and integrated
management model. The transformation process included a shift in governance from a focus on chosen individual reefs to a broader stewardship
of the large-scale reef system. In theory, the closer a system is to a tipping
point, the lower its resilience and the smaller the shock needed to shift the
regime. Resilience can also therefore be thought of as ‘the capacity of a
linked social-ecological system to absorb recurrent disturbances, such as
hurricanes or floods, so as to retain essential structures, processes and
feedbacks’ (Adger et al. 2005).
Panarchy theory (see Chapter 1.1) explains that the basis for change lies
in the adaptive cycle (Gunderson and Holling 2002). The adaptive cycle
contains four phases:
•
•
•
•

Rapid growth (r) – typically characterized by pioneer species, innovators or entrepreneurs;
Conservation (K) – where resources are increasingly available and
locked up in existing structures;
Release (omega) – that is often triggered by a disturbance (e.g. fire,
flood, disease) which exceeds the system’s resilience;
Reorganization and renewal (alpha) – where invention, experimentation and re-assortment are common.

The adaptive cycle has two ways of responding to change. The r and K
phases operate together and are called the ‘front loop’, and the omega and
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alpha phases are considered the ‘back loop’. The front loop characterizes
the development phase and it features things like the accumulation of
capital, stability, conservation, and development. Empirical studies of
complex adaptive systems often focus on the front loop, which are systems
that are undergoing gradual change, such as forest conservation (but see
Ashlin 2009). In contrast, this chapter considers systems that are in the
phase of reorganization (the back loop) following a fast and abrupt change.
The idea is that a shock may result in a reorganization that maintains the
system within the desired state, yet shifts thinking to new ways of framing,
adapting to, and governing, climate shocks (Ashlin 2009). Thus, given the
fast and abrupt change generated in the adaptive cycle, new forms of
governance are emerging, which navigate the barriers to sustainability via
networks and multi-sector learning platforms (e.g. see Ashlin 2012).

Adaptive governance and institutional fit
One emerging framework developed from the observation of several
hundred cases of ecosystems management over the past twenty years is
‘adaptive governance’, which emphasizes complexity, rather than the
steady-state equilibrium, as a pre-determinant of successful governance.
The concept of adaptive governance focuses on the organizational and
institutional flexibility for dealing with uncertainty and change (Dietz et al.
2003; Folke et al. 2005). Fundamental to this framework is a multi-scalar
approach, which acknowledges and integrates the knowledge of a diversity
of stakeholders to inform resource allocation decisions (Folke et al. 2005).
Adaptive governance requires the formation of social networks, formal or
informal, which create opportunities for collective action, engagement, and
learning (Olsson et al. 2006). Adaptive processes within networks are then
fostered by learning mechanisms, which generate and disseminate
information (Folke et al. 2005; Olsson et al. 2006).
Adaptive governance is an ‘ideal’ form of environmental governance
that consists of four principles: (1) explicit understanding of the system;
(2) monitoring; (3) flexibility in management and administration through
networks; and (4) strategies that prepare for ‘surprise’. Adaptive governance requires adapting institutions:
The capacity of people, from local groups and private actors, to the state, to
international organisations, to deal with complexity, uncertainty and the
interplay between gradual and rapid change.
(Boyd and Folke 2012: 3)

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Adapting institutions are evident at the local level in self-organized
institutions and networks, and leaders, in public institutions that are
responding to uncertainty and complexity, and in multilevel, hybrid
institutions that are coping with environmental crisis (Boyd and Folke
2012). The adaptation processes are normative in as far as principles of
fairness and effectiveness are embedded in co-management regimes. In
theory one could have an adaptive system that is not equitable but still
capable of adjusting to surprise: however there is limited empirical work
on this.

The challenge of institutional fit
The challenge of institutional fit is the trade-off between robustness/
efficient approaches to existing problems and the flexibility and redundancy required to meet new challenges. In essence, organizations have
developed responses for one problem set and are not readily adapted for
other problems. This is the key to ‘the challenge of the fit’ (Folke et al. 2005).
Olsson et al. (2006: 29) highlight the problem of fit in the example of the
management of watersheds, which have specific area/system boundaries,
but where the administrative boundaries and the area of the watershed do
not correspond. The mismatch of boundaries could be across national
borders or at the local county and municipal level. They suggest that it is
often the case that the jurisdictional, administrative, and institutional
responses are not well matched with the biophysical system boundaries,
due to historical reasons of national security or ethnic specificity. This
suggests a need for flexibility in governance structures (Dietz et al. 2003) to
allow for ecosystem-based management and stewardship of multifunctional landscapes and seascapes (Folke et al. 2005), while incorporating
diverse features of governance that allow for ecosystem stewardship and
relationships to multiple and cross-scale complex social-ecological
interactions (Duit and Galaz 2008).

From principles to practice of adaptive governance
The illustrative examples presented here are of systems that are in the
phase of reorganization (the back loop). The idea is that a shock may result
in a reorganization that maintains the system within the desired state, yet
shifts thinking to new ways of governing and adapting to climate change.
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Amazon dieback
Peter Cox and colleagues (Cox et al. 2000) were among the first scientists
to make predictions about the collapse of Amazonian rainforest by 2050.
They presented a scenario that climate change impacts on the region of
Amazonia would risk climate-induced forest dieback converting large
areas of tropical forests to savannah by the end of the twenty-first century.
While many were sceptical at first, two consecutive droughts in 2005 and
2010 (discussed by Toby Gardner (4.3)) have caused scientists to ask
questions about the potential irreversible damage of the combination of
deforestation, changing precipitation patterns, fire, and rising global
temperatures. Forecasting and monitoring of Amazonia has become more
integral to detecting early warning signals since then. A report by the
World Bank (Vergara and Scholz 2011) suggests that dieback in Amazonia
– one of several major, non-linear, positive-feedback responses to global
warming – has the potential to create major disruptions in global climate
systems (see also Patricia Howard (4.2)). It also calls for governance of
deforestation (despite a notable decrease since 2005). Deforestation is
largely driven by cattle ranching, large-scale soybean cultivation, and
commodity markets, opening up roads and access for small-scale farming
settlements.
The experience of the 2005 Amazonian drought provides important
lessons about the adaptive governance response capacity. Brazil experienced one of the worst droughts in thirty years, compounded by extensive
forest fires. The cause appears to have been warmer global temperatures,
which led to measurable increases in ocean surface temperatures in the
Atlantic and, ultimately, lower rainfall across several regions of the country
(Aragão et al. 2008). The drought impacted the northeast, as well as
southwest and western Amazonia. A state of emergency was called, and
the Brazilian government mobilized its army to provide water and medical
supplies to isolated communities and contend with the intense forest fires
in Brazil’s western state of Acre. The resulting smoke pollution affected
more than 400,000 people, and the fire damaged more than 300,000 ha of
rainforest; direct costs amounted to more than US $50 million (Brown et al.
2006). The true monetary and health costs could be far higher as the
widespread damage caused to forest cover has made the area more
susceptible to repeated burning.
What was particularly important about the 2005 Amazonian drought
was the speed and magnitude of the events that unfolded. An important
insight is that ecological systems do not respond to stress (such as high
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temperatures or extreme weather events) in a linear or predictable manner.
In fact, even small disturbances can bring about large and sometimes
irreversible changes. In the case of forest dieback it is still debated whether
a small change can bring about large-scale change. Nevertheless, the
governance system that tackled the 2005 crisis was unconventional both in
its rapid response and in the establishment of a situation room, extensive
networks, and reliance on available information on the internet. One may
wonder whether such a ‘flexible’ governance system can be institutionalized, strengthened, or replicated to cope with the future climaterelated surprises.
Elsewhere I have explained that critical to the disaster response was
the availability of the adaptive governance ingredients of early warning,
effective actors, and rapid self-organizing action, with strong feedback
data-gathering (Boyd 2008). This process included satellite imagery, hotspot data and meteorological data, which first persuaded the Governor
of Acre to act by prohibiting fires. Near-real-time data on hot-spot distributions, derived from MODIS (moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer) images and custom-designed analysis software, were
voluntarily made available to state government officials by a team of
NASA-supported scientists working on the large-scale biosphere–
atmosphere experiment in Amazonia (http://lba.cptec.inpe.br/lba/site/).
The Acre government in turn established a ‘situation room’ staffed by two
civil defence coordinators, three state employees from INPE (the national
space agency) and several researchers and students from the LBA-ECO
team. Using both satellite imagery and on-the-ground information, the
team provided daily briefings by email on the locations of fires to the local
authorities and the Brazilian army, helping to coordinate and focus state
and national efforts. Following the successful response to the crisis, access
to the China Brazil Earth Resources Satellite (CBERS) second-generation
satellite imagery is now granted to Brazilian institutions and more widely
across South America. The CBERS has been successfully up-scaled by the
provision of free-of-charge CBERS data (www.dgi.inpe.br/CDSR). CBERS
has also launched a CBERS project for Africa (Epiphanio 2008). The
Environmental Institute of Acre has also since established a permanent
situation room that incorporates the use of multiple satellite sensors to
monitor the extent of fire and drought conditions (Berkes and Seixas 2004).
The gravity of the drought in 2010 has led experts to renew their interest
in Amazonia. For example, in 2011 the EU 7th Framework research programme and various national organizations funded a new €4.7 million
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research project called AMAZALERT to establish a multilevel early
warning system for the whole region. This project includes fourteen
European and Latin American institutions under the leadership of Dr Bart
Kruijt, of Wageningen University, and Dr Carlos Nobre, of the Brazilian
National Space Research Institute (INPE). They plan to design a dataretrieval procedure to detect the signs of widespread forest degradation,
and to enable early warning if irreversible forest loss appears plausible.
The project will also assess the impacts and effectiveness of public policies
and mechanisms to prevent further deforestation. Over three years,
scientists and decision-makers will engage in dialogue to develop the
models and to contribute to a blueprint for an early warning system. The
project aims to provide tools for decision-makers on future management
and monitoring of Amazonia (Wageningen University and Research
Centre 2011). What is unclear with the emergence of large-scale early
warning systems is how local adaptation arrangements are factored into
the system. If the governance of early warning is predominantly at global
and national scales, is there a risk that important local sources of risk
knowledge and collective memory will be overlooked? Taking a cue from
Chapter 1.1, this response could lead to maladaptations by legitimizing a
‘one size fits all’ policy, such as Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and
Forest Degradation (REDD), which does not account for complex and
diverse ecosystems and may penalize activities that help to restore
ecosystems (Hurteau 2008; cf. Ostrom 2010) and which could lead to potential implementation problems with negative impacts on local communities.
In other words, ‘solving problems through centralized controls and global
blueprints tends to create its own vulnerabilities in the long term’ (Boyd
2009: 3; cf. Ostrom 2010). If new mechanisms such as REDD are to work in
practice they will also have to consider lessons on the barriers to local
engagement (Hall 2012: 22).

The Sahel drought
The Horn of Africa is currently experiencing one of the most severe
droughts in 60 years. In addition to the 30-year trend of declining precipitation, there is evidence that variability in amount and timing of rainfall
from year to year is increasing, which would further compound food
insecurity in the region (UNEP 2011). An accompanying trend of higher
temperatures – estimated to be equivalent to an additional 10 to 20 per cent
reduction in rainfall in its impact on crops – has exacerbated the reduced
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and increasingly variable rainfall. Air temperatures in the area have
increased by over 1 ºC since the 1970s. As with rainfall, there is evidence
that average annual temperatures have become more variable as well.
During roughly the same time that these trends in temperature and rainfall
have made rain-fed agriculture less secure, the combined population of
Darfur and South Sudan has roughly tripled (UNEP 2011).
Research conducted by Sendzimir et al. (2011) on the ‘re-greening of the
Sahel’ illustrates an example of the solutions to the problems that are
currently facing East Africa through adaptive institutions in the Niger
region. They found in their study that a massive reforestation of 5 million
hectares has taken place in the past 20 years in the Maradi and Zinder
regions of Niger. They explain that these solutions emerged from
interactions between multiple actors, institutions, and processes that were
operating at different levels, times, and scales, and which contributed to
this recovery in terms of biophysical, livelihoods, and governance
challenges. The key finding of their study shows that ‘reversing the
direction of reinforcing feedbacks in existing processes’ can break ‘bad’
patterns of interaction and poor management of natural resources. Bad
practice began with the colonial structures that weakened rural governance
structures and redirected the economy for export. This was followed by a
period (1935 to 1970) when resources and institutions were centralized, and
large-scale tree clearance for land use occurred. Conditions were exacerbated by the 1970s drought conditions, resulting in large-scale famine.
A reversal of interactions started in the 1980s with a push from the
international community for better management of natural resources and
a political vacuum which emerged following the death of a highly
respected political leader, President Kountché. A ‘window of opportunity’
opened up for local-level communities to take action at this time.
The adaptive response emerged through a co-evolution of local village
committees with improved functional ties to regional and national
organizations. Ties were built between institutions and across scales, thus
breaking the ‘pathological dominance from the national government’
(Sendzimir et al. 2011: 12). The study shows that the assistance of international NGOs helped to establish direct linkages to national governments
in ways that built new healthy relations, thus breaking down old power
relations that had been institutionalized by corrupt forest officers. New
local organizations were supported and rebuilt by international projects
and programmes. Similarly to the case of Amazonia, external funding and
support played a role in creating the response capacity. Currently Niger is
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resilient enough to sustain itself under normal conditions and withstand
drought better than many other countries in the region, but it remains at
risk from growing demographic pressures (doubling its population since
1920) (Sendzimir et al. 2011).

Urban mega-cities flood risk
A key social ecological tipping point that is currently overlooked is the risk
of urban exposure to climate change. The IPCC (2001) and more recently
the IPCC (2012) Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events
and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation (SREX) warn of
climate risks to low-lying coastal cities like Mumbai, which are likely to
face the brunt of sea-level rise and salt-water intrusion into underground
aquifers. Moreover, some models indicate that the intensity of heavy
rainfall events may increase, whilst the number of rainy days may decrease
along India’s coastal zones (Challinor et al. 2006). Mumbai-Pune, located
on the west coast of Maharashtra, has the highest number of people (50
million) exposed to coastal flooding, with unprecedented growth and
development of all the Asian mega-cities (Nicholls et al. 2008). Mumbai is
occasionally hit by cyclones and by frequent periods of heavy rainfall. The
main concern for Mumbai is that much of the vulnerable poor live in the
low-lying parts of the city most at risk from flooding (Huq et al. 2007).
In 2005 the city of Mumbai experienced severe flooding across 100 km2,
resulting in the death of over a thousand people and significant damage to
property. In the space of 24 hours the city received 95 cm of rainfall – a
‘once in a 100 year’ event. The event caught city residents unaware. Revi
(2005) recalls that the majority of the city services were shut for five days,
a first in the history of the city. The unprecedented rainfall affected both
wealthy and poor Mumbaikars, with people trapped away from their
homes, telephone landlines and mobile phone services cut, and city
transport halted for up to 24 hours. The most affected area of the city was
the densely populated area of the northwest, inhabited by a mixture of
social groups. The main cause was inundation, which was brought about
by the accumulation of heavy local rainfall and draining congestion; the
drainage process was unable to match the rate of rainfall coupled with the
high tide (Kelkar 2005).
Efforts to address climate change at the city level are largely driven by
NGOs, activists, and university groups, and include urban ‘greening’,
conservation area protection, and local pollution-prevention campaigns.
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Some call for engagement of politicians and elites in helping to address
climate change in urban planning (Revi 2008). De Sherbinin et al. (2007)
suggest that because Mumbai’s formal institutions are too many and too
weak, hope for climate change adaptive action is most likely to come from
strong civil society organizations, such as the national slum-dwellers
federation, with support from the overseas diaspora. Yet, the Municipal
Corporation of Mumbai plays an important bridging role in the city, and
points out that it lacks funds to support city-level change to prepare for
long-term climate change.
In the aftermath of the floods a variety of government-supported actions
sprang up, indicating that some level of institutional learning had taken
place. The response to the crisis was almost immediate, with NGOs and
civil society joining forces to launch the Concerned Citizens’ Commission
(CCC) only three weeks after the event on 4 August 2005 (CCC 2005).
The CCC acted as a bridging organization between local humanitarian
organizations, families, and individual slum-dwellers, which in turn acted
collectively and cooperatively in response to the crisis, while the official
response was less effective, despite the existence of city disaster risk
management plans. Although the city’s officials have come under scrutiny
from the CCC for ineffective institutional responses, since 2005 officials
from the Municipal Corporation of Mumbai have introduced thirty early
warning rain gauges across the city that are able to monitor rainfall every
15 minutes and update every hour during heavy rainfall (Chatterjee 2010),
and new satellite technology is anticipated to help monitor rainfall. A new
project is underway, funded by the local authorities, which aims to tackle
sewage and waterways, as well as map the city, using aerial photography.
Local government funds have also been provided to support interdisciplinary scientific research at the India Institute of Technology into the
impacts and solutions to flooding impacts in Mumbai.
Following the floods, a change in opinion among some of the elite, the
decision-makers, and organizations that govern Mumbai has been
observed, indicating a shift in perception about the risks of climate change.
For example, a Climate Action Plan for Mumbai has been announced,
financed by the state of Maharastra, which aims to examine projected
climate change impacts on hydrology and water resources, agriculture,
coastal areas, marine ecosystems, and livelihoods, including impacts on
migration in Mumbai (Ghoge 2010). More recently, the city has been
putting in place coastal defences to protect the city from breaches from the
sea, based on a longer-term adaptation perspective. While these large-scale
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infrastructural and engineering solutions are important for the citizens
of Mumbai, the CCC also provided the government with recommendations for a broader multi-layered approach to adaptation and mitigation.
Nevertheless, the Municipal Corporation of Mumbai has opted for a
narrower technical and infrastructural development approach to flood risk
and adaptation predominantly, which does not consider flood risk as one
of unequal distribution of resources (Chatterjee 2010). Plans and strategies
for Mumbai are similar to those developed for many other cities in that
they tend to focus on large-scale technological solutions. To build longterm resilience and sustainability Mumbai will also need to think about
issues of risk mitigation, risk sharing and risk redistribution and about
how marginalization is linked to risk governance and vulnerability
(Chatterjee 2010).

