Tipping Points for a Seminal New Era of Climate Resilience and Climate Justice

Abstract

Globally, we are living in an era of unparalleled population growth, rapid loss of undeveloped lands and forests, and tipping points of natural resource extractions serving 21st-century societal needs. Since the onset of industrialization in the 18th century, human actions have altered the planet and its atmosphere on a staggeringly large scale. Over the past 150 years, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from human actions have increased by 30% (UCAR et al., n.d.), creating a greenhouse effect, which in turn causes global temperatures to rise. As noted in the Sixth Assessment Report, AR6 Synthesis Report: Climate Change 2023, of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) , human activities, principally through emissions of GHGs, have unequivocally caused global warming, with global surface temperatures reaching 1.1°C above 1850–1900 levels in 2011–2020 (IPCC, 2023). Increased temperatures influence global weather patterns, creating climate nonstationarity, breaking down certainty of climate “normal” and the ability to accurately predict impacts of extreme weather events and the associated risks this poses to communities (Revi et al., 2014). Many theorize that our outsized impact on the natural world has propelled us into an entirely new geological time interval, dubbed the “Anthropocene.” The formal definition of the Anthropocene is an epoch in which many of the Earth’s conditions and processes are profoundly altered by human influence (Berkes, 2017; Steffen et al., 2007, 2011). In layperson’s terms, it describes the era when the consequences of our actions catch up to us in a series of tipping points.