Earth system resilience and tipping behavior

Abstract

Anthropogenic climate change, marked by unprecedented extremes, is an immediate concern. The Earth’s limited ability to adapt to abrupt changes within our societal timeframe has raised global alarm. Resilience, the capacity to withstand and recover from disturbances, diminishes as disturbances intensify. For avoiding potential catastrophic changes, it is crucial to identify tipping points, where a change in part of a system becomes self-perpetuating beyond some threshold, leading to substantial, widespread, often abrupt and irreversible, impacts. This ERL focus collection has published 27 papers, which contribute novel research findings into the scientific literature in: (1) formulating theories of resilience and tipping points, (2) determining ecological resistance, resilience, and recovery, (3) examining tipping behavior of the Earth system, and (4) identifying social-ecological resilience and tipping points. Some of these results also are useful for policymakers and resource managers in addressing catastrophic disasters as a result of increasingly anthropogenic heating.