Patterns and limits of adaptive governance
This chapter now draws on the resilience lens and the metaphor of the
adaptive cycle of change to reflect on three examples of how institutions
reorganize following rapid and sudden shocks. Sendzimir and colleagues
(2011) lend three important insights to help us to think through what the
examples show. First, crises can result in the formation of rapid communication and reactive policy responses that are single-issue explanations,
often with narrow technical framings: these often lead to failure (as was
the case in the management of the Sahel crises in the 1970s). Secondly there
is no silver bullet: in the case of the Sahel, NGOs stepped in where the state
was weak, and the lack of centralized control opened up an opportunity
for local small-scale adaptations through agro-ecological experimentations
to take shape. The platform and local networks were supported by outside
(NGO) ideas, knowledge, and funds. Thirdly, what is most important is
the reversibility of the reinforcing feedbacks in adjustment processes. For
example, the incidence of farmer-led natural regeneration in the Sahel was
a result of sufficient time passing for this type of innovation to become more
familiar, backed by the appropriate knowledge and resources from
international organizations.
The 2005 Mumbai floods are revealing because of the magnitude of
coupled social-ecological risks facing urban areas. Mumbai shows how
extreme poverty co-exists with environmental risk in a resilient city where
there is a burgeoning middle class and financial centre with property prices
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equivalent to London, Paris, and New York. However, given that the whole
cityscape of Mumbai persists on the poverty margins with little or no
buffering capacity, it requires that the introduction of complex adaptation
strategies be implemented through the leadership of the Municipal
Corporation of Mumbai. In this regard, the public institution is providing
adaptation arrangements, but there are problems over who should fund
this provision, given that the benefits fall to individuals and private entities.
Moreover, in India the risks of climate change are linked to its aversion to
accept external interference in its adaptation strategies and policies. The
events of 2005 illustrate that institutional responses in India can be reactive
and self-organizing among civil society, but are limited due to the presence
of too many uncoordinated government institutions. De Sherbinin et al.
(2007) suggest that a more radical transformation is necessary which
involves moving the low-lying old city of Mumbai to the suburbs. This
introduces normative and ethical questions about whether this is a
desirable strategy. This example shows that reorganization in the back loop
of the adaptive cycle cannot be about structural and technological fixes
alone, but also needs to incorporate reorganization of social and ethical
considerations (Chatterjee 2010). Adaptive governance challenges in a
highly human-dominated system like Mumbai encompass basic infrastructure impediments, as the city is historically located on a delta that is
unable to absorb the multiple shocks induced by today’s societal needs.
What is certain, however, is that Mumbai’s city officials and citizens will
have to engage in changing urban planning practices and factor neighbourhood integration for adaptation into everyday life (Revi 2005).
In Amazonia, it is evident that the governance and management
strategies have in the past fallen short of adequately protecting both people
and ecosystems. To blame are both global economic demand for raw
materials, minerals, and agricultural commodities and weak enforcement
of policies at the national level. In Brazil, federal command and control
structures have failed to deliver forest conservation (Fearnside 2005), and
state-level administration has failed to enforce the law relating to forests
and land-use change or to provide incentives to reduce deforestation
(Chomitz et al. 2006). More recently, scientists have shown that establishing
and implementing protected areas in zones under a high level of current
or future anthropogenic threat in Amazonia offers high payoffs in reducing
carbon emissions and as a result should receive special attention in
planning investment priorities for regional conservation (Soares-Filho
et al. 2010). It seems that Brazilian environmental policy has created a
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sustainable core of protected areas in the Amazon that buffers against
potential climate-tipping points and protects the drier ecosystems of the
basin (Walker et al. 2009).
As in the case of the Sahel, it is perhaps a window of opportunity that
international scientific institutions and funding are stepping up to the plate.
While the 2005 drought response illustrated a particularly important role
for the state, future integration of international funds and national/regional
organizations in adaptation measures is likely to occur. Any attempt to
manage Amazonia will require a suite of approaches and mechanisms,
such as local innovations and scientific research, coupled with national
regulation and markets. National institutions will need to provide better
extension support, agricultural implements and technology to farmers,
regulate medium and large agribusinesses, and prioritize those areas most
threatened and vulnerable in the ‘crescent of deforestation’ covering the
regions south and east (see also Toby Gardner (4.3)).

Limits to adaptive governance
Some say that historical reflections are a limited guide to the future. Davis
(2004) gives the example of urban areas, which he points out are ‘evolving
with “extraordinary” speed and in directions that are unpredictable’. He
explains that in this rapid process the accumulation of poverty undermines
security and poses vast challenges to the survival mechanisms of the poor.
While it is not necessarily appropriate to rely on past understandings to
predict climate futures, it is also not possible to predict the future with
certainty. We can use existing metaphors to think about the possible
outcomes. The adaptive cycle and tipping points as metaphors help to
illustrate, in the case of climate-related shocks, how institutions and
social systems respond to rapid and shock events. The limitations lie in
the need to draw on historical references of ‘what happened’ in the period
of ‘creative destruction’ in the adaptive cycle. Moreover, the practical
application to what this means for buffering future events to save lives
needs further thought. The adaptive cycle specifically is a useful metaphor
as it allows us to think about ways in which societies reorganize and
respond to uncertainty. As these cases show, there are old and new crosssectoral climate partnerships and networks that mobilize across scales.
Nevertheless, while examples are informative to begin our discussions, our
collective understanding of how to reorganize on a global scale remains a
much greater challenge.
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276

Commentary 7.3
Reflections of a journalist
PAUL BROWN

A ‘tipping point’ is a useful phrase for a journalist. It is one of those bits of
jargon used to describe a situation where some bad events begin to happen
ever more rapidly and cannot be reversed. The term is borrowed from
scientists who, my colleagues say, use it to describe the same continuous
or discontinuous sequence of events. But in their perspective a tipping
point can sometimes be reversible, as pointed out by Tim Lenton in Chapter
2.1. This provides a recipe for considerable public and journalistic misunderstanding and confusion.
The simplest illustration of this confusion in environmental terms (to a
journalist) is the melting of the Greenland ice cap. Once the temperature
reaches a certain level – say, 1°C warmer than present – the Greenland ice
cap will begin progressively more rapidly to melt, and not stop melting
until it is gone. Whether it is a 1°C or 2°C increase in temperature that will
push the ice cap into unstoppable ice melt is up for scientific debate: and
how quickly the melting will take place is likewise a matter of conjecture.
What is certain (and of interest to journalists) is the catastrophic consequences of reaching that point for many of the world’s cities located on
low-lying coastlines.
Politically there are tipping points too. In the recent Arab Spring there
comes a point when the old regime cannot hang on, and the revolution,
velvet or violent, is bound to succeed. The characteristic of both tipping
points is that there is no going back to the status quo. Greenland will not
suddenly get cold again and the same tyrants will not resume power.
Scientists studying behaviour and journalists reporting in other fields
could both use the term and there would be no misunderstanding. For
example, consider describing situations in which rioting occurs. The
tipping point in this case for both journalist and academic reports would
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be the police shooting of an unarmed suspect. The shooting is the tipping
point that precipitates public disorder that then escalates into riots. This is
an example of a tipping point that can be reversed by political action and
public order restored.
As Joe Smith tells us, global warming is a difficult subject nowadays to
get news desks interested in, which is why tipping points in the context of
escalating transformation become so important. Journalists struggle to sell
a story to their news desks because science in this area is incremental rather
than a series of easily reportable ‘new’ discoveries. The politics too,
particularly lately, have been glacial and at best inconclusive. A tipping
point is therefore an interesting idea about which an invigorated discussion
can take place. A good example is the long-running debate about parts per
million by volume of carbon dioxide in the global atmosphere. What is the
tipping point at which global warming begins to escalate, becomes
runaway, and therefore unstoppable, thus ensuring most of the human race
will be consigned to oblivion? Is the tipping point 350, 400, or 450 parts per
million by volume of carbon dioxide? Discuss this and you will get your
story in the paper. The key point is that it is irreversible. Politicians (and
scientists) are seemingly fiddling while ensuring that the Earth burns.
Let us be controversial here. The difficulty in finding a hard and fast new
fact on which to base a news story has been made worse by the weaknesses
and fears of the scientific community. Scientists have retired to their
bunkers aware of the power of the climate deniers to make their lives
miserable. There has been a staggering campaign against scientists.
Journalists have failed to expose this concerted, highly sophisticated, and
frequently illegal persecution of scientists, and consequently failed to assist
them in standing up to this powerful political lobby. This is surprising since
the effort to discredit the science is paid for largely by the fossil fuel lobby
and free market fanatics who are not particularly popular with newspaper
journalists and the internet community. The motives of this dangerous
bunch should have been questioned at every opportunity – but have not
been.
In 25 years of covering climate change, initially at least, I thought there
would be a tipping point when the overwhelming scientific consensus on
the need for action, backed by Nicholas Stern and other economists, would
finally tip the politicians into action. Lately it has been clear that this will
not happen, and partly this has been due to the rapid disappearance of the
mainstream media and its replacement by internet communication in all its
forms. This has undermined objective, science- and fact-based journalism,
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which needs time and resources to get it right. The internet is instant, and
leaves no room for either. Anything goes, and when it comes to serious
issues like climate change, a lot of what is reported is simply rubbish.
There are lots of other factors that make the reporting of climate issues
difficult. Newspapers, radio, television, and blogs are obsessed with
the size of their audience. Content is dictated by the need to survive.
Thousands of newspapers and magazines have died in the last ten years,
particularly in the United States, where much serious journalism has
disappeared. This is why British newspapers are now among the best read
in the world – online. It is impossible to buy a print version of any serious
newspaper in many North American cities.
Within news organizations battles have to be fought to get climate
change reported. Eyes of news editors and editors glaze over at mention
of the issue. Offered the choice of the prosecution of an international
footballer for a racial slur, or a piece on the displacement of a million people
because of climate change, there would be no contest. You might get
somewhere on the climate story if all the one million had reached a political
tipping point and decided the only way to get their message across was to
get in boats, arrive in the south of England, and ask for a new homeland.
Then it would be an interesting immigration story.
Journalists need to be able to use simple triggers or hooks to capture the
news editor’s attention – ‘new’, ‘the first time’, ‘never before’. A tipping
point provides a trigger for environmental journalists, a bad situation
getting worse with no return to the status quo. But it has to be a real tipping
point. A drought with some dieback of trees is reversible, a tipping point
beyond which the forest cannot recover is another much more newsworthy
event altogether. When we use these words, all of us need to be clear
exactly what we mean.

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Commentary 7.4
Making sense of the world
CAMILLA TOULMIN

We all use mental maps and various models to make sense of the world,
and understand how the different elements relate to each other. Some
of these models are based on close observation of cause and effect,
while others rely on a looser set of assumptions. In the first case, the
biophysical world provides many settings in which we can be fairly sure
that one set of actions will produce a given result. For example, planting
a belt of trees will provide a sufficient windbreak for crops, animals, and
pastures on the leeward side, thereby significantly increasing their
productivity.
But in many other cases, particularly where people and decision-making
are involved, we have to work with far looser connections, and less
confidence in cause and effect. As a policy-focused research centre, the
International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) works
with a ‘theory of change’ that is based on a set of assumptions around the
importance of well-crafted information, ideas, and evidence. We seek to
address what we would like to believe to be a benign, far-sighted political
leadership, ready to listen and act on sound evidence, as part of a
government responsive to the needs of citizens rather than narrow selfserving interests of particular lobby groups.
In practice, we recognize that many of these assumptions are only
partially true and consequently we need to adapt our activities to cope with
the existence of short-sighted politics, psychological denial, and the power
of certain interests to both contest sound science and ensure government acts in their favour (see 6.7). We also recognize that government is
not the only actor that counts, and hence the importance of working
through citizen engagement, and encouraging competition amongst
business leaders to show stronger sustainability credentials.
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Many of us imagined that in Copenhagen in 2009, world leaders would
make bold, courageous choices in favour of cutting greenhouse gas
emissions, putting aside various biases for the benefit of humanity. We
were wrong. We had failed to factor in the lock-in inertia in our economic
patterns, the interests spearing our political systems, and the unwillingness
of our politicians to take long-term decisions that might bring short-term
electoral costs.
Mental models are clearly important in helping us debate the choices
we face as global citizens, and the consequences of choosing a given
pathway. Our readiness to accept a particular vision of the world is based
on various factors, beyond rational acceptance of evidence. Kahan (2012)
shows that adherence to a particular social group and its associated values
may be more important than a careful weighing up of scientific arguments. He notes that people tend to filter out information and attitudes
that would tend to drive a wedge between themselves and their peers
(see also 3.2).
The study of global environmental change offers plenty of room for close
observation of the biophysical and the human dimensions, as well as their
multiple interactions. Communicating the complexity of global environmental change has been a big challenge, for which the concept of ‘tipping
points’ has offered a valuable metaphor (see 3.1 and 7.1), although it brings
its own baggage.
There have been key moments in recent and more distant history when
the pattern of ideas has undergone major shift and re-adjustment. Such
movement does not happen all at once. Historically, we can point to Galileo
and Copernicus whose ideas and writings confirmed a radical shift in
people’s conception of the Earth’s place in the universe; or to Hutton and
Darwin, for their proof of the dizzying length of time that must have passed
for particular geological features to have been produced, and for the slow
painstaking process of evolution to generate such marked differences in
animal and plant varieties.
More recently we have seen acceptance by governments and publics of
the link between smoking and lung cancer, which has led to smoking bans
in public places and controls on advertising. On the environmental front,
one of the key insights of Barbara Ward, founder of IIED, has now started
to take hold, 30 years after her death. This is that the cumulative actions of
individual people and nations can collectively render our planet Earth unfit
for human life. Having seemed limitless in scope and scale, this planet is
showing its biophysical limits. In a world of scarcity and limits, Ward
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Camilla Toulmin
argued that it will be vital to address inequality, and provide means to
privilege the needs of the many over the wants of the few.
Social theorists suggest that it can take 30–40 years for new ideas to
become accepted and integrated as the new norm. Humankind exhibits a
wide range of responses to new thinking – from denial, argument, and
resistance, to broad acceptance, integration, and regulation (see also Sara
Parkin in Chapter 6.3). As creatures of habit, with considerable investment
in tried and tested ways of doing business, it often takes great force to
achieve changes in behaviour, given the inertia, cognitive capture, and the
press of interests keen to keep things as they are. The forces pushing back
on achieving change can be evermore potent when there is a mismatch
between the politico-administrative unit and the scale of the problem, as
we see with nation states grappling with global challenges yet constrained
by domestic interests, sovereignty, and competition.

Climate change and development
At IIED, we have focused on building resilience to climate change, by
strengthening existing mechanisms and introducing new ways to cope
with change. Such actions are premised on the costs of preparation for
hazards usually being much smaller than the costs of coping with impacts
after the event, and on the value of local knowledge and expertise in
understanding and responding to shifting local conditions. There is a
growing body of expertise around community-based adaptation (CBA),
drawn in part from research in the 1970s and 1980s on coping with drought
and establishing early warning systems. The six annual international
workshops on CBA organized by IIED have also now built up a global
constituency of people and ideas, able to share learning and offer practical
insights. Key elements from the field of building resilience include:
•
•
•
•
•

282

Recognizing local rights and agency, to manage and control access to
resources;
Supporting diverse livelihoods, putting eggs into many baskets;
Bridging local and modern science, in ways which recognize their
complementary value;
Supporting the revolution in ICT to maximize connectivity and access
to information;
Investing in social infrastructure and social learning, through building
cooperation, trust, and mutual obligations;

Making sense of the world
•
•

Setting up safety nets, for food or income support, and establishing
payments for ecosystem services;
Building low-carbon collective infrastructure, especially for water,
transport, and energy.

In Europe and North America, we have much to learn from adaptation
and resilience in poorer countries. Our current economic models are
pushing us in the opposite direction from resilience, leading to increased
fragility in our economic and social infrastructure, through ‘just in time’
sourcing, long elaborate supply chains, few local connections, and eroded
social capital.
Given the slow global response to cutting greenhouse gases, we now
face the likelihood of a 3–4 degree rise in average temperatures by midcentury. Hence, adaptation will be critical to enable people to survive and
hopefully prosper. Adaptation is not cost-free. While there may be multiple
ways in which people cope with change, it tends to absorb resources that
could have been used in other ways. Equally, it should be remembered that
there are limits to adaptation. Language amongst donors and analysts
asserts the availability of innovations which can bring ‘win–win–win’
solutions for climate adaptation, low-carbon mitigation, and pro-poor
growth, sometimes referred to as the ‘sweet spot’. Such optimistic language
needs to be tempered by recognition of the fundamental unfairness of
climate impacts affecting poor people and vulnerable countries most of all.
The Rio+20 summit was another opportunity to get our political leaders
to focus attention on the challenges of sustainability. In contrast to COP15
(the Copenhagen climate change summit) in 2009, most observers had
fewer ambitions for the outcome of such a global summit. With an outcome
document with few if any commitments, even these low expectations were
barely met. Our political leaders seem to be way behind many of their
voters. The multilateral system is at a low ebb, but it is unclear how long
the tide will be out. There is an absence of trust between nations, and the
continued unhelpful dichotomy of developed versus developing countries,
through the maintenance of the G77, no longer represents global reality
and its greater complexity. International negotiation tactics are taken from
the trade sector, with many country negotiators coming from a GATT and
WTO background, where there is an emphasis on win–lose, rather than
everyone contributing to a collective goal.
We hope that the next three years’ work to draw up a set of sustainable
development goals (SDGs), as agreed in Rio, could offer a better place to
focus attention. The post-2015 agenda needs to be built up from below, and
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to address the multiple priorities of low- and middle-income countries as
well as bringing change to the consumption patterns of rich nations.

Reference
Kahan, D. (2012), ‘Why We Are Poles Apart on Climate Change’, Nature, 488: 255.

284

Commentary 7.5
Endgame
JONATHAN SINCLAIR-WILSON

HAMM (anguished): What’s happening, what’s happening?
CLOV: Something is taking its course.
(Samuel Beckett, Endgame)

Metaphors are revelatory. At least successful ones are. They expand our
understanding, but they hardly provide explanations. ‘Juliet is the sun’?
On the other hand, as Susan Sontag’s caustic assault showed, they can be
misleading or worse, obstructive; particularly when trying to grapple with
life-threatening conditions such as cancer or HIV/AIDS, where what is
required is diagnosis and treatment, and explanation that offers at least the
prospect of management or even cure (Sontag 1978).
So are tipping points, or rather ‘tipping points’, a metaphor, and if so
an illuminating or an obscuring one – faced as we are with the mounting
and incontrovertible evidence of damage to the life-support systems on
which we all depend, and the need above all for diagnoses and effective
responses?
‘The final straw’ may be a metaphor for a tipping point, and one that
results in abrupt, irreversible, and systemic, or at least structural, change.
But we don’t have to rely on analogical understanding to grasp the idea of
an incremental variation that passes a critical threshold, resulting in a
fundamental change of state. So while the graphic sense of ‘tipping’ may
apply better to some such changes than others, such as the potentially
reversible tipping of scales, or the potentially irreversible tipping of a glass
of wine, it stretches ‘metaphor’ out of shape to think that ‘tipping points’
is one (unless we go to the vertiginous, and vacuous, lengths of saying all
language is metaphor).

