Exploring the use of adaptation tipping points: A systematic review of definitions, characteristics and applications

Abstract

Adaptation Tipping Points (ATPs) are critical in adaptation pathway planning, marking thresholds where existing strategies fail, and requiring new approaches. Despite their importance, ATPs lack consistent definitions, leading to conceptual fragmentation. Following the lack of a systematic approach, existing research provides limited insights into how ATPs align with broader development trajectories, making their integration into adaptation strategies challenging. Addressing this gap requires a comprehensive characterization that clarifies how ATPs have been applied in scientific literature, ensuring consistency while allowing for context-specific adaptations. To this end, we systematically analyse and consolidate existing research on ATP definitions, methods, and outputs, laying the groundwork for a standardized approach to ATPs in climate change adaptation planning. We identify four primary ATP categories (policy-based, acceptance-based, transition-based, and opportunity-based), each representing distinct thresholds shaped by governance, societal acceptance, systemic transitions, and strategic opportunities. These categories are characterized by differences in system dynamics, triggering events, consequences, adaptation drivers, and goals, defining distinct trajectories and objectives for each category in adaptation pathway planning. Furthermore, we show that the application of different ATP categories is independent of specific contexts, methods or outcomes, highlighting the flexibility of different categories across climate change adaptation planning processes. This study underscores the potential of ATPs to enhance cross-sectoral integration and facilitate the development of adaptation pathways. Ultimately, a more coherent application of ATPs can strengthen adaptation pathway planning by enabling timely interventions, accounting for systemic interdependencies, and aligning adaptation measures with broader sustainability goals in an integrated, system-wide framework.