Dialogues on Climate Change

Overshoot is increasingly likely to be required to meet the Paris Agreement's 1.5 °C temperature goal, resulting in climate risk management becoming more complex. This is aggravated by an often siloed and fragmentary risk management landscape, making the risks and benefits of potential interactions between interventions less legible to practitioners, policymakers, and academia. Approaches that integrate thinking across all climate risk management interventions are emerging as an increasing priority. We present a qualitative climate risk management typology that aids in exploring the interactions and roles of climate interventions across a variety of climate risk scenarios and contexts. Use of the typology is demonstrated by presenting six portfolios of interventions, which illustrate the utility of different interventions to ultimately reduce loss and damage. This approach builds on existing tools in the literature by recasting them explicitly in terms of risk and extending their range over a variety of qualitatively distinct climate scenarios.

Climate policy needs to respond to the realities of overshooting 1.5°C of warming. Geoengineering approaches – both large-scale carbon dioxide removal and solar radiation management – have been proposed as ways to both limit global temperature increase and return the climate to a stable and safe state. These provide policy makers with new options, but come with notable biophysical and socioeconomic risks. Current methodologies for assessing climate risk have potentially significant weaknesses when evaluating the risks generated by geoengineering. Given the potential for social and biophysical systems to produce complex and destabilising feedback loops, careful assessments of geoengineering must be conducted within holistic and integrative risk frameworks.

Hyslop et al. advocate the ‘integrating’ of complex climate politics under a singular ‘risk management’ typology focused on ‘overshoot’. As in much parallel climate policy analysis, this raises (alongside some strengths) a range of serious problems. These may detract from both scientific rigour and political efficacy. Objectivity and completeness are overplayed. Uncertainties and ambiguities are sidelined. Framing subjectivities and conditioning factors acting on analysis are neglected. Criticised here as ‘technocratic scientism’, the result risks spuriously cloaking an essentially political intervention behind the ‘neutral’ authority of science. Such an under-accountable style fails to be persuasive. It also arguably helps provoke rising wider regressive forms of authoritarianism. Remedies are argued to lie in supporting (rather than subverting) democratic struggle: using scientific method to ‘open up’ (more than ‘close down’) space for challenging (not reinforcing) existing patterns of incumbent privilege. As much against climate disruption as other threats, it is on this (rather than technocratic scientism) that effective progressive action depends.

Two decades after the tipping points became part of climate policy discussions, this study examines how the relation between societal tipping points and climate tipping points is understood in public discourse. We analyze views on how political and social actions might impact the race between negative climate tipping points and positive societal tipping points, drawing on a global sample of 10 news outlets from 2020 to 2024. In line with previous research, our findings suggest that “Tipping point” rarely implies an irreversible, self-reinforcing process. Three discursive tensions stem from the concept's ambiguous ontology: the kind of transition envisioned, agency of actors and politics needed, and means for change. Positive tipping points offer a discursive balance, allowing discussions on negative climate tipping points without excessive pessimism. The paper ends with a reflection on whether this shift may dilute the focus on risks and promotes a depoliticized belief that incremental changes will lead to a conflict-free transition.

Tipping points in the Earth system have been an important topic in climate research for the last couple of decades. Numerous systems are thought to have non-linear dynamics, such that a slow linear external forcing on them can cause large, irreversible changes that have serious consequences for the climate. Recently, the concept of ‘positive’ societal tipping points has been considered to combat the global climate crisis. Social systems that exhibit these behaviours can promote a more environmentally conscious society with considered interventions. This commentary responds to recent analysis of how negative climate tipping points and positive tipping points are framed in public debate by asking what these framings mean for prediction and decision-making. I argue that highlighting movement toward positive tipping points can spur action because governments often have greater domestic leverage and the faster timescales make progress visible on policy horizons.

This article discusses Hansson et al.'s argument that the metaphor of societal tipping points inadequately captures processes of social and political change. While agreeing that equating societal with climatic tipping points risks depoliticization and oversimplification, the article contends that Hansson et al. underestimate the transformative potential of political institutions. It proposes institutionalization—defined as enduring, path-shaping change in norms, rules, organizations, and implementation practices—as a more accurate framework for understanding how change unfolds. Unlike tipping-point metaphors, institutionalization can highlight power dynamics, incremental evolution, reversibility, and diverse national trajectories. The article illustrates this through the global rise of solar photovoltaics, showing how technological and economic shifts interact with varied institutional configurations in countries such as India, Indonesia, South Africa, and Brazil. These cases demonstrate that energy transformations are politically mediated rather than cascading, single-threshold events. Institutionalization thus offers a more nuanced and hopeful perspective than the notion of tipping points.

In this article, I discuss the limitations of tipping points as a framework for communicating risks and vulnerabilities created by climate change. In doing so, I expand on the genealogical account of Anders Hansson, Jonas Anshelm, and Simon Haikola and their claims about the salience of apocalypse and doom in climate communication. I suggest that the communication of vulnerabilities to climate change, including catastrophic risks, should not seek to manage public emotion or invite billionaires to prescribe policy and governance frameworks for climate change.

This commentary engages with A Race to the Tip – Revisiting Societal Tipping Points in the Public Climate Debate, a timely contribution to the evolving discussion on how tipping points are understood and communicated. The authors trace how the metaphor of the “tipping point” has traveled between science, media, and policy, showing how its expanding use shapes public and political responses to climate change. Their analysis reveals both the strengths and the risks of framing climate and societal transformation as a “race” between collapse and innovation. Building on this, the commentary highlights the paper's conceptual and communicative contributions, situating them within wider debates on public understanding, governance, and climate discourse. It concludes that the study provides an essential perspective on how language structures urgency and agency, advancing a more reflective, hopeful, and politically aware approach to communicating climate change.

We have followed with great interest the responses to our article in Dialogues on Climate Change concerning societal tipping points in public debate, as well as the reflections offered on their relationship to climate tipping points and their implications for society. In this response, we underscore the strengths of the four responses our article received and critically assess whether early opportunity signals can be applied to transformations in social systems, and whether such systems can be modelled in ways analogous to physical climate systems. Finally, we outline potential directions for future research on societal tipping points.

This commentary explains why market signals are vital to support a zero greenhouse gas emissions outcome. This is a critique of the commentary ‘carbon markets have no future in a (net) zero-emissions world’ and seeks to foster conversation around this topic. The commentary herein is a defense of carbon markets and how their integration within a cap-and-trade system represents currently the most efficient mechanism in coordinating the anarchy of nation scale emissions reductions, both in reaching net-zero, and beyond. The commentary describes why the total centralized control of emissions reduction without markets is ineffective on the path to zero emissions, why it places significant economic and bureaucratic burden upon a nation, and why those impacted the most by this are the poor.