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Behind the idea of it as a metaphor there may however be a different
and also troubling thought: that what we see as critical thresholds, or
tipping points, are a construct of our own forms of explanation, imposed
on rather than reflective of an underlying reality which would require a
different approach if we were ever properly to grasp it. Again, we don’t
need to go to the lengths of speculating on a metaphysical realm that puts
what is really going on permanently out of our reach, but the worry is
nonetheless salutary. It reminds us that, faced with the immense complexity of the natural and social worlds we are trying to encompass and –
as far as possible – manage, identifying and relating all the relevant causal
factors involved is anything but straightforward, and the lines we fear to
cross over may simply be ones we’ve drawn ourselves.
Yet, even if we recognize that abruptness is relative to the frame of
reference applied, that irreversibility – at least where that means more than
the sense in which all change is irreversible or the continuous fulfilment of
the second law of thermodynamics – may be a function of our limited
knowledge, and that the system subject to change is one that exists first and
foremost through our construction, it remains hard to deny that radical and
sudden changes do occur. And moreover, with more than seven billion of
us now on the scales, that in all probability significant geo-biophysical
changes will occur and as a result of human activity.
Having acknowledged as much, what then? In controlled environments,
science is able by elimination and confirmation to predict when states will
alter, when water will freeze or critical mass be achieved. But confronting
the biosphere, a mother of all complex systems, and the possibility of
transgressing its vital boundaries, what we most evidently lack is any
semblance of comparable control. Nor, without limitless spare planets, not
to speak of spare centuries within which to test for the crucial variables,
have we much hope of approximating to the probative value of experimental results in figuring out what the relevant causal factors are in its
metabolism. We have no option but to fall back on constructed models,
with all their admitted limitations. In the light of which, however exactly
these models may capture experimental results and the limited historical
data available to reflect current understanding, relying on them seems to
be akin to looking under the streetlamp for the car keys you’ve lost, not
because you dropped them there but because that’s where the light is. Even
with oscilloscopes going haywire, suggesting a major disruption is
pending, the unknowns, both known and unknown, undermine confidence
that our models have included and correctly weighted all the significant
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causal variables, so as to enable us correctly to anticipate what is coming
or analyse it when it has.
Take the most publicized of the thresholds we may be approaching, a
2°C average global warming. Ignoring the element of political expediency
in fastening on it, and the arbitrariness of drawing any line across a range
of more or less graduated climate impacts, it is difficult to see how climate
models can tell us not only the initial distribution of impacts from this level
of warming but also the subsequent, cumulative cascade of further, everless-tested-for consequences, and to believe they can give us an accurate
picture of the state in which the biosphere will eventually stabilize. If not
for 2°C, there is no reason to suppose the picture is different for any other
level of warming, including the 1.5°C already generated over the last
250 years (according to the recent Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature
project (Muller 2012)) – or that we can say what the final reckoning of the
experiment we have already begun with the Earth’s systems will be. It
seems perfectly conceivable that we may already have passed crucial
thresholds, and that fundamental and, by the appropriate measures, abrupt
changes in the conditions for life on Earth are under way. We have to hope
otherwise, but without knowing exactly what counts as the relevant
evidence, that may be what we have to fall back on, as the balance of
probabilities appears to be imprecise and subjective. Our position is one of
justifiable apprehension: a lot to suggest that we’re approaching a
precipice, but little assurance that we know precisely where it is or how far
we may fall. In a collectively rational world, one would expect this to be a
very strong incentive to arrive at a collectively rational response.
Given the state of the world as it is, however, the idea of a collectively
rational response may seem absurd. If not, it does at least take us into quite
a different area where tipping points may need to be found, or engineered:
in our behaviour and in the social realm. It was here that Malcolm
Gladwell’s book, which pushed tipping points into the limelight, focused
(Gladwell 2002). His account, like Sontag’s, was grounded in medicine, in
the spread of epidemics, using the poorly understood phenomenon of
emotional contagion to extend from there to the rapid adoption of new
technologies and behaviours, new social forms and norms (though his story
did stretch the analogies and arguably itself tip over into metaphor).
Nevertheless, the communication of feeling, from earliest infancy on, is
at the heart of our common humanity, and may indeed underpin the ‘moral
sentiments’ that motivate and justify our concern for others, including
those spatially and temporally distant from us. So our response should
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perhaps be, not to try and geo-engineer a way round confining planetary
boundaries, but to look for ways to reinforce and employ the bonds we do
share so as to inspire widespread change of social attitudes and behaviour.
Replacing the self-fulfilling picture we have of ourselves, as greedy, shortsighted, and fundamentally maladapted individuals – for which the
accumulating stock of atmospheric greenhouse gases could stand as an
expression – may be where we need to start. Only with an expanded
understanding of how we toll for one another are we likely to be able to
inch our way back together from whatever precipices lie ahead.

References
Gladwell, M. (2002), The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
(London: Abacus).
Muller, R.A. (2012), ‘The Conversion of a Climate Change Sceptic’, New York Times,
30 July: A 19.
Sontag, S. (1978), ‘Illness as Metaphor’, New York Review of Books, 26 January.

288

Commentary 7.6
Beyond the linear
The role of visual thinking and visualization
JOE RAVETZ

If tipping points are more than just technical events – if they are equally
significant in human hearts and minds – it follows that we need more than
just technical means to understand, anticipate, or respond to them.
So here I would like to explore the role of visual thinking and visualization in the understanding and communication of tipping points. This is
part of a wider programme on ‘synergistic thinking for the one planet
century’ (Ravetz 2012), which brings in a parallel track as experience as an
occasional ‘graphic facilitator’, with basic drawing skills from my previous
life as an architect. During the Kavli Tipping Point workshop, I was keen
to explore some of the more wide-ranging themes from alternative
perspectives, in parallel to the more linear ‘text and reasoning’ mode of
thinking. A sketchbook was filled in 24 hours with original raw materials,
some of which have filtered through to this commentary.
My aim is both to argue the case for the visual thinking approach, and
to demonstrate it. This draws on the help of some virtual friends: like
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, such characters remain quite fuzzy, but
they seem to follow me around everywhere – arguing, questioning,
thinking aloud, and flying off on crazy tangents.
There are four main stages to this argument: each has a section of graphic
storyline. The first stage looks at the understanding of tipping points
through visual thinking, in order to appreciate multiple forms of cause–
effect and of human agency. The second is about the understanding of
tipping points, which are complex or ‘beyond complex’, where visual
thinking may be more effective than rational analysis. Thirdly we look at
the communications side, where the flow of information and knowledge
becomes part of the system. Finally, there is an overarching role for
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communications as catalysts for social tipping points which can respond
to such interconnected problems. To set the scene, here are some background comments on visual thinking.

Background: visual thinking for research and policy
Generally, visual thinking (and/or visualization) can be a powerful enabler
for new insights on complex problems (Tufte 1983; Horn 1998). There is a
more technical-analytic approach which can focus on human–computer–
information interfaces (Humphrey 2008; Huang et al. 2010). In parallel there
is a more experiential and creative approach, which uses the visual medium
to access the unconscious, right brain and lateral types of thinking
(Nachmanovitch 2007; de Bono 1985). Such visual thinking then points the
way towards more holistic ways of ‘complex adaptive thinking’, which
might be better equipped than ‘linear rational thinking’, for the interconnected and multi-scale challenges all around us (Waltner-Toews et al.
2009). Through many diverse channels, techniques, audiences, and cultural
platforms, visualization can offer the following for the research task:
•
•

A trans-disciplinary perspective, grounded in social experience, with
open and inclusive cognitive processes;
Applications, on a spectrum from systems analysis and problem
mapping to experiential envisioning and creative policy design and
synthesis.

This suggests a landscape of visual thinking possibilities with two main
axes (Ravetz 2011):
•

•

One axis spans between analytic and mechanical concepts (focusing
on abstractions), over to synthetic and holistic experiences (focusing
on figurative substance).
Another axis spans between discrete and disaggregated objects (specific purposes such as building designs), and fuzzy/embedded fields
(general purposes such as artworks or other aesthetic communications).

This analytic approach is useful for mapping out the possibilities. But
there is an alternative approach where the visualization speaks for itself,
rather than as an explanation of text. In the fine arts, there are many
interpretations and levels of analysis, but the primary purpose is clearly
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aesthetic and experiential. Likewise if we approach tipping points as
‘experiences’ as much as technical objects, then a fine art approach can be
at least as significant as rational analysis. This can be applied to processoriented deliberation, which again is about experience as much as technical
information. For instance, ‘graphic facilitation’ is now established as a
valuable technique in process-focused workshops, with a London institute
and practitioner network (www.vizthink.co.uk). In parallel the practice of
‘relational visualization’ emerged from sustainability research and futures
workshop processes, where visual material (from on or off site) can be a
powerful catalyst to creative group thinking (Ravetz 2011). To summarize,
there are two strands here:
•

•

Visualization as a process – used in workshop or discussion situations
– visioning, consensus building, conflict mediation, strategy forming,
negotiation, and bargaining.
Visualization of a process – directly capturing dialogue, debate,
argument and even conflict. The classic cartoon strip is one example
where a dialogue can communicate a nuance of thinking and multiple
meaning which is hardly possible in any other way.

Visual thinking to understand multiple cause–effects
Our characters are trying to plan out a TV documentary on our subject –
‘tipping points and the role of visual thinking’. The unplanned tipping
point of a glass then sparks off various trains of thought. One is about
visual technical analysis with charts, maps, or systems diagrams. Another
is about experiences, sentiments, literary nuances, cultural resonances, all
wrapped up with the drinking or wasting of wine. One consequence of
such joined-up thinking is that the physical tipping point of another broken
glass, leads to a possible social tipping point for an alcoholic on the path
to reformation.

Visual thinking to understand multi-scale complexity
In search of an iconic visual theme, the image of the planet Earth turns up,
but this is a very large and complex system to understand. If we zoom in,
then any one tipping point – such as a forest fire – seems to be entangled
with other tipping points or ‘balancing points’ at other scales. If we look
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Today we’re here to plan
out the new docu-tainment on “Tipping Points
and the role of Visual
Thinking”

Sorry that’s
way too
abstract for
our viewers…
We have 3
seconds max to
get the idea
across… then
we are back to
time-lapse
cloud shots
with ghostly
backing track
and deeply
intelligent
voiceover

WHOOPS
!!!

Well in
technical
analysis this
particular
bifurcation is
looking a bit
irreversible,
(assuming
the laws of
physics as we
know them)…

… and what if there’s
things beyond technical
analysis … like culture,
psychology, art
humanities …

… But with
other kinds of
laws, maybe
beyond the
realm of
physics, we
could just melt
down the
pieces and
make a new
glass…??

Quick – let’s draw a
graph!! Or maybe a
systems diagram.
Actually a map could
be useful

Then with our
advanced
technical
visualizations,
we detect a
rapid and
discontinuous
bifurcation
from one
stability zone
to another

***** !!!
How about a
cartoon?
they always
hover in the
air before
crashing to
the ground

KKRASHH !!!
OK that’s definitely
the social tipping
point … you’re drunk!!!!
You gotta take
control of your life …
starting now!!

OK, OK … it’s
just a mechanical
misunderstanding… a
synchronous
confluence of
time space and
material

Meanwhile – we
gotta get this
docu-tainment
together. So
what kind of
visual can help
understand
Tipping Points??

Figure 7.1 Visual thinking to understand multiple cause–effects

for the ends of the chains of cause and effect, we have to zoom back out to
the global scale. Here there is a very complex technical system of feedbacks
and amplifier effects, combined with human effects such as denial,
displacement, conspiracy, and corruption, along with positive features
such as learning, creative innovation, social responsibility, etc. The result
could be summarized as ‘beyond complexity’ – in which case we would
need all possible channels of communication to access the subconscious
and supra-conscious human psyches. Then, as we are faced with multiple
and existential tipping points – climate change, water and energy, food and
soil, nitrogen and phosphorus, mass extinction, political terrorism, financial
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Beyond the linear

OK – here’s a visual theme for you
Hmm. I guess that kind of
tipping point is a whole lot
bigger – more complex,
unpredictable, seems to
have a life of its own

Anyway then we zoom in … a good
catastrophe makes good footage …
the idea is a ‘tipping point’ is often
part of some other ‘balancing
point’ – but which??

It’s a house
fire!!
No – it’s a
forest fire!!
It’s a catastrophe!
No – it’s
reorganization of
climax habitat!!

No … it’s an insurance
job arranged by the
mayor’s uncle

No way!!… you’ve
had your tipping
point already

Yeah just to understand
it we have to think,
imagine new stuff,
debate and communicate…
some more wine would
help actually

And then we zoom out again
Atmospheric
concentration

Radiative
forcing

Climate disruption
and turbulence

No – it’s due to runaway
climate change, causing
drought and desertification

No, it’s because city
folks come out here
and cause havoc in all
sorts of ways…

So how are we supposed to
understand systems which are not
just complex, they’re “beyond
complex” – is there a word for that??

Yeah –
“humans”…
they cause
no end of
trouble

Climate change
physical impacts
Greenhouse
gas emissions

Climate–
related
energy and
industrial
change

Climate change
human impacts
Climate-related
denial and paranoia

Climate culture,
Climate change ethics, psychology
policy and markets

See – there’s lags, filters, amplifiers,
feedbacks all over the place. Who
knows what the **** is coming up

Climate
crunch

What if
we just
skip the
words
about
humans …
think in
pictures
directly??

Food and
water
Mass
extinction
etc…

Terrorism

Yeah right. Connect with the
subconscious. Unleash your
sensory self. Dance with dragons

Figure 7.2 Visual thinking to understand multi-scale complexity

crisis, and mental illness (to name but a few) – then we can better access
other parts of the human psyche which are implicated in such problems.

Visualization in communicating tipping point situations
The focus now shifts from ‘understanding’ to ‘communications’, and the
role of images is clearer. We are surrounded by images, many generated
for profit, and most striving to be iconic and memorable. Perhaps the most
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Joe Ravetz

OK so much is clear for our docu-tainment …
“One picture tells more than 1000 words”

See this one – more than 1000000000 words I think
Now the question
is, did this image
catalyse a ‘tipping
point’ in global
consciousness??
Or just another
phase of mediainduced delusion
and paranoia???

Sure, But
just now
we’re on a
very complex
problem …
the evidence
is in here
somewhere,
if we can
just do
enough
analysis…

Also, it’s a photo
not a painting…
So it must be
“true”. People
respect that.

No way … this is where communications are
catalysts for responses to tipping points …
not just docu-tainment for passive viewers
Look we gotta get to the
bottom of this communication
thing. Shannon here says you
have a source and transmitter …
then a receiver and destination

Yes and communications science
helps to understand how … We have
some seriously bad tipping points to
communicate somehow

But some say it was all a
mock-up in the studio
No no no!! You are so missing the point…

OK … But if you
have a real
tipping point
then don’t a
lot of those
things change
around??

Careful
with that
glass
again!!

We have a
complex
“object” doing
the ‘tipping’,
with layers
and layers of
intangibles,
social learning,
creative ideas
Then we have
a complex
“subject”
observer –
humans,
communities,
networks…

So it’s a no-brainer – the communication model itself
has to be complex, self-organizing, multi-channel…

Figure 7.3 Visualization in communicating tipping point situations

famous for our generation is the ‘earthrise’, as seen from the moon (Poole
2010). But the implications are not so clear – did this image enable new
kinds of global consciousness, or further layers of manipulation by global
interests and corporate elites? To explore such questions reveals a debate
on communications: starting with the communications theory which paved
the way for the digital age (Shannon and Weaver 1949). But this points
towards something more – the role of communications as enabler for
complex feedback systems, which interpolate between complex tipping
point ‘objects’, and observation by complex tipping point ‘subjects’. We can
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Beyond the linear
start to envisage a holistic tipping point system, in which object, subject,
and media are all interconnected.

Visualization for synergistic tipping point responses
Ultimately the role of visual thinking (and other multiple channels of
communication) can emerge. The example of the multi-scalar problem –
including a house fire / forest fire / corrupt planning / irresponsible
urbanization / climate-induced desertification – shows this graphically.
The humans involved here work with multiple ways of thinking and
‘intelligences’ – technical intelligence, social, entrepreneurial, ethical,
ecological, political intelligence, and some others. So how can decisions be
made in ‘wild’ situations of urgency and controversy, which can respond
to such a tipping point in an integrated way, using local resources and
enabling global synergies? (Ravetz et al. 2011). Again, self-organizing and
multichannel communications are not the whole of the solution, but
enabling resources for solutions to emerge. This of course is not easy to
‘communicate’ in the two-second sound-bite culture of modern visual
media. So again there is a search for iconic images which have depth and
resonance – which contain or evoke conceptual mappings, so that
participants can better appreciate where they are, places where they want
to be, and possibly ways to move towards them.

Conclusions and ways forward
This brief think-piece or ‘looking-piece’ explores some territory which is
maybe intuitively obvious. Faced with a crisis or catastrophe, we humans
need to ‘see’ it. And such visual thinking is not only about technical
information on risks or responses, but a multilevel multichannel experience
which resonates with different parts of the human psyche.
So what to do next? There are global-level tipping points in all directions,
and the technical evidence for existential crisis for our civilization seems
overwhelming. Yet to generate any kind of response needs political legitimacy, economic acceptance, behavioural change, collective responsibility,
psychological resolve, and similar qualities. Few of these are technical in
nature or respond to technical stimulus – rather they are socio-cultural
dynamics of learning, creative action, shared intelligence, and so on. The
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so to zoom in one more time…

OK maybe this is where our docutainment gets really interesting –
communications beyond complexity…
Yeah – not
just a
science
lesson –
could be
revolution
on the
streets,
comrade…

How are these
people with all
different kinds
of intelligence
gonna work
their way out of
all these interconnecting
problems?

House fire
Forest fire
Planning problem
Urbanization problem
Civilization problem

Hmm – re-volution or
co-evolution?? In any case,
communications is the catalyst
OK you’re making a big
deal out of this forest
fire. But this last frame
looks too complex …
Viewers won’t get it.

Technical intelligence
Social intelligence
Entrepreneurial
Ethical and ecological
Political intelligence

The answer has to be communications
How about a closing section … time-lapse clouds with ghostly
soundtrack … Then, visuals of all kinds of communications – talk,
text, email, tweets etc … forming a huge global map, not just
technical but mind and spirit in the global tipping point.

Know what
you mean –
we just need
something
to finish on
– an iconic
image for
the tipping
point right
in front of
us…

Wow … the
effects
team have
to read
the global
mind?
What you
gonna do
with this
map?

So we can see where we are … where we
wanna get to … and ways to get there, maybe

Figure 7.4 Visualization for synergistic tipping point responses

role of visual thinking, and other types of media, is crucial in appreciating
the problems and designing effective responses.

References
De Bono, E. (1985), Six Thinking Hats: An Essential Approach to Business Management
(New York: Little, Brown).
Horn, R.E. (1998), Visual Language: Global Communication for the 21st Century
(London: Macro VU Press).

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Huang, Mao Lin, Nguyen, Quang Vinh, and Zhang, Kang (eds) (2010), Visual
Information Communication (Berlin: Springer).
Humphrey, M.C. (2008), Creating Reusable Visualizations with the Relational
Visualization Notation, Interactive Visual Communication working paper:
available on www.iviz.com (accessed April 2010).
Nachmanovitch, S. (2007), ‘Bateson and the Arts’, Kybernetes 36 (7/8).
Poole, R. (2010), Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth (London: Yale Books).
Ravetz, J. (2011), ‘Exploring Creative Cities for Sustainability with Deliberative
Visualization’, in Girard, L.F. and Nijkamp, P. (eds) Creativity and Sustainable
Cities (Oxford: Heinemann).
Ravetz, J. (2012), ‘Urban Synergy Foresight’, in Forward Planning Studies Unit (ed.),
Urban Governance in the EU: Current Challenges and Forward Prospects (Brussels:
EU Committee of the Regions), 31–44. Available on: http://urban-intergroup.eu/
wp-content/files_mf/corurbangoverancefinal.pdf (accessed 31 October 2012).
Ravetz, J., Miles, I., and Popper, R. (2011), European Research Area Toolkit: Applications
of Wild Cards and Weak Signals to the Grand Challenges and Thematic Priorities of the
ERA (Manchester: Institute of Innovation Research, University of Manchester),
http://community.iknowfutures.eu/news/toolkit.php (accessed 31 October
2012).
Shannon, C.E. and Weaver, W. (1949), The Mathematical Theory of Communication
(Champaign: University of Illinois Press).
Tufte, E.R. (1983), The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (New York: Graphics
Press).
Waltner-Toews, D. with Kay, J., and Lister, N. (2009), The Ecosystem Approach:
Complexity, Uncertainty and Managing for Sustainability (New York: Columbia
University Press).

