Anticipation-induced social tipping: can the environment be stabilised by social dynamics?

Abstract

In the past decades, human activities caused global Earth system changes, e.g., climate change or biodiversity loss. Simultaneously, these associated impacts have increased environmental awareness within societies across the globe, thereby leading to dynamical feedbacks between the social and natural Earth system. Contemporary modelling attempts of Earth system dynamics rarely incorporate such co-evolutions and interactions are mostly studied unidirectionally through direct or remembered past impacts. Acknowledging that societies have the additional capability for foresight, this work proposes a conceptual feedback model of socio-ecological co-evolution with the specific construct of anticipation acting as a mediator between the social and natural system. Our model reproduces results from previous sociological threshold models with bistability if one assumes a static environment. Once the environment changes in response to societal behaviour, the system instead converges towards a globally stable, but not necessarily desired, attractor. Ultimately, we show that anticipation of future ecological states then leads to metastability of the system where desired states can persist for a long time. We thereby demonstrate that foresight and anticipation form an important mechanism which, once its time horizon becomes large enough, fosters social tipping towards behaviour that can stabilise the environment and prevents potential socio-ecological collapse.

Social tipping points everywhere?—Patterns and risks of overuse

“…Scholars have been developing increasingly sophisticated methodological approaches to study tipping dynamics, including agent-based models (Müller et al, 2021), controlled experiments (Andreoni et al, 2021), and historical case studies. Some of the more sophisticated modeling studies have attempted to include empirical data, for example, using survey data to inform model parameters (Wiedermann et al, 2020), but to a large extent this work remains detached from the observation and measurement of actual social systems.…”

Modelling coupled human–environment complexity for the future of the biosphere: strengths, gaps and promising directions

“…These models allow for a focus on the social structure of a given population, as two groups with the same mean threshold to participate could have drastically different dynamics given the distribution of thresholds among individuals. Threshold models have also been formulated for continuous systems where the frequency of participants is modelled through population dynamics [ 50 , 51 ] and have been sparsely applied to CHES models [ 52 , 53 ]. For agent-based models, there are a number of ways in which individuals learn, often inspired by voter models [ 54 ] or Ising models [ 55 ] where agents simply imitate the majority opinion of their peers.…”

“…Many CHES models account for foresight in the human decision-making process. In models of forest cover, pollution, ecological public goods and reinforcement learning, this environmental foresight can be very significant in conserving natural states or mitigating harmful action [ 52 , 65 , 73 , 81 , 83 , 102 ]. One forest-grassland model included an additional term for economic foresight, finding the persistence of the forest-grassland mosaic to be highly dependent on individuals valuing long-term environmental health over long-term economic benefits [ 73 ].…”

Concern and anticipation of sea-level rise provide grounds for social tipping towards climate action

“…Within natural systems, experienced climate impacts (32,33), e.g. floods and heat waves (34), have the potential to shift attitudes and behaviors toward climate change and instigate social tipping processes (35). Behavioral changes are more likely if extreme weather events elicit an emotional response, increase the salience of climate change, or when people directly attribute the event to climate change (36).…”