Global Climate Tipping Points Could Arrive In a Matter of Years

(Bloomberg) -- Irreversible changes may start reshaping the world’s ecosystem as soon as the next few years—much sooner than previously thought.

A new study published Tuesday in Nature Communications examines the mechanics of these tipping points in 40 separate ecosystems, including forests, coral reefs, and marshes. Drawing on pre-existing studies and modeling, the authors suggest that the apparent stability of the world’s largest ecosystems is “a deceptive guide to the potential speed of their collapse.”  

The findings bring new rigor to the study of how ongoing pollution and degradation of earth systems may transform the global environment. While precise predictions are still out of reach, the author write, “we must prepare for regime shifts in any natural system to occur over the ‘human’ timescales of years and decades, rather than multi-generational timescales of centuries and millennia.”

The authors say governments should take advantage of the time they have now to fix these increasingly fragile systems. Once they start to slide, the transformation will be quick. The Amazon rainforests, they write, could become open savannah within a half-century. Caribbean coral reefs might need just 15 years to die off.

The analysis joins a rapidly expanding collection of studies trying to bring light to risks to the Earth systems most critical to ecological stability and human systems. This larger body of work also focuses on the Atlantic warm-water currents that keep Europe temperate, African and Indian monsoons, and melting polar ice sheets that contribute to rising seas. 

In everyday life, cause-and-effect, linear thinking can take people quite far. But understanding how changes are actually likely to occur—slowly and then all at once—may be the first step in addressing them, particularly when it comes to the planet’s massive carbon-storing rainforests. “There are effective actions that we can take now, such as protecting the existing forest, managing it to maintain diversity, and reducing the direct pressures from logging, burning, clearance and climate change,” said Georgina Mace, professor of biodiversity and ecosystems at University College London, in a statement.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Reed Landberg at landberg@bloomberg.net, Jillian Goodman

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