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PART 8
A PRECARIOUS FUTURE

8.1
Into a precarious future
TIM O’RIORDAN AND TIM LENTON

In the run-up to the UN Conference on Sustainable Development held in
Rio de Janeiro in June 2012, the leaders of the global scientific convention
Planet under Pressure concluded:
Research now demonstrates that the continued functioning of the Earth’s
system as it has supported the well-being of human civilization in recent
centuries is at risk. Without urgent action, we could face threats to water,
food, biodiversity and other critical resources: these threats risk intensifying
economic, ecological and social crises, creating the potential for a humanitarian emergency on a global scale.
(Brito et al. 2012: 3)

GEO 5, the fifth Global Environmental Outlook of the UN Environment
Programme, reached similar conclusions:
As human pressures on the Earth system accelerate, severe critical global,
regional and local thresholds are close or have been exceeded. Once these
have been passed, abrupt and possibly irreversible changes to the life support
functions of the planet are likely to occur, with significant adverse implications for human well-being.
(GEO 5 2012: 5)

We are starting to stray outside the ‘safe operating space for humanity’
as introduced by Rockström et al. (2009) and extended in Rockström and
Klum (2012). Rockström and his many colleagues believe that they have
the scientific evidence that humanity is near or past safe boundaries in the
areas of climate change, biodiversity loss, nutrient cycling, and ocean
acidification. Although such boundaries are fiendishly difficult to define,
the concerted scientific effort on the contingent outcomes of ubiquitous
climate change shows that it is reasonable to agree on them (in this case,
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staying below 2°C global warming). The real difficulty lies in staying within
the boundaries. Now the World Bank (2012) has begun to address a world
of 4°C temperature increase by 2100, once considered at the outside range
of scenarios. The Bank suggests that human institutions of adaptation and
adjustment have no precedent for coping and ‘the risks of crossing critical
social system thresholds will grow’. The Bank concludes: ‘that simply must
not be allowed to occur’ (2012: xviii).

Regional navigation between social foundations
and planetary boundaries
We suggest that sharing a common view of what is just and safe for all is
also what will make our future sustainable. Fundamental considerations
of what is just, especially what is equitable, must be considered alongside
planetary boundaries on what is safe.
In the planetary boundaries framework, protecting human well-being
is the rationale for limiting natural resource use in order to avoid tipping
points in critical Earth system processes. At the same time, human wellbeing clearly depends upon each person having claim upon the natural
resources required to meet their dignified human rights, such as decency
in life, health, water and sanitation, food, shelter, and subsistence.
Meeting these basic human rights for everyone is what Kate Raworth
(2012) at Oxfam calls the ‘social foundation’ for human betterment.
Although we need to use resources to provide this social foundation,
the amount of additional resource use necessary is modest compared to
current global overconsumption. Instead we have a distribution problem
– resource use and availability are profoundly not equitable, and a small
minority are massively overusing global resources. The UN Human
Development Report (2011: 2) shows that overall poverty is increasing, that
environmental stresses and associated diseases are afflicting the poor and
the powerless and women in a particularly adverse manner, and that there
is a ‘turning point’ for general human ill-being in the least developed
countries well before 2050, if present trends continue.
This inefficient overuse of resources is overstepping the planetary
boundaries that represent an outer limit on our collective activities.
Between the social foundations and the planetary boundaries lies a
‘doughnut’ (or torus) that prescribes the ‘just and safe operating space for
humanity’ – the ‘Oxfam doughnut’ as devised by Kate Raworth, building
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on the work of the Stockholm Resilience Centre (www.oxfamblogs.org/
doughnut).
The challenge then is to ensure that there is sufficient resource use and
distribution to achieve human rights and well-being, while simultaneously
ensuring that total resource use remains within planetary boundaries. We
suggest the pathway to achieving this goal is a regional approach.
The reality or otherwise of planetary boundaries has been questioned
(Nordhaus et al. 2012) with arguments that ‘boundaries’ are fuzzy, that
regional variations make nonsense of global guardrails, and that huge
differences in cultures and economies mean that any such boundaries are
highly elastic in every particular human setting. These criticisms are partly
helpful, and partly spurious. We take them as an impetus not to throw out
planetary boundaries, but to try to define regional and local ones.
Of the nine original ‘planetary’ boundaries, only four clearly involve
globally well-mixed variables: climate change, ocean acidification, stratospheric ozone depletion and phosphorus cycle boundaries. Carbon dioxide
is well-mixed in the atmosphere and affects the climate and ocean acidification boundaries, well-mixed chlorofluorocarbons affect the stratospheric
ozone boundary, and excess phosphorus leaking into the global ocean is
also well-mixed, and might ultimately trigger excess removal of oxygen
from deep ocean waters – an oceanic anoxic event.
However, for the other five proposed ‘planetary’ boundaries there are
more immediate and evident thresholds and clearer management opportunities at regional or local scales. The corresponding boundary variables
– namely atmospheric aerosols, chemical pollution, freshwater availability,
land system change, and biodiversity – are regionally very variable.
Conditions can sometimes exceed local or regional scale thresholds, but
currently there is a lack of evidence for a global-scale threshold.
Furthermore, even where a ‘planetary’ boundary may exist, say, for
phosphorus input to the global ocean, the original boundary was set at a
level far beyond the point at which multiple regional systems – including
lakes, coastal seas, and their fisheries – could pass tipping points into anoxic
conditions (Carpenter and Bennett 2011). It clearly makes more sense in
this case to set boundaries for regional systems, and then aggregate them
through their catchments to a global scale. By iterating between such efforts
to define regional and global thresholds, the boundaries concept can be
placed on a firmer scientific foundation.
There are other compelling human reasons for a more regional and local
approach. The regionalization of boundaries fits with existing scales of
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communities and governance, and it reflects the scales at which democratic
social foundations have relevance. Furthermore, the impacts of ecosystem
degradation are experienced most strongly within national or regional
economies – long before global boundaries of resource pressure may be
reached. Already, natural resource management takes place predominantly
at smaller scales, as part of national and regional development planning.
Therefore, analytical tools that map resources and their boundaries at these
scales of governance are more likely to have relevance and traction.
In the context of global population growth coupled with extreme income
inequality – within and between countries – many nations and regions face
significant and urgent challenges to ensure that available resources are
used to meet the rights of all, whilst also seeking to guarantee that total use
of regional resources stays within boundaries necessary to protect human
well-being. Nations therefore need the analytical tools to define both an
environmentally safe operating space and a socially just one. This theme is
most eloquently addressed by the report published by the Royal Society
entitled People and the Planet (Sulston 2012). This emphasized the necessity to address the relationships between population growth, increasing
inequalities of health, wealth, and opportunity, and overconsumption as
an integrated totality for discerning targeting of policy. It pushed the case
for more investment in the well-being of the one billion poor and the
further two billion disadvantaged, and for much more sensitive planning
and socially caring development of the emerging world’s cities, which will
dominate human occupation within a decade.
Happily, the thickness of the ‘doughnut’ is not fixed for certain critical
social foundations and environmental boundaries at regional scales – for
example, those processes involving the use of the nutrients nitrogen and
phosphorus to produce food. By shifting to much more efficient and targeted use of fertilizers and food, along with more recapture and recycling
of nutrients, we can simultaneously produce human betterment whilst
reducing the pressures tending to tip lakes or coastal seas into anoxic states.
There is room for manoeuvre, and we need a creative interplay between
regional and global scales of analysis and governance, to define and then
live within the ‘doughnut’.
The message of this book is that although tipping points are hard to
predict and corresponding boundaries even harder to define, they are
taking form on an advancing horizon. Reviewing the ecological evidence,
Barnosky et al. (2012: 57) conclude that only with a combination of organized scientific effort, together with serious transformations in the institu304

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tions of global cooperation, plus widespread cultural recognition of the
moral need to share and care, can we ‘steer the biosphere towards conditions we desire, rather than those that are thrust on us unwittingly’. How
might the world approach this task?

On trifurcations
Tipping points carry options. John Fowles, in his novel The French
Lieutenant’s Woman, offered two storylines for the outcome of the fateful
meeting of his lovers. When contemplating tipping points we can only see
stories. In astronomical time, nothing of our earthly human experience
eventually will matter. As Filipe Duarte Santos (2011: 285–96) reminds us,
the ultimate fate of the Earth is either spinning away into the outer realms
of the solar system as a frozen lifeless rock, or being engulfed in an expanding, and subsequently contracting Sun. Before the planet is destroyed, life
on Earth will be cooked to death by our steadily brightening Sun, in
roughly a billion years’ time. So we have time to consider our inevitable
fate. The human race, even if it were to become truly sustainable, is unlikely
to last for more than a few more millions of years. Given the essence of this
text, such a prolonged prospect for a survivable humanity is extremely
unlikely.
In this book we have so far offered two broad scenarios. One is the ‘lockin’ effect of succumbing to combinations of Earth system phase changes,
even in the full knowledge of possible catastrophic outcomes – especially
for the most vulnerable people, the human majority. The other is the
creeping mass realization that positively creative transformations are
increasingly unavoidable, and that if this is so, then some form of creative
adaptation towards localized resilience is necessary.
In framing our conclusions, we feel it is realistic to suggest that three
distinct scenarios for the coming generation of 30 years are plausible – our
‘trifurcation’ of tipping points.

The first scenario
The first scenario is that the ‘lock-in’ effect will prevail. This will be marked
both by prolonged overall economic decline and turmoil, punctuated by
and coupled to real successes of emergent eco-friendly and socially
beneficial technology. We envisage advances, such as: in 3D computing; in
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recyclable photo-voltaics which are so thin that they can coat objects; in
robotics; in portable programmable computers with blossoming ‘apps’; in
human genetics to increase survival; and in permaculture married to
targeted plant, fungal, and animal genetics to enhance food production.
But these advances will not push the economic system towards sustainable
paths. On the contrary, they seem more likely to reinforce efforts to keep
the globalized industrial show on the road. The more there is technological
hope for ‘fixing’ the wicked problems generated by economic growth and
the explosions in production and demand, the more the lock-in effect will
be relentlessly pursued. In fact it may influence the future pathways of the
much touted ‘resilience’. This is because such technology will be seen as
the basis for successful adaptation to global and regional change. Hence
‘tipping points’ may lose some of their frightening qualities and ‘nonadaptive’ resilience will prevail.
In this scenario, tipping points of various combinations introduced in
this book will become unavoidable before the century is out. Indeed, they
will begin to reveal their physical dangers in the coming three decades and
in some cases (summer Arctic ice removal, degradation of the Amazon)
even sooner. As for social system disruption, we have repeatedly claimed
that these thresholds are much more menacingly nearer.

The second scenario
The second scenario is that some form of accommodation to such approaching probable calamities will take place as an adjunct to the lock-in scenario,
with a significant effort to establish ‘adaptive’ resilient communities across
the planet. These will embrace sustainable energy, low-carbon, low-water,
and low-waste technologies, behavioural change in consumption habits
more generally, and the emergence of the local, more autonomous, community. Social enterprise, sensitive mentoring, and creative learning
for flexible employment will flourish. Locally sourced resources will be
generated by levies on non-sustainable consumption and behaviour, with
the proceeds being incorporated into community-based not-for-profit
cooperatives. These might be created by community charitable trusts and
subject to community forums for advice, linked to media and web-based
scrutiny. They could build resilience and leadership from within the
vulnerable and establish the scope for sustainability enterprises. Most
challenging will be the formation of such resilience in the poorer communities lying within wealthy, prosperous, and impoverished societies.
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Local resilience will reflect capability and inequality of opportunity. But at
least it could offer signposts.
Tipping points in this scenario will be mixed – positive and negative –
but overall will contribute to human disruption and misery, despite many
islands of resilience and hope.

The third scenario
The third scenario is the progressive combination of the first two, where
the spectre of calamitous tipping points and the encouragement of ‘islands
of hope’ begin the transformation of governing, of politics, of markets, and
of learning into a world of sustainable living. This optimistic scenario
will be seen as unrealistic by many. Positive narratives and expectations,
however, can generate action, encouraging a drive for innovation and a
willingness to embrace change, even when the initiating institutional
conditions are very hostile. We feel it is possible for humanity to shift
towards cooperative living for its own civilized survival in the light of
emerging risks of serious social violence, economic disintegration,
widespread destitution, and irrecoverable global damage. But as we
concluded in Chapter 1.1, we may have first to be ‘shocked and awed’ into
such dramatic transformations.
We believe that aspects of all of these scenarios are likely to develop and
shape our choices and constraints by 2050. It is partly the purpose of this
book to offer the reader the scope for considering the ways in which we
may avoid the first scenario, embrace the emergence of the second, and
realize we need to capture the third over the coming two decades. This is
the message of Matthew Taylor (3.2), namely to respect, to listen, and to
cooperate through mutual vision, understanding, and action.

The politics of lock-in
It is dangerous to extrapolate from immediate trends into distant prospects.
As we write in late 2012, the signs for both the European and the global
economies are distinctly unhappy. Official growth predictions summarized
in the April 2012 World Economic Outlook (International Monetary Fund
2012) verge on recession in the European theatre where even the more
powerful economies of Germany and the Scandinavian countries are
weakening. In May 2012, the manufacturing sectors in Europe and the
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USA fell to their lowest levels in three years, with few signs of sustained
recovery. In the USA there is such turmoil in domestic politics that
sustained recovery seems to be thwarted by political anger. Paul Krugman
and Robin Wells summarize the dismal scene:
Ultimately the deep problem isn’t about personalities or individual
leadership; it’s about the nation as a whole. Something had gone very wrong
with America, not just its economy, but its ability to function as a democratic
nation. And it is hard to see when or how that wrongness will get fixed.
(Krugman and Wells 2012: 2)

The 2012 UK Democratic Audit (Wilks-Heeg et al. 2012) has recorded a
widespread and disturbing lack of confidence in politicians and political
institutions, with deepening dismay over the failure of legislatures to be
responsive to public needs, and an overwhelming perception that politicians are in the grip of big self-serving corporations. The authors conclude
that long-term representative democracy is in persistent decline, though
local informal activism is strengthening. The loss of faith in overall political
democracy adds to the huge difficulties facing legislatures in credibly
tackling tipping points.
The normally dynamic propulsions of the emerging economies are also
slowing down. Given their population growth and burgeoning cities, what
looks like high rates of growth may not mop up the huge numbers of
people seeking employment. Furthermore the rising rates of job-seeking
amongst young people in many member states of the European Union do
not bode well for their well-being and self-confidence. Overall the
unemployment rate for young adults in the EU is 22.6 per cent. There is a
real danger that many millions of young adults could become a ‘forgotten
generation’. In May 2012, there were 5.52 million unemployed young
people in the EU, a figure that has been steadily rising since 2007.
EU policymakers and stakeholders are aware of this potential catastrophe of creating a ‘lost generation’, but so far appear powerless to halt
the rising unemployment among young people:
This is a huge problem to tackle, but it is essential that young people are
encouraged to develop skills that are in demand and that they are given the
chance to obtain meaningful work experience that enables them to gain a
foothold in the labour market.
(Andrea Broughton of the Institute for Employment Studies 2012
http://www.employment-studies.co.uk/press/10_12.php)

The Prince’s Trust (2012) found that two in five of youngsters not in
employment, education, or training were deeply pessimistic about their
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ability to cope with their lives, exhibiting very little self-confidence about
their abilities to enter into meaningful work. The Trust has launched a
campaign over this Undiscovered Generation (Prince’s Trust 2012).
While the Western nations are reassessing means to force-feed growth,
they are also paying lip-service to ‘green economies’. Even the most
optimistic supporter of the green economic transition realizes that little can
be achieved in a hurry, that by no means all of the currently unemployed
can be mopped up by this transition, and that it will not sidestep the real
risks of ecological breakdown. The Commons Environment Audit
Committee (2012: 3–5) concluded that: the government in the UK do not
give high priority to a green economy, favouring instead established,
carbon-intensive investments in infrastructure; there were no measures of
success or sense of direction in the transition to any coherent version of a
green economy; there were conflicting and unhopeful prospects for many
net new jobs without extensive training and work experiences; and there
was no central mechanism to promote a full-scale environmentally and
socially robust transition to such an economy.
From this we conclude that lock-in is rife, and that any transition
towards our alternative tipping scenarios is still in its infancy and lacking
in leadership. Beetham (2011) sees the weakening of democratic processes
as fuelled by a combination of: market fundamentalism; corporate
globalism; the hollowing out of the public service in favour of ‘cherry
picking’ privatization; and the informal influence and ready access to
politicians by those who donate to political parties. He also points to the
‘revolving door’ of senior civil servants moving to lucrative consultancies
in the private sector they once managed; the perfidious entry of corporate
advisers into the public service, often without any accountability; and the
weakness of any individual politician to stand up to this onslaught. Even
if he is half right, this is surely a recipe for lock-in.
The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) is a
highly respected modelling and policy advising interdisciplinary group
of top-level researchers. In October 2012 it organized an impressive
conference, Worlds Within Reach: From Science to Policy (IIASA 2012a). In the
run-up to this event it published a number of reports seeking to show how
indeed it is possible to turn around the big conundrums of the age: climate
change, water and energy security, and sustainable urban living (IIASA
2012b). What is evident from these massive exercises in systems-led policy
prescription is both the huge danger of lock-in (where IIASA modellers
give to 2030 at most for successful transformation) and the challenging
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requirements they seek for ensuring that their clever and comprehensive
recommendations are acted upon.
What they seek seems remote from the present economic and political
realities: strong international leadership; consistent and durable regulation
to provide reliable investment conditions for business to commit resources
and inventiveness; significant joint public–private investment of many new
billions of US dollars guaranteed every year for over 25 years; and the scope
for entrepreneurial technology and enterprise across the face of the planet.
This is genuinely stirring stuff. And it comes from many person-years of
painstaking modelling and discussions amongst some of the brightest
minds in the sustainability business. But it does appear fanciful in the harsh
realities of limited available cash, deep divisions over climate change
verities and solutions, touching faith in as-yet-untested technologies, and
optimism over relatively rapid and enduring behaviour change coordinated across nations and time.
For us, the IIASA optimism lies at the cusp of our two scenarios: deeply
dependent on the smashing of lock-in and heroically cheerful about untried
ways of inventing, working, managing, and leading which should be the
hallmark of a human species searching for joyous salvation.
Pavan Sukhdev (2012), the doyen of sustainable accounting, also places
great faith in transformations to capitalism which, as yet, show little sign
of being embraced by global financial markets and debt-plagued politicians. Perverse subsidies would be reduced (when billions are spent
annually on lobbying to keep them (Heinrich Böll Foundation 2012)). Taxes
would be reformed and new ‘green’ incentives created, with future infrastructure geared towards ecosystem sensitivity and alignment (while at
present there seems only talk of more airports, roads, pipelines, and transmission lines). Public ownership of the commons and community ownership of common pool resources would be the new economic reality (while
critical minerals and land are being purchased by international speculators
and acquisitive governments and the global biodiverse hotspots, such as
the mangrove and coral, fade). Socially responsible regulations would
extend to the corporates generally, and advertising would be forced to
follow strict ethical and accountable codes. Resource and pollution
(including greenhouse gases) levies would steadily replace corporate taxes.
These are the recommendations we support for our second scenario.
What all of these powerful and well-analysed reports reveal is the lack of
alignment between the frantic regrowth-policy desperation of beleaguered
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cedented era of recurring Euro crises and deep social malaise as austerity
strips family after family of their accustomed dignities, and the emerging
realities of fundamental political and social failure. Yet it is precisely this
combination of excellent science, policy analysis, and unavoidable crises
which we feel stimulates the conditioning for our second and third
scenarios.

