Climate change and weather extremes as risk multipliers: Tipping points, cascading events, and societal instability

Abstract

The role of global warming as a risk multiplier is discussed in an integrative framework connecting climate and societal stability, acting through complex and destabilizing impact chains beyond thresholds. These include complex social interactions and self-enforcing collective dynamics such as breakdown of vulnerable infrastructures and networks; tradeoffs in the water-food-energy nexus; economic and financial crashes; social protest and turmoil; mass migration and violent conflict. Adressing the challenges through adaptive and anticipative governance can induce societal transformation processes to protect human security, develop social livelihood, strengthen societal resilience and solve problems along cooperative and sustainable pathways. In this context, key questions considered are conditions when climate stress exceeds the adaptive capacity of natural and social systems; tolerance ranges of stability and instability; impacts of climate stress on critical infrastructures and human-environment-interaction; thresholds of negative and positive tipping points triggering cascading events; and conditions for sustainability transition and societal transformation processes.