Beginning the journey
Throughout this book, we have sought from authors some sense of
what needs to be done to break the lock-in effect. There are signs of hope.
Jeffrey Sachs, the special adviser to the Director General of the UN,
Ban Ki-moon, has begun the process of determining what would constitute
the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for all nations which formed a
centre piece of the Rio+20 UN Conference on Sustainable Development:
One of the key planks of the SDGs is that we need better measurement of
well-being and one way is to ask people how well they feel they are doing,
one crude measure of life satisfaction. A legion of scholars have been studying
this and picking up great traditions as brought by Buddhism and Bhutan in
particular. We can now identify pretty systematically places where people
are deeply unhappy, highly anxious and also identify systematically the
reasons why.
Second, people are, like Aristotle said, social animals. We depend on our
sense of participation in communities, and if there is a lack of trust, our lives
are miserable, and if we live in unhappy places where people do not cooperate with each other and altruism is not a moral virtue that is defended,
where cheating is rife and pervasive, then unhappiness soars.
(Jeffrey Sachs, quoted in the Guardian, 22 June 2012)

Sachs is highly critical of the lobbying powers of big business which
result in distortion of commodities prices, profound undervaluing of
natural and social capital (as outlined by Sara Parkin (6.3)), and the undermining of political democracy as governments seem unable to withstand
their financial and self-serving political purposes.
In order to understand how we might make the move towards alternative scenarios avoiding lock-in, we consider below some of the signals
of change and instability of our time, within a conceptual framework of
‘landscape, regime and niche’ (Geels 2002) that can help us map the terrain
and chart paths towards better futures.
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Turchin (2011: 7–9) suggests that there are long waves of stability and
instability in many societies lasting for about a century at a time. His neoMalthusian approach regards the disintegrative cycles as being marked by
rising populations, increasing scarcity of food, insupportable urban
migration, and bulges in the young to middle age ranges, releasing great
social dissatisfaction. More of a trigger is the sequestering of wealth by
elites and competition amongst rising numbers of aspiring elites to get hold
of diminishing amounts of remaining wealth, leading to factionalism and
social turmoil. The diminishing state coffers mean that the rising costs of
military and police control, and associated surveillance, exceed the capacity
of the state to finance their voracious demands on the tax purse. The
outcome is deep social turbulence and loss of central authority.
There are signs in the troubled Eurozone of the latter stages of this
sequence beginning to occur. So we need to consider how best to avoid the
worst and begin to address the better. We began this journey in Chapter
6.1. We also asked Andrew Dobson (8.2) and Ian Christie (8.3) to take us
further on this path.

Well-being and betterment
The New Economics Foundation (2012: 6) regards well-being as a combination of feelings (contentment, joy, satisfaction) and functions (competence,
self-esteem, worthwhileness). Placing these in the context of external opportunities (work, social connectedness, trust in others, democratic involvement) and personal propensities (health, resilience, optimism, diversity of
experiences) gives a sense of flourishing (self-realization) and capabilities.
What lies behind well-being is the beginning of a whole new approach
to measuring and appreciating social betterment. The scope rests on the
assets of what is possible for an individual to achieve, alone or with others,
in creating inner satisfactions as well as empowerment over apathy or
disillusionment. It also offers, crucially, the chance to avoid seeing real loss
of income and ageing as negative aspects of economic failure. Rather, wellbeing offers the scope for regarding household flourishing as a far more
appropriate measure than income, and ageing into health a basis for
extending experience for community enhancement.
One outcome of well-being is the current interest in social investment.
This is of two kinds. One is essentially charitable giving, where investors
place funds in schemes which are designed to better people and society
who are otherwise disadvantaged. The other is to offer schemes and
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support to those who are a cost to themselves and to society more generally,
so that they take on responsibility and avoid future financial burdens on
the public and private purse.
It is too early in the development of a social investment bank to assess
its overall value. There is a grumbling amongst market fundamentalists
that this is not ‘real value’ but some kind of ‘charity’ of a kind more
commonly found in Victorian times. Consequently social investment will
require a concerted effort from businesses which are either strapped for
cash as the banks restrict and channel lending for measurable gains, or
which are really only prepared to pay lip-service to what they regard as
government responsibility. This is the message of the commentaries from
Amanda Long (6.4), John Elkington (6.6), and Thomas Lingard (6.8). Mike
Barry (6.9) and Ian Christie (8.3) make an even more forceful point. The
failure of governments to provide for publicly funded support for the
planet or even for social capital may create a void which the private sector
will simply have to fill. Social investment may have to be privately
financed. This is the line also strongly advocated by Sukhdev (2012).
The second form of social investment is more promising. This depends
on the intervention in the lives and consumption habits of people who are
proving a cost to themselves (alcoholism, obesity, type 2 diabetes, selfharm, early and unwished-for pregnancy, and substance abuse). All this
tends to result in expenditures to various other parties, such as insurancepremium contributors, or health authorities. For example, the cost of
obesity to the UK alone is estimated to be over £5 billion annually, and the
cost of treating depression over £4 billion per year (see Foresight 2008).
Mulgan (2011) offers seven criteria for success in this kind of endeavour:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

The programme is clearly preventative and sufficient funding is available.
The programme demonstrably improves social well-being and
ameliorates undesirable outcomes.
The specific impacts and advantages of the programme can be measured.
Sufficient participants offer robust evidence of a wider success.
Beneficiaries can be identified.
Their benefits are shown to be larger than the overall costs of the
interventions.
There is scope for rolling this out into a social investment bank.

In many ways key aspects of sustainability should apply here. For
example, helping poor families to cut wasteful energy and water use could
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result in incentives from utilities and reduce carbon emissions and water
shortages in drought-prone areas. Such eco-orientated approaches fit in
with the vision of socially responsive capitalism offered by our contributors
to Part 6. Reconstituting waste, especially used consumer goods such as
bicycles or electrical appliances, should provide reusable products for poor
families who otherwise could not afford them. Mentoring potential
depressives or would-be drug abusers provides significant benefits on the
hard-pressed public purse, as well as possibly benefiting the well-being of
both the helper and the assisted.
Maybe it is precisely in the realm of well-being and community support
that sustainability can find a new home. This would be where it has never
entered before. It is to the disadvantaged, the new household poor, the
frustrated unemployed, and the incipient depressive that sustainability can
now reach out. So, if the conditions of sustainable capitalism do begin to
take hold nationally and internationally, this sets the scene for sustainable
localism. It is here that we finally must turn.

Redesigning locality
Getting to an effective role for localism will not be easy. Central governments dislike giving too much power and discretionary money to local
governments, for the obvious reason that many local governments are run
by other political parties. But equally relevant is the real crisis of reduced
overall cash in local government coffers due to austerity measures. Along
with this financial suffocation come losses of staff and discontinuity of
programmes. In many cases the projects where local government excel,
namely where they create a trusting and bonded relationship with less
advantaged peoples and associated charities, are those which are cut and
where well-liked personnel are made redundant.
The Economist (2012) offers the emergence of a revolution in local
government, especially in London where councillors are well educated and
amenable to creative experimentation. They are trying out ‘John Lewis’
cooperative partnerships and ‘easy’ (low cost, no frills) partnerships with
communities where all manner of people are getting involved with
bettering social services and care. These well-intentioned schemes are still
very embryonic, but they do show the scope for really effective adaptation
and resilience if the management innovations are shared, and if ‘failure’ is
regarded as a source for learning and recalibrating.
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In essence there is little prospect of successful transfer to localism for
sustainability unless several conditions are met:
•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

Local government needs to have powers to raise their own income
from activities which are proven to be non-sustainable and carbongenerating.
Most, if not all, of this revenue should be in the form of local not-forprofit investments which are handled by community charitable trusts
for the benefit of viable local sustainability initiatives run on a partnership basis with the public and private sectors.
Young people should be enabled to work on a host of sustainability
schemes in the arenas of energy auditing, mentoring appropriate
energy, water, waste, and food use by forming social enterprises which
engage with communities on a neighbourhood level, and which embed
real empathy with their peer groups.
There should be a targeted programme of ‘resilient streets’ through
which this effort can be enacted by young people who are from
disadvantaged neighbourhoods so that neighbourly households can
work together on common sustainability projects.
Schools should also be involved with schemes for enabling their pupils
to gain in mental toughness and confidence-building, and through
such programmes to twin with schools in less advantaged areas
(including in emerging and developing economies) to instigate resilient
schools and streets programmes.
The local media should support this enthusiastically, with lots of
positive news coverage, information-rich websites, and schemes for
community-based visits for other neighbourhoods to look and learn.
All of this should also be promoted by social networking sites and the
kinds of web-based schemes for linking people with skills to those who
need support and confidence-building.
The cascade of success should be progressively rolled out across the
totality of the settlement to begin the process of creating a true sustainable city and a resilient community.

This is essentially Local Agenda 21 at work. This is the programme of
conveying sustainability to the local scene and creating forms of democracy
which genuinely introduce cooperative governance. Ideally there should
be supportive sustainable community-based citizens’ charitable or not-forprofit trusts which work alongside local politicians in a non-partisan way,
so that effective collaborative democracy triumphs.
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We are some way short of this. In particular the freedoms sought here
for local government are very variably available throughout the world. For
the most part central administrations prefer to tether their local brethren.
But surely here is the path to our second conception of a more socially
tolerant transformation, drawn from its collective self-belief rather than the
fear of impending economic and social collapse. But much more needs to
be done. It may be more through economic and social desperation, coupled
with local business leadership, that the necessary changes will eventually
occur.

Islands of hope and transformational tipping
points
Following the casework of the Resilience Alliance, recognizing the
heartening examples offered by Emily Boyd (7.2) and Camilla Toulmin
(Commentary 7.4), and reading countless websites of sincere community
action for sustainability – together these offer a sense of ‘islands of hope’.
These are the myriad of trials, of pilots, of courageous innovation, of
community or personal leadership which add up to a transformational
movement.
What seems to kill the enlarging of these islands is a combination of the
themes outlined in Chapter 6.1 and in this chapter so far: inadequate
international leadership; hopeless indecision and contradiction; possible
deliberate hypocrisy; and failing institutions unready for change because
of complexity, lobbying, and lock-in. There is also the very real difficulty
of trying to alter human behaviour when cultural norms and peer pressure
intervene, as we saw in the commentaries by Matthew Taylor (3.2), Charles
Clarke (6.7) and Camilla Toulmin (7.4). Andrew Dobson takes this further
in his companion chapter (8.2).
We add another dimension. This is a moral envelope of the kind
introduced by Laurence Freeman (5.1) and by Andrew Dobson (8.2). Social
nudge, regulatory shaping, economic incentives are not in themselves
sufficient to produce the kinds of across-the-board transformational
behavioural change in what are very habitual, peer-guided, and marketdriven actions. There needs to be an inner drive: what Ernst Schumacher
(1972) called ‘the centre’. This is the coherent inner certainty which directs
supportively and creatively the kinds of sustainability citizenship
addressed by Dobson. How this can be achieved and in a timescale of
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decades, remains deeply problematic. We rely on a combination of ‘awe
and shock’ as the wider and longer effects of the human footprint become
more evident through scientific research, evidence collection, unavoidable
warnings, and exceptionally damaging hazard. We sense that many people,
especially younger people, are becoming more aware of the scale of the
challenges and seek to be better informed and more in tune. We see the
‘islands of hope’ enlarging and gaining in publicity and attractiveness. We
believe well-being and betterment will take over as the mainstay of human
endeavour within a decade. We support the Sulston working group conclusions (Sulston 2012) that inequality in all of its pernicious manifestations
in all nations must be reversed. For only a society of progressive, but
earned, fairness can embrace sustainability. And we see business and
government being goaded by customers and encouraged by reconstructed
regulations and markets (in that order) to turn the corner.
So we salute these islands of hope, their visionary leaders, and their
‘centred’ supporters. We thoroughly support the abundance of websites
which proclaim their existence and learning pathways for others to
emulate. And we share the optimism of Joe Smith (7.1) that we can
communicate hope much better than despair.
But we also realize we will have to travel further into the uncharted
territory of advancing tipping thresholds, before we move in the directions
offered in Part 6 and Part 7. It would be so very sad if the human family,
with its magnificent science and information-processing skills, and new
forms of communication, cannot work creatively and purposefully to
prepare us all for the positive transformations we all must eventually
embrace. Civilizations have failed in the past, but never comprehensively,
and always with some aftermath. We believe the prospect of global dismay,
and with it a sense of failing our offspring, will provide the current that
potentially will turn the tide. But we are not sanguine. The lock-in effect
and the sheer magnitude of social and institutional transformations which
grow more irreversible by the month, particularly in times of austerity
which are a function of our folly, may make tipping points the beginning
of human nemesis. This is why we humbly believe this book, with its
marvellous contributions, is so very timely.

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8.2
Improving our chances
of transition to sustainability
The role of values and the ethics
of solidarity and sympathy
ANDREW DOBSON

Sustainability is a moral and ethical issue, so it is vital to see that we will
not reach the tipping point at which it becomes the new common sense
until its ethical dimensions are much more deeply rooted in the minds of
citizens and policymakers alike. In this regard things do not look especially
positive, especially in the realm of policymaking.
Policymakers have a range of tools at their disposal. First they can
legislate. Laws may or may not be informed by moral and ethical considerations, but law-making is certainly an opportunity for governments to
make ethical and moral points. In the context of climate change, for
example, a government might decide on a regime of congestion charges in
a country’s major cities. These charges might be explained in terms of
revenue-raising – a fiscal measure designed to raise money. But they might
also be explained as being underpinned by the recognition that transport
accounts for about a third of greenhouse gas emissions, that climate change
affects the life chances of near and distant others, that it is usually the most
vulnerable who are least able to cope with these challenges, and that it is
therefore the duty of responsible governments to encourage their citizens
to drive less.
Legislation seems an obvious vehicle through which to establish the
moral and ethical ‘weather’ in a society – a great opportunity to engage
citizens in these dimensions of the sustainability question. Up to about 40
years ago, UK governments governed through enacting legislation and
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expecting citizens to comply with it. The legitimacy of this approach was
grounded in the democratic nature of the political system – if citizens didn’t
like the legislation they could vote out the government and give another
one a try.
This model where the state, through its agent the democratically elected
government, was the origin and author of policy, was called into question during the mid-1970s by the theoreticians of the New Right and,
subsequently, the governments of Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald
Reagan in the USA. The postwar settlement between state, citizens, and
government was undermined as the market challenged the legitimacy of
elected governments to set policy, and governments in return increasingly
absented themselves from the public policy space, transferring to markets
ever greater scope and freedom. The effects of the success of this challenge
are plain to see, from the selling off of previously state-owned assets, such
as the railways and telecommunications, to the outsourcing of public
services, such as waste collection and care for the elderly, to the inundating
of the public sphere with market-based language (we are often referred to
by local authorities as customers rather than citizens).
In liberal-capitalist countries over the past 40 years governments have
been increasingly reluctant to govern, in the sense of taking responsibility
for a country’s political, social, and economic direction of travel, and
offering arguments for preferring that direction of travel to others. Instead,
the market is the constraint on, and opportunity and reference point for,
policymaking. Governments hide behind the market by presenting it as a
series of ‘facts that speak for themselves’, thereby absolving themselves of
the need for ideological debate, and presenting policymaking as a matter
of following common-sense. The result has been the virtual disappearance
of the moral and ethical dimension of the politics of sustainability, at least
in so far as the business of government is concerned.
Governments have compounded this moral and ethical ‘hollowing out’
by digging around in the policymaking toolbox and coming up with two
further options which make it even less likely that morals and ethics will
be part of the sustainability debate. The first is fiscal incentives and
disincentives, and the second is rooted in behavioural economics – or what
has come to be known as ‘nudge’.
The logic of the fiscal approach is simple: people will want to avoid fiscal
pain (fines) and embrace fiscal pleasure (rewards), so as long as the incentives and disincentives are set up in the right way, people’s environmental
behaviour can be altered. One important benefit of this approach is that it
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can work very fast, often resulting in observable positive outcomes as soon
as a charge is put in place (e.g. a congestion charge for vehicles). In the
context of the urgency with which some environmental problems need to
be dealt with – the most obvious being climate change – policy tools that
secure behaviour change quickly are obviously attractive.
But from the mainstream point of view there is one huge advantage.
People need have no environmental commitment whatsoever for it to
work. No hard work needs to be done persuading people of the environmental and other reasons for getting out of their cars – just go with the grain
of human nature, understood as the pursuit of self-interest, set up the
incentive structure, then sit back and watch the environment heal.
In the longer run this advantage can turn to disadvantage. People
respond to the fiscal prompt and not to the principles underlying it, so they
are likely to relapse into their previous behaviour patterns once the
incentive is removed. Car drivers, for example, drive less in cities with a
congestion charge, but they do so because they do not want to incur
the congestion charge, not in order to reduce carbon emissions. Their
behaviour is changed by a superficial response to a carrot or a stick, rather
than through commitment to a point of principle.
From a policy point of view this is a marked weakness of the fiscal
incentive tool. But from the point of view of a politics of the environment
the damage is much greater. In removing all talk of morals and ethics from
the debate, the fiscal incentive approach encourages the idea that
sustainability makes no moral or ethical demands on us. To grasp how
bizarre this is, think of a similar claim being made in the context of votes
for women or the ending of slavery. Would we be happy with a policy
approach to these issues based on fiscal incentives? Can we imagine being
‘incentivized’ not to manacle people and put them in the hold of a ship
before sending them to work for nothing in sugar plantations? No, and not
just because it might not work, but because these issues demand ethical
and moral reflection. Votes for women and the ending of slavery are the
right thing to do, and we are selling these issues a long way short (misunderstanding them, indeed) if we rely on people’s short-term financial
self-interest as the sole motivation for them.
The other approach to environmental policymaking is ‘nudge’, drawing
on the eponymous book by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein (2009), and
deploying the insights of behavioural economics. This book has rapidly
became required reading in the higher reaches of the UK government. In
May 2010 the Cabinet Office and the Institute of Government published a
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Improving our chances
document called Mindspace which aimed to bring nudge to wider attention
among policymakers. Fiscal incentives bypass norms, but at least those
subject to the policy are aware that there is a policy, and that they are
subject to it. Nudging also eschews normative debate – but it goes even
further by hiding even itself from view. Nudging works best when no one
knows they are being nudged. This could well turn out to be the high (or
rather, low) point of a particular approach to policymaking – including
environmental policymaking – which effectively depoliticizes (and
certainly de-democratizes) politics. And by ‘politics’, here, we mean not
the institutions of government and the people who occupy them. We refer
to the Aristotelian understanding of politics – debating and enacting what
is right and wrong, and what is just and unjust.
‘Mindspace’ works as follows: ‘For policymakers facing policy challenges such as crime, obesity, or environmental sustainability’, writes one
of the report’s authors, Paul Dolan:
advances in behavioural science offer a potentially powerful new set of tools.
Applying these tools can lead to low-cost, low-pain ways of ‘nudging’
providers, consumers and citizens into new ways of acting by going with the
grain of how we think and act. This is an important idea at any time, but is
especially relevant in a period of fiscal constraint.
(Dolan 2009)

Rather than operating at the level of normative reasoning as to why we
think and act in the way we do and debating those reasons in terms of right
and wrong, just and unjust, the Mindspace approach seeks to influence
behaviour by changing the contexts which encourage people unconsciously
into one course of action rather than another. Mindspace takes behavioural
science to the very heart of policymaking – and simultaneously displaces
politics.
One key reason given by its advocates for ‘nudging’ is that it ‘goes with
the grain of how we think and act’, as Dolan (2009) puts it. This makes
nudging seem hard-headed and realistic – characteristics that the electorate
like to see in their politicians (or so the politicians would have us believe).
Dolan goes on to say:
In simple terms, we can seek to change behaviour in two main ways. First,
we can seek to change minds. If we change the way they think about and
reflect upon things, then we can change their behaviour. The success of these
kinds of interventions has been somewhat mixed. Second, we can seek to
change people’s behaviour by changing their contextual cues. If we change
the ‘choice architecture’, then we can change their behaviour. It turns [out

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that] our behaviour is a lot more ‘automatic’ and somewhat less ‘reflective’
than we have previously thought.
(Dolan 2009)

This makes it clear that ‘nudgers’ aren’t interested in normative debate –
or what Dolan calls the ‘changing minds’ approach to politics. This,
apparently, is because of ‘mixed results’ – i.e. policymakers don’t always
get what they want. Instead they propose to look at the world in the same
way as consumer experts look at supermarkets. These experts know that
consumer behaviour is affected by how the supermarket is designed – we
are encouraged to buy this product rather than that one by the siting of
shelves and signs, the smells and sounds we encounter, and the direction
we walk round the shop. An environmental example of nudging – which
appeared on the Nudge website not so long ago – is making recycling bins
larger and general waste bins smaller in the expectation that people will
begin to recycle more and throw away less.
In thinking of sustainability as a matter of tweaking behaviour, nudgers
commit what philosophers call a ‘category mistake’. Ethics, norms, and
values are not an optional extra in sustainability – they are constitutive of
it. From this point of view, it is as absurd to see sustainability as a matter
of re-sizing waste bins as it would have been to nudge slave owners
towards ending slavery by making their ships a little shorter and narrower.
Unsustainability is a moral and ethical affront with severe practical
consequences for all beings – human and non-human – that suffer from it.
An alternative approach is sustainability citizenship. We define sustainability citizenship as ‘pro-sustainability behaviour, in public and in private,
driven by a belief in fairness of the distribution of environmental goods, in
participation, and in the co-creation of sustainability policy’. More
particularly, the sustainability citizen:
•
•
•

•
•

324

believes that sustainability is a common good that will not be achieved
by the pursuit of individual self-interest alone;
is moved by other-regarding motivations as well as self-interested ones;
believes that ethical and moral knowledge is as important as technoscientific knowledge in the context of pro-sustainability behaviour
change;
believes that other people’s sustainability rights engender environmental responsibilities which the sustainability citizen should redeem;
believes that these responsibilities are due not only to one’s neighbours
or fellow-nationals but also to distant strangers (distant in space and
even in time);

Improving our chances
•
•

has an awareness that private environment-related actions can have
public environment-related impacts;
believes that market-based solutions alone will not bring about
sustainability.

The sustainability citizen will therefore recommend social and public
action.
As policy tools, fiscal incentives and nudge make sustainability less
likely. First, this is because they deliberately avoid engaging the public
in debates around ethics, norms and values – yet the deployment and
internalization of this language is essential if we are to debate (a) what
sustainability is, and (b) what we need to do to achieve it. Second, longterm sustainability policy success requires the sort of buy-in that can only
be achieved through citizen participation and the co-creation of policy. One
of the biggest obstacles to the realization of sustainability citizenship is the
abdication of government from governing. It is not simply a matter of
rolling back the state and expecting citizens in the guise of the Big Society
to take over. Sustainability citizenship is a tender plant that needs nurturing
by public agencies – the very agencies that are under attack from the market
fundamentalists of the present Coalition government.
Government has a key role to play in sustainability citizenship. The
trade-off between state and society is not a zero-sum game; less state will
not automatically mean more society. In fact as the Young Foundation
recently reported:
When government cut back sharply in places as varied as US inner cities, and
countries like Russia, the promised revival of civil society didn’t happen.
Often the spaces left by government were filled by organised crime or gangs.
Ordinary citizens became more afraid, not more trusting, and the evidence
from around the world shows that, surprisingly perhaps, the countries where
civil society is often strongest are also ones with active government, even in
such diverse countries as Brazil, Denmark and Canada.
(Young Foundation 2010: 6)

Government can help by providing greater opportunities for citizens
to participate in environmental policymaking, and for making clear the
ethical and normative questions at stake. It can provide more support for
grassroots initiatives and create more opportunities for civic engagement.
Government can provide appropriate funding streams and build social
capital. But above all, government must reconsider its overall role.
Sustainability citizenship invites government to recover its nerve, to
govern once again, to engage citizens in the cut-and-thrust of ethical and
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normative debate, and to resist the temptation to bypass politics in the
name of an easy life. These ways lie the routes to infantilization, disillusion,
and a vacuum where politics ought to be, filled with nudges and financial
inducements. Aristotle was surely right:
Man is a political animal . . . [since] humans alone have perception of good
and evil, right and wrong, just and unjust. And it is the sharing of a common
view in these matters that makes a household or a city.
(Aristotle 1962: 28–29)

References
Aristotle (1962), Politics (Harmondsworth: Penguin).
Carolan, M. (2007), ‘Introducing the Concept of Tactile Space: Creating Lasting
Social and Environmental Commitments’, Geoforum 38: 1264–75.
Carter, N. and Huby, M. (2005), ‘Ecological Citizenship and Ethical Investment’,
Environmental Politics, 14 (2): 255–72.
Dolan, P. (2009), ‘Mindspace: A Simple Checklist for Behaviour Change’,
http://www.socialsciencespace.com/2011/01/mindspace-a-simple-checklistfor-behaviour-change/ (accessed 15 February 2013).
Gilbert, L. and Phillips, C. (2003), ‘Practices of Urban Environmental Citizenships:
Rights to the City and Rights to Nature in Toronto’, Citizenship Studies, 7 (3):
313–30.
Jagers, C., Sverker, C., and Matti, S. (2010), ‘Ecological Citizens: Identifying Values
and Beliefs that Support Individual Environmental Responsibility among
Swedes’, Sustainability, 2: 1055–79.
Thaler, R. and Sunstein, C. (2009), Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth
and Happiness (Harmondsworth: Penguin).
Wolf, J., Brown, K., and Conway, C. (2009), ‘Ecological Citizenship and Climate
Change: Perceptions and Practice’, Environmental Politics, 18 (4): 503–21.
Young Foundation (2010), Investing in Social Growth: Can the Big Society Be More Than
a Slogan? (London: Young Foundation), http://www.youngfoundation.org/
files/images/YF_Bigsociety_Screen__2_.pdf.

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Commentary 8.3
Turning the tides?
Parallel infrastructures and
the revolt of the corporate elites
IAN CHRISTIE

At the end of 2012, the signs were proliferating of the lateness of the hour
for a global turn towards sustainable development. The projections for
greenhouse gas emissions suggest that humanity is well on course for a
4–6 ° C global average temperature rise by the end of the century. The
scenarios for economic, social, and ecological disruption, or even collapse,
are ever more alarming. Yet in the US general election campaign of 2012,
neither climate change nor wider ecological stresses and resource crises
were discussed or even discussable. The presidential candidates studiously
avoided all mention of climate disruption. Only when the election was won
did President Obama dare to raise the issue, and then only when the
devastation wrought on the north-eastern US seaboard by Hurricane Sandy
had made it ‘safe’ to talk freely about it. Such has been the group-think of
US policymakers, lobbies, and media about climate change and the broader
question of ecological limits: these issues are so deeply disturbing to the
settled assumptions of neoliberal economics and politics that they cannot
be allowed to be made real.
Yet this is the unavoidable truth for modern states and businesses. No
matter how much they hubristically feel they are entitled to define the
‘facts’ of the world to suit themselves, hard reality will have the final word.
Already in the aftermath of the elections of 2012 and the impact of
Hurricane Sandy, US politicians are beginning to break ranks and abandon
the conspiracy of silence about global ecological risks and tipping points.
That said, the weight of established interests lobbying for business as usual
remains immense. And the persistence of the Western economic crisis that
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Ian Christie
broke in 2007 means politicians will continue for some time to be distracted
by financial fire-fighting and the challenges of unemployment, recession,
and debt.
What can potentially lead to a change in the ‘lock-in’ to a network of
systemic dependencies and constraints that inhibit any honest and farsighted confrontation with global ecological risks and the threat of
dangerous tipping points? There is so much to overcome, as summarized
in Chapters 6.1 and 8.1:
•
•

•

•
•

•

Deep internalization of the neoliberal view of the primacy of free
markets, deregulatory policy, and individualistic consumer choice;
The consequences of this in actual market development, leading to
oligopolistic business powers exercising immense influence over
politics, especially in the USA;
A demoralization of political discourse and professional ethos, as
evident in the financial scandals exposed since 2007 and in the
hollowing-out of the idea of citizenship (see Andrew Dobson’s analysis
in 8.2);
Path-dependency on a vast scale, with lock-in to fossil fuel-powered
centralized infrastructures for energy, transport, and food;
A profound mismatch between the timetables of politicians and
democratic culture and the timescales of investment and adjustment
for resilience and sustainable energy use;
Little political gain for anyone confronting the need for radical changes
in production and consumption as part of a century-long strategy for
sustainable development.

In the light of all this, it seems clear that we cannot expect leadership
and ‘tipping conversion’ among those most embedded in the neoliberal
system, namely policymakers at national level and producers in resourcebased industries. They are likely to confront change rather too little and
too late, largely in response to the experience of being ‘awed and shocked’
into action by environmental and social change. So we need other agents
of systemic change, capable of offering leadership, exemplary influence
and leverage over the political system. These need to be capable of:
•
•

328

deploying sufficient power in production and consumption systems to
change existing interests, or to confront them in political lobbying;
connecting with sympathetic community interests and energizing
citizens for sustainable living, in a context of deep loss of trust in
politics and widespread lack of agency for change;

Turning the tides?
•

holding sufficient financial power to have a major role in funding
investments in sustainable technologies along entire value chains.

My contention and hope are that agents already exist who can meet
these requirements. They have in common a capacity to influence behaviour, values, and investment at significant scale; dismay at the lack of urgent
action on climate disruption and other global risks; a long-range perspective, transcending in some ways the electoral cycles of nation states, and
less vulnerability to the lobbies so powerful at national level in politics; and
potential to inspire ‘followership’ in national politicians, who might be
encouraged to act in the wake of these agents’ pioneering work. They are
all capable of forming alliances and action-oriented partnerships for what
Elinor Ostrom (2010) calls the ‘polycentric governance’ needed for resilient
societies and sustainable development paths (see 5.1, 6.6, 8.1):
•
•
•

Corporations and major public sector investors concerned with the
risks arising from fossil-fuel dependency and climate disruption;
Religious organizations and communities;
Cities and local/regional governments.

Corporations such as Unilever have become increasingly outspoken
about the risks being run by the global economic system and by its
dominant national governments. They see their long-term competitiveness
or even survival jeopardized by business as usual. Truly striking denunciations of neoliberal economic culture have come in the past year from
Paul Polman, CEO of Unilever, whose global strategy for sustainable
development is remarkable for its ambition and radicalism. For example:
The very essence of capitalism is under threat as business is now seen as a
personal wealth accumulator.
We have to bring this world back to sanity and put the greater good ahead
of self-interest.
We need to fight very hard to create an environment out there that is more
long term focussed and move away from short termism.
(Paul Polman, quoted in Confino 2012)

Other corporations are making similar moves – for example, Wal-Mart,
Marks and Spencer, Puma, Patagonia. Far more needs to be done. But the
makings of a coalition of the willing are clear among major corporations
whose interests are threatened by ecological disruption and whose collective
financial clout could enable them to form ‘parallel infrastructures’ for
investment, accounting, reporting, and engagement with customer-citizens.
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Ian Christie
Many of these companies are concerned with food supply and have greater
sensitivity to what is happening at local and regional levels to ecosystems
than any major fossil interests or national governments do. Their interests
in long-term security are shared by the US Department of Defense. The
Pentagon is now a major investor in renewable energy, motivated by selfinterested security concerns but capable, like Unilever and other global
corporations, of being a catalyst for change across many important supply
chains.
My hope is that by the end of this decade these corporations will do three
things. First, they will begin to construct parallel infrastructures for ‘doing
capitalism’ to challenge the existing models of finance, accounting, reporting, and investment. Second, they will become openly and consistently
hostile to fossil capitalist interests. Third, they will deliver ultimatums on
climate action and low-carbon energy investment to political elites.
Democratic policymakers will thereby be given an incentive to lead and to
break ranks from the carbon-generating interests. This will not be a noble or
inspiring spectacle, but it is the best we can hope for, and it will be effective.
These efforts will be accompanied and supported by a gradual shift
towards an ‘ecological awakening’ among the major religions. This is
already in evidence in Christian churches, some parts of the Islamic world,
and in Buddhist and Daoist traditions. The global population remains
overwhelmingly committed to religious identity and observance in varying
degrees. We may witness a major expansion in religious belonging in China
and elsewhere, galvanized by the onset of scarcities and ecological
disruption. Such a development will not be automatically for the good, of
course: heightened religious sentiment could well be a factor in local and
regional conflict. But the potential for religious traditions, which have
immense holdings of land, money, and buildings and which have
potentially unrivalled resources of community trust and influence, to be
positive catalysts for change and members of ‘coalitions of the willing’ with
pro-sustainability advocates in business and civil society, is very great. The
faith communities too can form ‘parallel infrastructures’ for finance,
investment, and enterprise, and already are doing so, as evidenced by the
many initiatives promoted and documented by the Alliance of Religions
and Conservation (Palmer and Finlay 2003; Colwell et al. 2009; see also
www.arcworld.org).
A third force for change is the emergent ‘parallel infrastructure’ of local
and regional governance for sustainable development. Ever since the Rio
conference of 1992 the Local Agenda 21 framework has inspired consider330

Turning the tides?
able local and regional action on environment and renewables worldwide.
It has also generated a political narrative of increasing potency. The full
force of this widely shared analysis was expressed in the wake of the
Rio+20 Conference in 2012. Mayors, regional governors and local
authorities released damning statements on the performance of national
leaders. A quotation from the international network of local authorities for
sustainability, ICLEI, exposes the frustration:
We now see that all the good will, energy, brain capacity and money that
went into the Rio+20 process have resulted in dozens of pages of paper,
which contain hardly any commitment by governments. Instead, national
governments reaffirm what they had already resolved long ago, list nonbinding intentions, and acknowledge the activities by other actors such as
local governments . . . Do cities have to step in where governments are failing
to take effective action? Cities are cooperating internationally without
borders, without customs, without military forces. They can address the
issues of the future without the global power play that we see going on at
inter-governmental level . . . We suspect that the mechanisms, rules and
routines of international diplomacy are outdated and incapable of designing
and bringing about a sustainable future.
(ICLEI 2012)

The failure of national politics to match up to the challenges at hand has
reinvigorated alliances of mayors, cities, and localities. This robust response
from many local decision-making elites has been marked by the emergence
of numerous coalitions for investment and sharing of experience across the
world, with business, and with other sectors of civil society. As with
business and religious elites alarmed by unsustainable developments, these
policy elites have the capacity to make major investments in new forms of
production and consumption; they have procurement power on a
significant scale; they can command in many cases more trust and influence
than can national politicians; and they can often plan for the long run more
effectively than national policymakers can.
An objection to this analysis might be that in the absence of national
action, none of these agents for bottom-up and ‘together-across’ change can
make the difference we need to see. But the combined force, whether
coordinated or not, of these interests operates at international scale, and
can catalyse change in multiple value chains. Crucially, all of these forces
have the capacity to develop self-reinforcing institutions for investment,
engagement of citizens, and for sharing of technologies, bypassing those
embedded in carbon-intensive business as usual. Should they deploy this
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Ian Christie
power, they could embolden and champion national politicians who are
otherwise boxed in.
This is the scenario for transformational tipping thresholds. The essential
elements of this revolt – or gradual build-up of revolts – are in place now.
The agents for change will extend and devise what I have called ‘parallel
infrastructures’ for finance, energy, production, and consumption. The
coalitions needed to make the revolts succeed need to be formed, active
and bold in leadership well before the end of this decade. My hope and
expectation are that this will be the case.

References
Colwell, M. et al. (eds) (2009), Many Heavens, One Earth: Faith Commitments to Protect
the Living Planet (Bath: Alliance of Religions and Conservation/UNDP).
Confino, J. (2012), ‘Rio+20: Unilever CEO on the Need to Battle on to Save the
World’, Guardian Sustainable Business, 21 June; http://www.guardian.co.uk/
sustainable-business/rio-20-unilever-battle-save-world.
ICLEI (2012), ICLEI at Rio+20 statement: http://local2012.iclei.org/fileadmin/
files/ICLEI_at_Rio_20.pdf.
Ostrom, E. (2010) ‘Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex
Economic Systems’, American Economic Review, 100 (3): 641–72.
Palmer, M. and Finlay, V. (2003). Faith in Conservation: New Approaches to Religions
and the Environment (Washington DC: World Bank).

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Index
ABC see atmospheric brown cloud
abrupt basic change 178
accommodation 15, 306
accountability 184, 226, 227
Action Aid 78
adaptation xiv, 4, 7–8, 15, 241, 244, 283;
adaptive cycle 15, 261–2, 271, 272;
adaptive governance 8, 258–76;
Amazon rainforest 137;
community-based 282; creative
305; current thinking on 122;
ecosystem-based 79; institutions 302;
local initiatives 314; media coverage
250–1, 253, 254; private sector 239;
response to early warning 39;
restorative redirection 5
Adger, W.N. 261
adjustment 15, 16, 302
aerosols 38, 97, 303
Africa: climate change 251;
ecosystem-based adaptation 79;
IAASTD report 85; Sahel 26, 29, 110,
112, 258, 266–8, 270, 272
ageing 10, 227–8
agency 289
agriculture: Amazon region 133, 134–5,
136, 138, 139; biodiversity 79, 117,
121; deforestation 130; emissions
77–8; food security 90, 94–6, 97, 99;
mechanized 138
albedo effects 109, 110, 111
algal blooms 30
Alliance of Religions and Conservation
(ARC) 330
AMAZALERT project 265–6
Amazon rainforest 15, 32, 79–80, 110,
127–48, 259, 271–2; bifurcation
approach 12; biodiversity loss 105;

challenges for governance 135–40;
challenges for science 140–2;
dieback 26, 28, 33, 35, 112, 128–31,
258, 264–6; dry season 11; food
products 118; future scenarios 306;
impact on human well-being
115–16; transitions 131–5
Anglian Water 216–17
Anhang, J. 92
Annan, Kofi 194
anticipation 16
Aquinas, Thomas 154
‘Arab Spring’ (2011) 6–7, 226, 259, 277
Arabian Peninsula 118
ARC see Alliance of Religions and
Conservation
Arctic sea-ice 25–7, 31, 32, 33–4, 35
Arima, E.Y. 135
Aristotle 53, 57, 326
art 290–1
Atkinson, David 48, 150, 165–7
Atlantic thermohaline circulation
(THC) 26, 29, 32, 33
atmospheric brown cloud (ABC) 29–30
attitudes 7, 205, 288
attractors 6, 61
Australia: food security 85, 93, 94;
Great Barrier Reef 261; media 250;
Queensland flood 191; subtropical
jet 34; vulnerability 109
autonomy 184
awareness 184, 253
Bahti, T. 57
Ban Ki-moon 194, 311
Bangladesh 250
banks 7, 220, 232, 241
Barlow, J. 141

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Index
Barnosky, A.D. 304–5
Barry, Mike 237–9, 313
Barthes, Roland 52n1, 59
Bean, Richard 253
Beckett, Samuel 285
Beddington, John 77, 78
Beetham, D. 309
behavioural economics 321, 322–4
belief 154, 155
belief–attitude–behaviour relationship
205
beneficence 182
‘benign catastrophes’ xii
‘benign’ tipping points 5, 167;
leadership 207; markets 174; media
coverage 253; political context 185;
virtue 184
Berardi, G. 138
Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature
project 287
Bernoulli, D. 66
bifurcations 6–7, 10, 12, 15, 16, 24; ice
melting 25; schematic representation
of bifurcation point 36, 37
Big Society 214, 325
bio-cultural diversity 120–2
biodiversity 30, 78–9, 104–26; Amazon
rainforest 138; bio-cultural diversity
and resilience 117–22; boundaries
303; food-system activities 96, 97;
human resilience 114–16; threats to
301; tipping points 108–16, 120;
types, magnitudes and drivers of
106–8
biofuels 93, 94, 107
biome loss 26, 28–9
BiTC see Business in The Community
Black, M. 62
‘black’ markets 174
‘Black Swan’ thesis 74
bogs 111
Bolivia 127, 132
boreal forests 11, 32, 113; biodiversity
change 109–12; dieback 26, 28, 33,
35; forest–climate feedback 111
Borlaug, Norman 85
bottom-up approach 34, 331
boundaries 301–4

334

Boyd, Emily 8, 13, 15, 18, 92, 95, 100,
241–2, 244, 255, 258–76, 316
Boyd Orr, John 86, 87
Boykoff, M. 250
Brazil: Amazon rainforest 79, 127–8,
132–3, 136, 138–40, 142, 271–2; civil
society 325; drought 264–5;
exchange rates 134; Forest Code 137;
‘governing region’ concept 14;
media 250; middle-class
consumption 9–10; ‘payment for
ecosystem service’ scheme 138
Breakthrough Capitalism initiative
223–5, 228
Brito, L. 301
Broughton, Andrea 308
Brown, J.S. 185
Brown, Paul 9, 81, 242, 244, 277–9
Brundtland Report (1987) 135, 184
Buddhism 152, 311, 330
Business in The Community (BiTC)
217
business models 213, 217, 219, 226,
239
businesses see corporations
Cameron, David 196, 199, 214
Canada 28, 118, 325
capacity building 100, 136
capital 195, 197n6, 198–201, 202, 203
capitalism 170, 195, 207, 310, 329, 330;
new logic for 197, 198–201, 211–12;
Prospectus for Breakthrough
Capitalism 228; socially responsive
314; sustainable 314; types of 196
carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions 210,
211, 303; agriculture-related 77–8;
Amazon rainforest 112, 116, 127,
129, 130, 271; biodiversity change
114; Church of England campaign
167; coral reef acidification 114;
Emissions Trading System 192–3;
food wastage 96; worst case scenario
35; Yedoma permafrost 27; see also
greenhouse gases
Carbon Mitigation Institute 210
carbon sequestration 138
CarbonTracker 226

Index
causality 17, 292
CBA see community-based adaptation
CCC see Concerned Citizens’
Commission
Centrica 218
Čermák , F. 52n1
change xii, 6, 10, 76, 190, 212, 229, 243,
286; abrupt basic 178; adaptive cycle
261–2; adaptive governance 260;
agents of 328, 332; Amazon region
131–5, 141, 143; biodiversity 104–26;
complexity of global environment
281; cultural theory 73; disruptive
innovation 237; exponential 235; fear
of 153; managing 260; media 249–53,
255; openness to 156; private sector
218; roadmap for sustainable 223–8;
see also social change
chaos 6, 61
chaos theory 10, 162
Chapin, F.S. 137
charities 214, 215, 216, 312
China: carbon dioxide emissions 193;
economic power 191; endangered
cultures 121; food demand 92;
‘governing region’ concept 14;
media 250; middle-class
consumption 9–10; religious
belonging 330; state-planning 192;
Zero Discharge of Hazardous
Chemical agenda 227
Christianity 150, 152, 166–7, 330
Christie, Ian 3–20, 313, 327–32
Church of England 167
circulation change 26, 29–30
citizenship 183–5, 186, 324–6, 328
civic engagement 185
civil society 193, 325, 331
Clark, Nigel 247
Clarke, Charles 170–1, 229–32, 316
Clarke, Keith 19, 170, 175, 220–2
Clegg, Nick 196, 199
climate change 191, 259, 287; abrupt 24;
adaptation 15, 263; Amazon
rainforest 112, 115, 116, 128–30, 142,
264; amplification of 25; biodiversity
change 107–8, 114; biome loss 26,
28–9; boundaries 301–2, 303;

circulation change 26, 29–30;
Copenhagen Summit 250, 281;
cultural politics of 244–9;
deforestation 79; development and
282–4; early warning signs 36–8, 39;
ecosystem-based adaptation 79;
faith communities 167; food security
91, 92, 94, 95, 97; ice melting 16,
25–8, 33–5, 39, 277, 306; as
leadership failure 201; markets 174,
220–1; media coverage 243–57,
277–9; Mumbai flood 268–9, 271;
pests 11; regional effects 12;
regulation 216, 320; responses to 75;
risk assessment 31, 32–4; Sahel
drought 266–7; threats to
ecosystems 109; tundra 113;
‘wicked problems’ xv; worst case
scenario 34–5; see also greenhouse
gases
coalitions 331–2
coastal areas 11, 109–12, 113, 268
Coetzee, J. 53, 54
cognitive dissonance 204
‘cognitive surplus’ 255
Colander, D. 178–9
Cold War 190
collaboration 214, 215, 216, 219, 239
collective rationality 287
Colombia 132
commodity trading 176
common good 186, 324
communication 251–2, 289–90, 293–5
communism 6–7, 197n6
community-based adaptation (CBA)
282
community food security 84
compassion 204
competition 170, 225, 226
complex adaptive systems 15, 262
complex adaptive thinking 290
complexity 49, 61–2, 262, 291–3
complexity economics 178–9
Concerned Citizens’ Commission
(CCC) 269–70
conflict 116
congestion charges 320, 322
Connolly, William 254–5, 256

335

Index
conservation: adaptive cycle 15, 261;
agro-biodiversity 121; Amazon
rainforest 271; market-based
governance 192
consumption 181, 239; collaborative
225; food 82–3, 85, 88, 92–3; future
scenarios 306; middle-class 9–10;
over-consumption 13; social
investment 313
contemplative consciousness 10, 47–8,
149, 151–64
contraceptives 210–11
cooperation 306, 307
Copenhagen Climate Change Summit
(2009) 250, 281
coral reefs 26, 28–9; biodiversity
change 105, 109–12, 114; diseases
111; Great Barrier Reef 261
corporate responsibility 217
corporations 13, 14, 169, 170, 220–2,
226, 329–30; business responses to
tipping points 233–6, 237–9;
leadership by business 213–19;
political influence 328
Cox, Peter 264
crises 6, 7, 270, 301; contemplative
consciousness during 161–2, 163;
economic 116, 178, 192, 225, 232, 238,
307–8, 310–11, 327–8; financial 189,
220, 221
critical thresholds 3, 19, 24, 286, 301,
302; see also thresholds
critical transitions 7, 108
cultural biodiversity 78–9
cultural keystone species 105, 118, 120
cultural politics of climate change
244–9
cultural theory 73–6
Currie, Mark 52n2
customer demand 234
dangerous anthropogenic interference
(DAI) 24
Daoism 330
Davis, M. 272
De Beaugrande, R. 55, 59–60
De Man, Paul 53
De Sherbinin, A. 269, 271

336

De Soto, Hernando 199
death 152–3
deforestation 79, 97, 109, 110, 111;
Amazon rainforest 115, 128–36, 139,
142–3, 264, 266, 271–2; UN policy
137
democracy 169, 232, 321; collaborative
315; decline in 308; food 84;
participative 186; undermining of
311
denial 9, 13, 16, 169, 205, 280, 282,
292
Denmark 325
Derrida, Jacques 53, 59, 61
developing countries 5, 117, 283; food
security 93, 99; media 251; public
opinion on climate change 250
dialogue 291
discounting 177
discourse analysis 55
diseases 81, 105, 106, 108–9, 111, 118,
302
disequilibrium 10–11
disruptive innovation 237
diversification 136
Dobson, Andrew 119–20, 183–4, 316,
320–6
Dolan, Paul 323–4
Dolphin, T. 175, 178, 180
‘domino dynamics’ 25, 35
Douglas, Mary 73
Drèze, J. 83
droughts 28, 30, 35, 258; Amazon
rainforest 80, 112, 128–9, 264; food
security 94; Sahel 266–8, 270, 272
drylands 110
early warnings 36–8, 39, 241; adaptive
governance 265; AMAZALERT
project 265–6; biodiversity change
105, 120
earthquakes 242, 247, 252
EbA see ecosystem-based adaptation
economic crisis 116, 178, 192, 225, 232,
238, 307–8, 310–11, 327–8
economic factors: Amazon rainforest
135; food security 86, 90, 91;
sustainability 188–9, 191–2, 195

Index
economic growth 166, 175, 219;
Amazon region 131, 132–3; food
security 92; ‘green growth’ 16, 193;
see also growth
economics 175, 177, 178–9, 180, 195–8,
204
economy 82, 169, 196, 200, 256; ‘green’
xv, 309
ecosystem-based adaptation (EbA) 79
ecosystems xi, 108; biodiversity change
104–5, 107, 108–9, 119–20; ecosystem
services 104, 105, 114, 119–20, 283;
evaluating the well-being of 171;
human-dominated 107; life-support
processes 4, 78; ‘payment for
ecosystem service’ scheme 138;
regime shifts 24; resilience 13;
‘wicked problems’ xv
Ecuador 127, 132
Edwards, J. 96
egalitarian perspective 73, 75–6
Einstein, Albert 211
Ekins, Paul 12, 13–14, 19, 170, 188–93,
199
El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO)
26, 30, 32, 33, 35
Elkington, John 18, 19, 170, 218, 223–8,
235, 313
emerging economies 308
Emissions Trading System (ETS) 192–3
endangered cultures 121
energy xi–xii, 205, 313–14; food-system
activities 97; fossil fuels 328; future
scenarios 306; growth in demand for
77; low-carbon infrastructure 283;
policy solutions 230; renewable 330
ENSO see El Niño–Southern Oscillation
entitlement 83, 84
environmental factors: business
assumptions 238; food security 86;
‘safe operating space’ 192;
sustainability 188, 195
environmentalism 208, 254, 255
epidemics 111, 287
epidemiology 81
equilibrium 108
Ericksen, P.J. 91
ethics 321, 322, 324, 325

Ethiopia 118
ETS see Emissions Trading System
European Convention on Human
Rights 230
European Union (EU) 171, 231;
AMAZALERT project 265–6;
biofuels 94; Emissions Trading
System 192–3; incomes 239;
lobbying 78; public opinion on
climate change 250; unemployment
308
eutrophication 11, 97
exchange processes 174
exchange rates 80, 134, 241
externalities 177–8
‘facilitating conditions’ 205–6
fairness 184, 263, 317, 324
Fairtrade products 206–7, 208
faith 150, 154, 155, 164, 165–7; see also
religion
famine 83, 267
FAO see Food and Agriculture
Organization
fatalistic perspective 74, 75–6, 81–2
fear 152, 163, 166, 205
feedback: adaptive governance 260;
biodiversity change 108, 109;
complex systems 292, 294
fertilizers 30, 93, 97, 119, 304
finance 166, 203, 241, 329; Amazon
rainforest 136; new logic for
capitalism 198–9, 200, 201
financial crisis 189, 220, 221
fires, forest 12, 128, 130, 138, 264,
265
fiscal approach 321–2, 325
fish products 77
fisheries 113, 117
Flannery, Tim 248
flexibility 8, 262, 263
flooding 30, 34, 260; impact on food
system 95; Mumbai 242, 258,
268–71; Pakistan 18, 92, 191;
Queensland 191
Foden, Giles 5, 8, 17, 47–8, 49–72, 74,
81, 245, 249, 254
Folke, C. 260, 262

337

Index
food 13, 78, 81–103, 304; biodiversity
78–9, 117–18; concept of food
security 83–5; environmental
interactions with food systems 94–6,
97; food chain 91; food industry 77,
78; food-system activities 91–2, 96,
97; food wastage 96; fossil fuels 328;
future scenarios 306; governance
96–100; local versus long-distance
206; policy 86–91, 93, 99, 100;
scarcity 197, 312; threats to 301
Food and Agriculture Organization
(FAO) 83, 85, 87, 88, 93, 100, 117–18
forecasting 9, 36–7, 82, 264
foresight 13, 190
forests see Amazon rainforest; boreal
forests
Fowles, John 305
fracking 14
France 85
free markets 181–2, 328
Freeman, Laurence 10, 14, 19, 47–8,
149, 151–64, 182–3, 316
front and back loops 15, 261–2, 271
Fukushima nuclear accident (2011)
191, 252
Funtowicz, S.O. 246
future generations 135, 249
future scenarios 305–7
futures contracts 175
Gandhi, Mahatma 201
Gardner, Toby 11, 12, 15, 28, 79–80,
127–48
GCMs see global circulation models
GECAFS see Global Environmental
Change and Food Security project
General Electric 218
Generation Investment Management
226
Genette, G. 70
GEO 5 (Global Environmental
Outlook) 301
geo-engineering 39
geopolitics 9–10
GHGs see greenhouse gases
GIS see Greenland ice sheet
glaciers 28, 35

338

Gladwell, Malcolm 24, 50, 65–6, 81–2,
287
GlaxoSmithKline 218
global circulation models (GCMs) 129
Global Environmental Change and
Food Security (GECAFS) project 91,
95
global pervasiveness 246
global warming see climate change
globalization xii, 99
Globescan 250
God 166
‘golden goose’ arguments 255, 256
Goleman, Daniel 227
‘good news stories’ 18–19, 167
Goodland, R. 92
governance 4, 17, 192–3; adaptive 8,
258–76; Amazon rainforest 135–40,
143; boundaries 303–4; cooperative
315; food security 83, 96–100; global
226, 235; localism 185; ‘polycentric’
14, 329; social change 12–13; social
organization 202
governments 236, 280, 317, 321, 331;
business assumptions 238;
difficulties dealing with tipping
points 170–1, 229–32; local 209, 314,
315–16, 329; sustainability
citizenship 325–6; see also politicians;
politics
Governors’ Climate and Forests Task
Force 140
‘graphic facilitation’ 291
Great Barrier Reef 261
greed 166
‘green economies’ xv, 309
‘green growth’ 16, 193
Green Revolution 85, 93
greenhouse gases (GHGs) 177, 197,
288; Amazon rainforest 116;
Copenhagen Summit 281; food
contribution to 89, 92–3, 95–6, 97;
Indian Summer Monsoon 29–30;
projections for 327; transport 320; see
also carbon dioxide emissions
Greenland ice sheet (GIS) 25–7, 31, 32,
33–4, 35, 39, 277
Greenstock, Jeremy 209

Index
Gregory, P.J. 94
Grint, Keith 209–10
growth: adaptive cycle 15, 261;
exponential 10; ‘green’ 16, 193;
investment 175; political leaders’
emphasis on 196, 199; see also
economic growth
habitat loss 107, 108, 109, 119
habits 205
Haiti 242
happiness 152, 182, 201
Havel, Vaclav 201
Hegel, G.W.F. 53, 64
Heidegger, Martin 65, 154
Heilbronner, Robert 196
herbicides 119
hierarchical perspective 73, 75–6
Himalayan glaciers 26, 28, 35
Holling, C.S. 135
household flourishing 312
Howard, Patricia 8, 12, 78–9, 80, 104–26
Hulme, Mike 246, 249
human capital 181, 195, 199–200, 202,
203, 210
Human Development Report 302
human nature 13, 163, 322
human rights 302, 303
humanities 54
hunger 85, 88
Hunt, J.C.R. 54, 62
hurricanes 36
hysteresis 11
IAASTD see International Assessment
of Agricultural Science and
Technology Development
Knowledge
Iannucci, Armando 249
ice melting 16, 25–8, 33–5, 39, 277, 306
ICLEI 331
IIASA see International Institute for
Applied Systems Analysis
IIED see International Institute for
Environment and Development
images 293–4, 295
incentives 226, 235, 310, 321–2, 325
incoherence 4–5

incomes 238–9, 304
India: food security 92, 95; ‘governing
region’ concept 14; media 250;
middle-class consumption 9–10;
Mumbai flood 242, 258, 268–71
Indian Summer Monsoon (ISM) 26,
29–30
indigenous peoples 115, 117
individualistic perspective 73, 75–6
Indonesia 252
induced vulnerabilities 4, 13
inequalities 10, 189, 282, 304
informal markets 174, 181
infrastructure 271, 309, 310; ‘lock-in’
328; low-carbon 283; social 282, 283
Ingram, John 7, 8, 12, 13, 65, 77, 78,
81–103
‘inner eye’ 19
innovation: breakthrough 226–7;
creative 292; disruptive 237;
‘reverse’ 228
institutional fit 263
institutions: adaptation to climate
change 302; adaptive governance
258, 259–60, 262–3; Amazon
rainforest 140, 143; food security 83,
96–100; global 226, 235, 304–5;
institutional lock-in 49, 180; political
171, 173, 186; scientific 272; selfreinforcing 331
insurance 174
interdependence 6, 152, 247, 260
interdisciplinarity 9, 12, 54, 79, 141–2,
248
interest rates 175–6, 177
inter-generational equity 135
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) 15, 24, 31, 191, 246,
248–9, 250, 268
International Assessment of
Agricultural Science and
Technology Development
Knowledge (IAASTD) 85, 87
International Institute for Applied
Systems Analysis (IIASA) 309–10
International Institute for Environment
and Development (IIED) 280, 281,
282

339

Index

Kahan, Dan 74–5, 281
Kalahari 121
Kavli conference (2011) xiii–xiv, 3, 47,
289
Keynes, John Maynard 196
keystone species 105, 118, 120
Kierkegaard, S.A. 64
Kingfisher 218
Klum, M. 301
Kramer, M.R. 218
Krugman, Paul 308
Krujit, Bart 266
Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth 205
Kurzweil, R. 10

language 51, 52–4, 56, 59, 121, 162; see
also metaphors
leadership 18, 169, 194–212; adaptive
governance 260; by business 213–19;
international 310; media 253–4; new
logic for capitalism 198–201; NGOs
222; NIC report 197, 201; for
sustainability 201–12
Leadley, P. 109–12
learning 262, 282, 292, 295; adaptive
governance 258, 260, 262
Leclair, Tom 54
legal regimes 230–1
Lenton, Tim xiii–xvi, 3–20, 23–46, 47,
73, 174, 178, 188, 241, 301–19
Limits to Growth (Meadows et al. 1972)
195
‘linear rational thinking’ 290
Lingard, Thomas 77, 170, 233–6, 313
linguistics 54, 57, 59, 62, 65
lobbying 78, 133, 171, 225, 235–6, 278,
310, 311, 327, 328
Local Agenda 21 315, 330–1
Local Enterprise Partnerships 208
local governments 209, 314, 315–16,
329
localism 5, 12, 18, 314–16; governance
185; need for sophisticated approach
to 207, 208–9; sustainable 150
‘lock-in’ xiv, 4, 14, 317, 328;
Copenhagen Summit 281; future
scenarios 305, 306; institutional 49,
180; path dependency 328; politics
of 307–11; productionist paradigm
88, 89
Long, Amanda 18, 19, 99, 170, 213–19,
313
Longa, V.M. 61
long-term approach 179, 186, 217, 329,
330

lakes, eutrophication of 11
Lakoff, G. 63
land use change 30, 95, 97; Amazon
region 134–5, 141, 142, 143, 271;
boundaries 303
landscapes, tipping 17
Lang, Tim 7, 8, 12, 13, 65, 77, 78, 81–103

Machiavelli, Niccolò 204
Malthus, T.R. 85, 86
Mansfield, M. 250
markets 17, 19, 166, 169–70, 171,
173–87, 215, 317; climate change as
market failure 201; comparison with
politics 181–2; the future 174–9;

internet 278–9, 315
Inuit 248
investment 175, 177, 178, 233, 310; local
315; social 312–13; sustainable
technologies 329
IPCC see Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change
Iraq War 189–90
irreversibility 24–5, 242, 286, 301, 317
irrigation 95, 97
Islam 330
islands 112–13, 120
‘islands of hope’ 244, 252, 307, 316,
317
ISM see Indian Summer Monsoon
Italy 250
Jackson, Tim 175, 180, 195, 200
Jakobson, R. 51, 57–8
Japan 190–1
Jayne, E. 59
jeopardy 244
Johnson, M. 63
journalism 277–9
justice 182, 183

340

Index
market-based governance 192;
neoliberal view 328; power
transferred to 321; role of 221; see
also corporations
Marks and Spencer 329
Martin, W. 60, 62
Marx, Karl 85, 86, 153, 196
Mason, Jeffrey 52, 53, 64
mathematics 6, 10, 24, 50, 55, 59
Max-Neef, Manfred 200
McEwan, Ian 244
media 243–57; change 249–53, 255;
cultural politics of climate change
244–9; journalism 277–9; local 315
meditation 19, 156, 158, 159–60, 164
metalanguage 51
metanoia 156, 159
metaphors 16, 49, 52–3, 272;
complexity 61–2; functions of 50;
narrative and 69–70; revelatory
nature of 285; as risk 62–3; science
and 50–1; sensuality 64–5;
separation and 64; social
transformation 12–14; theories of
metaphor 56–61; tipping landscapes
17; tipping points as 3, 5–8, 55–6, 63,
65–9, 70, 81–2, 165, 190, 285–6
methane hydrates 27–8
metonymy 57–8, 59, 60
middle class 9–10, 93
migration: Amazon region 80, 115, 116,
131, 133–4, 135; economic 170; food
security 94; insupportable 312; of
species 107–8, 113
Miliband, David xv
Miliband, Ed 196, 198, 199
Mill, John Stuart 196
mimesis 54
mindfulness 19
‘Mindspace’ 323
mitigation 39, 105, 270
modelling 9, 11, 12, 286–7
monitoring 8, 38, 262, 264
morality 207, 321, 322
mortality 152, 153
Mulgan, G. 313
multi-departmental initiatives
179–80

multi-scalar problems 295
Mumbai 242, 258, 268–71
Munang, R. 79
Nair, R.B. 62–3
narrative 49, 50, 52n2, 64, 69–70, 162,
165–6, 254
Nash, D. 175, 178, 180
National Intelligence Council (NIC)
197, 201, 203
natural capital 181, 195, 199–200, 203,
311
Natural Capital Committee 176, 177,
180
natural disasters 252; see also
earthquakes; flooding
natural resources 165, 304; Amazon
region 131, 132; economic growth
175; human well-being 302
nature 73–4, 199, 247
Neate, R. 77
Neiman, Susan 201–2
neoliberal markets 174
neoliberalism 88, 327, 328, 329
Nepal 95
networks 9, 185; adaptive governance
8, 260, 262; research 141–2; see also
social networks
New Economics Foundation 312
new social movements 226
News Corporation 255
NGOs see nongovernmental
organizations
NIC see National Intelligence
Council
Niger 267–8
nitrogen cycle 97, 304
nongovernmental organizations
(NGOs) 14, 222, 233–4; climate
change 245; lobbying by 236; Sahel
drought 267, 270
Norris, F.H. 55–6
Nowell-Smith, D. 65
‘nudge’ theory 82, 316, 321, 322–4,
325
Obama, Barack 327
obesity 88, 313

341

Index
oceans: acidification 9, 28–9, 114, 303;
ocean methane hydrates 26, 27–8;
oxygen minimum zones 30–1; see
also sea-level rises
OECD see Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development
oil 14, 88, 93, 197
Olsson, P. 261
optimism 82, 227, 307, 310, 317
organic products 206, 207
Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development
(OECD) 93
Origen 162
O’Riordan, Tim xiii–xvi, 3–20, 167,
173–87, 301–19
Ostrom, Elinor 329
Ott, Konrad 177
over-consumption 13
‘Oxfam doughnut’ 302–3, 304
ozone depletion 303
PAC see Public Administration
Committee
Pacific Islanders 248
Painter, James 250
Pakistan 18, 92, 191, 252
panarchy 11, 261–2
parables 162
Paragominas 138–9
‘parallel infrastructures’ 329, 330, 332
Parfitt, J. 96
Parkin, Sara 12, 18, 169, 171, 173,
194–212
partnerships 314, 315
Patagonia 329
path dependency 14, 17, 328
‘payment for ecosystem service’
scheme 138
Pereira, H.M. 107
permafrost 26, 27, 32, 222
Peru 127, 132
pessimism 81–2, 308–9
pesticides 97, 119
pests 11, 105, 106, 108–9, 118, 119
pharmaceutical industry 78
philanthropy 214
Philippines 121

342

philosophy 54, 57, 61, 64
phosphorus cycle 97, 303, 304
physical science 23
physics 10, 24, 55–6, 59
Pickett, K. 189
planetary boundaries 301–4
Plato 161
pluralities xii
Poincaré, H. 50
‘points’ 11
policy 230, 236, 256; Amazon rainforest
137–8, 140, 271–2; contemplative
consciousness 161; enactment of 231;
fiscal incentives 321–2, 325; food
86–91, 93, 99, 100; lack of coherence
180; lock-in 309–10; ‘nudge’ theory
322–4, 325; see also regulation
policy elites 331
policymakers 4, 12, 13, 82, 328, 330; EU
308; food security 89, 91, 100;
legislation 320; ‘nudge’ theory 324
politicians xv, 185, 309, 328, 332; denial
by 169; lack of confidence in 308;
‘nudge’ theory 323; short-termism
179; views on capitalism 196, 199
politics 6, 169, 170–1, 185–6, 230;
business influence on 328; climate
change 248; comparison with
markets 181–2; enactment of policy
231; failure of national 331; influence
of markets on 173; journalism 278; of
‘lock-in’ 307–11; new kind of
geopolitics 9–10; ‘nudge’ theory 323;
short-sighted 280; tipping points
277; see also democracy; governance;
governments
polities 179–82
pollution: boundaries 303; food-system
activities 97; taxes 310; threats to
ecosystems 109
Polman, Paul 218, 329
‘polycentric governance’ 14, 329
population growth 16, 77, 304;
Amazon region 131, 132–3, 135;
emerging economies 308; Malthus
on 85; neo-Malthusianism 312;
Niger 268
Porter, M.E. 218

Index
post-colonialism 248
poverty 270–1, 272, 302
power relations 17, 197
prayer 162
prices: Amazon region 133; food 88–9,
90, 93, 94; futures contracts 175
Prince’s Trust 308–9
Princeton University 210
privatization 309
Proambiente 138
productionist paradigm 87–9
Prospectus for Breakthrough
Capitalism 228
prosperity 195, 201
protests 246
Proust, Marcel 213
prudence 182
Public Administration Committee
(PAC) 180
public opinion 185–6, 221–2, 230, 243,
250
public ownership 310
Puma 329
Quebec 111
race relations 258, 259
radiative forcing 38, 39
rainfall xi; Amazon rainforest 127–9,
130; flooding 268, 269; Sahel
drought 266–7
rainforests see Amazon rainforest
Ravetz, Joe 246, 289–97
Raworth, Kate 302
Reagan, Ronald 321
Recyclebank 227
recycling 324
Reducing Emission from Deforestation
and Forest Degradation (REDD+)
137, 139, 140, 266
regime shifts 24
regulation 234, 236, 310, 320–1;
Amazon rainforest 137, 140;
business 213, 221, 310, 317; climate
change 216; enlightened 170; legal
regimes 230–1; markets 174; see also
policy
‘relational visualization’ 291

release 15, 261
religion 150, 151, 157–8; ‘ecological
awakening’ 330; meditation 159–60;
religious communities 329, 330
renewal 15, 261
reorganization 15, 261
resilience 5, 13, 177, 244, 259, 282;
adaptive governance 258, 260,
261–2; Amazon rainforest 137–8,
139; biodiversity change 117–22;
capacity building 100; developed
countries 283; food security 78, 84;
future scenarios 306–7; ‘good
news stories’ 18; human 114–16;
livestock 199; localized 305, 307, 314;
loss of 12; media coverage 250–1,
253, 254; as metaphor 55–6; Mumbai
270
Resilience Alliance 11, 316
responsibility 182, 184, 248, 292, 324
restorative redirection 5
‘reverse’ innovation 228
reversibility 24–5, 27, 28, 30, 270, 279
Revi, A. 268
rhetoric 53, 57
Richards, I.A. 62
Richards, P.D. 134
rights 83, 302; food security 87; local
282; sustainability citizenship 324;
well-being 182
risk: cultural politics of climate change
246–7; cultural theory 75; food 84;
markets 174; media coverage 244–5;
metaphor as 62–3; Mumbai flood
270; private sector 220–1; risk
assessment 31–8; risk avoidance 137;
risk-reduction strategies 39
Rockström, J. 301
Rosenstock-Heussy, Eugen 202
Royal Institute for International Affairs
92
Royal Society 304
Russia 250, 325
Sachs, Jeffrey 311
‘safe operating space’ 183–4, 192, 301,
302–3, 304
Sahara 26, 110, 118

343

Index
Sahel 26, 29, 110, 112, 258, 266–8, 270,
272
Sandel, Michael 183
Santa Fe Institute 11
Santos, Filipe Duarte 305
Sarkozy, Nicolas 88
Saussure, F. 59
scarcity 197, 312
Scheffer, M. 108
Scheffler, Samuel 207
Schelling, Tom 259
Schellnhuber, John 191
schools 184, 315
Schumacher, Ernst 316
Schumpeter, Joseph 196
science 4, 6, 47, 54, 55, 286; Amazon
rainforest 140–2; attacks on 278;
contemplative consciousness 149,
151, 157–8; food security 87; link
with society 222; metaphor and
50–1; mortality 152; new
engagement with 50; ‘post-normal’
24, 246; religion conflict with 157;
scientific method 151, 154, 155, 159;
sustainability 150; tipping point
concept 190
Scott, Lee 234
SDGs see Sustainable Development
Goals
sea-level rises: Atlantic thermohaline
circulation 29; biodiversity change
113; ice melting 16, 27, 35, 39; impact
on coral reefs 114; Mumbai 268;
Pacific Islanders 248
Sears, Richard 73
security 32, 182, 330
Seldon, Anthony 19
self-command 183
self-esteem 182
self-interest 176, 179, 205, 322, 324, 329
self-knowledge 151–2
semantics 55, 60
Sen, A.K. 83
Sendzimir, J. 266–7, 270
Seram 118
Seregeldin, I. 199
shale-based oil 14
Shanahan, Mike 251

344

shared value 218
shares 176
‘sharing economy’ 239
Shell 70
Shirky, Clay 227
shocks 258–9, 262, 263, 272
short-termism 174, 176, 178, 179, 180,
186, 225, 230
Shove, Elizabeth 205
silence 155
Simms, Andrew 245
simplicity 154, 155
Sinclair-Wilson, Jonathan 242, 285–8
skittles 66–7
Smith, Adam 182–3, 196
Smith, Joe 9, 81, 241, 243–57, 258, 278,
317
social capital 180, 181, 195, 199–201,
203, 210, 311, 313
social change 12–14, 131, 141, 202–3,
209; see also change
social construction 17–18
social entrepreneurs 18–19, 208
social factors: food security 86, 90;
sustainability 188, 189–90, 195
‘social foundation’ 302
social investment 312–13
social justice xiv, 177, 182
social marketing 215
social markets 181
social media 234
social movements 5, 226
social networks 9, 18, 259, 262, 315
social sciences 10, 55, 190
social systems 12–13, 23, 169, 194,
306; see also socio-economic
systems
social tipping points 290, 291, 292
‘social-unlocking’ 14
society 82, 171, 207–8, 222; see also civil
society
socio-economic markets 174
socio-economic systems 12–13, 188–93;
see also social systems
soil conservation 138
soil erosion 30
Sontag, Susan 285
South Korea 250

Index
Southwest North America 26, 30
Soviet Union, former 190, 192
space 17, 183–4, 192
Spain 250
species extinction 105, 106–7, 111,
112–13, 119, 120, 152–3
species ranges 107–8
spiritual dimension 149–50, 153, 154,
156, 159–60, 165
Steer, A. 199
Steffen, A. 252
Stern, Nicholas 201, 278
Stern Report (2007) 177, 256
stewardship 137, 261, 263
stillness 19, 155
stock markets 176, 241
Stockholm Resilience Centre 302–3
‘Stockholm syndrome’ 245
stories 17, 162, 254, 255
strategies 262
subsidies 226, 235–6, 310
substitution theory of metaphor 57,
60
Sukhdev, Pavan 310, 313
Sulston, J. 317
‘sunk costs’ 7, 14, 17
Sunstein, Cass 322
‘surprise’, preparation for 8, 262
sustainability: Amazon rainforest 137,
139; barriers to 178; Brundtland
concept of 184; business case for 218;
concept of 194–5; data collection
211; economic dimension 188–9, 192,
195, 197; environmental dimension
195; food security 87, 89, 99, 100;
future scenarios 306; global
standards 226; interventions 195–6,
197–8; leadership for 201–12;
localism 315; long-term 186; ‘nudge’
theory 324; social dimension 189–90,
195; sustainability science 150;
transition to 320–6; virtue ethics and
citizenship 184–5; well-being 314
sustainability citizenship 324–6
sustainable development xv, 82, 86,
135, 188, 328, 329
Sustainable Development Goals
(SDGs) 283, 311

system dynamics 10–11, 54, 62
‘system failures’ 16
systems theory 24, 49, 53, 62, 86
Taleb, Nassim Nicholas 74
taxes 226, 235, 310
Taylor, Matthew 18, 48, 73–6, 307, 316
technology 152, 165, 227, 239, 310; faith
in 178; food security 86–7; future
scenarios 305–6; ICT revolution 282;
individualistic perspective 75; ‘lockin’ 14; social networking 18;
sustainable 329
‘teleconnections’ 134
terriblisma 252
Terror Management Theory 152
Tesco 90
Thaler, Richard 322
Thatcher, Margaret 321
thermohaline circulation (THC) 26, 29,
32, 33
third sector 213–14, 216, 219
Thomas, D. 185
Thompson, E.P. 190
Thompson, Michael 73, 75
threshold conditions 7, 8, 259, 260
thresholds 11, 13, 14, 15, 303; see also
critical thresholds
Tickell, Crispin xi–xii
timber extraction 128, 130, 139
time 17, 249
tipping elements 24, 25–31, 32–4, 35
tipping points: adaptive governance
258–76; Amazon rainforest 129, 131,
142; biodiversity 105, 108–16, 120;
business responses to 233–6, 237–9;
communicating 241–2; concept of xi,
3–4, 24–5, 76, 281; contemplative
consciousness 151, 163, 164; cultural
theory 73–4, 75, 76; definitions of
65–7, 188; early warning signs 36–8,
39, 241; economic 189; etymology of
65–9; food security 90–1; four
propositions regarding 4–5; front
and back loops 15; future scenarios
305–7; Gladwell’s thesis 24, 65–6,
81–2, 287; global perspective 23–46;
‘good news stories’ 18–19;

345

Index
governments 229, 232; human
behaviour 194, 212; literal meaning
of 50–1; markets 174, 178; media
coverage 243–57; meditation 159; as
metaphors 3, 5–8, 55–6, 63, 65–9, 70,
81–2, 165, 190, 285–6; polities
179–81; private sector failure 220–2;
risk assessment 31–8; social
construction 17–18; socio-economic
domain 12–13, 188, 191; spiritual
dimension 149–50; unpredictability
304; use of the term 23, 47, 162, 245,
277–8; visual thinking and
visualization 289–96; see also
‘benign’ tipping points
Toulmin, Camilla 48, 280–4, 316
trade 78, 99, 208
transformation see change
transpiration 110
transport: congestion charges 320; food
95, 97; fossil fuels 328; low-carbon
infrastructure 283
Transport for London 227
Triandis, Harry 205
trifurcations 305
tropes 57
trophic levels 119, 120
tsunamis 36, 190–1, 247, 252
tundra 113
Turchin, P. 312
Tyszczuk, R. 245
UN see United Nations
uncertainty 4, 6, 32; adaptive cycle 272;
Amazon rainforest 129; biodiversity
change 105; cultural politics of
climate change 246–7; fear of 163;
‘irreducible’ 38; media coverage
244–5; science and humanities 54;
‘wicked problems’ 210
unemployment 116, 228, 308–9, 328
UNEP see United Nations
Environment Programme
Unilever 216, 218, 234, 329
unintended worsening 4
United Kingdom (UK):
belief–attitude–behaviour
relationship 205; Commons

346

Environment Committee 309; fiscal
deficit 189; flooding 34; food-related
GHG emissions 92; food security 85,
87, 89–90; food wastage 96; free
markets 181; health-related
expenditures 313; journalism 279;
legal constraints 230–1; legislation
320–1; Local Enterprise Partnerships
208; Natural Capital Committee 176;
‘nudge’ theory 322–3; organic
products 207; political leaders
196; Public Administration
Committee 180; Stern Review
256
United Nations (UN) 36, 99–100, 137,
231, 256, 302
United Nations Conference on
Sustainable Development (Rio+20)
(2012) xv, 193, 235, 236, 283, 301,
331
United Nations Environment
Programme (UNEP) 100, 178, 301
United Nations Framework
Convention on Climate Change
249
United States (US): agriculture 138;
biofuels 93, 94; carbon dioxide
emissions 193; climate change 327;
economic crisis 307–8; food-related
GHG emissions 96; free markets 181;
incomes 238–9; inner cities 325;
journalism 279; lobbying 78;
National Intelligence Council 197,
201, 203; public opinion 221–2; racial
segregation 259; renewable energy
330; Southwest North America 26,
30; trade deficit 189
universities 203, 212
unpredictability 6–7, 31, 38, 304
urbanization 78, 272; Amazon region
132–3; food security 92, 94, 95;
rural–urban migration 115
values 7, 158, 166, 184, 324, 325
vegetation 110, 131
Vergara, W. 115
virtue 182–5
visual thinking 289–97

Index
Vonnegut, Kurt 223
vulnerability 8, 16; Amazon rainforest
130; biodiversity loss 118; ethics of
248; food security 95; indicators 38;
induced vulnerabilities 4, 13; risk
avoidance 137
WAIS see West Antarctic ice sheet
Wal-Mart 234, 329
WAM see West African Monsoon
Ward, Barbara 281–2
water xi, 260, 313–14; Anglian Water
216–17; ecosystem-based adaptation
79; food-system activities 96, 97;
freshwater availability 303; growth
in usage 77; human rights 302;
low-carbon infrastructure 283;
scarcity 197; shortages 116, 216;
threats to 301
WBCSD see World Business Council
for Sustainable Development
wealth 195, 199, 201, 312
weather 94, 95, 110, 115; see also
climate change; rainfall
well-being 171, 181, 212, 301, 312–14,
317; concept of 182; measurement of
311; new logic for capitalism 200,
201; planetary boundaries 302, 303,
304; sidelined by capitalist logic 199
Wells, Robin 308

West African Monsoon (WAM) 26, 29,
32, 33–4, 35
West Antarctic ice sheet (WAIS) 16, 26,
27, 32, 33–4, 35
WHO see World Health Organization
‘wicked problems’ xv, 13, 150, 209–12,
254, 306
Wilkinson, R. 189
Williams, Rowan 167
Willis, K. 114
women 210–11, 302
Woodruff, D. 106
World Bank 85, 114, 115, 264, 302
World Business Council for
Sustainable Development (WBCSD)
226, 236
World Economic Forum 236
World Health Organization (WHO)
100
World Trade Organization (WTO) 78,
99, 231, 283
worst case scenario 34–5
WTO see World Trade Organization
Yedoma permafrost 26, 27, 32
Young Foundation 325
young people 228, 308–9, 315, 317
Zero Discharge of Hazardous
Chemical agenda 227

347