10 October 2024 | Online

On 10 October 2024, the European Climate, Infrastructure and Environment Executive Agency (CINEA), together with DG RTD, organised and hosted an online Clustering event for Horizon Europe Cluster 5 Destination 1 projects for a Feedback to Policy event on “Recent Advances in Climate Science”. As such, the event was oriented towards policymakers in the European Commission, with the aim to convey policy-relevant messages from the research projects to EC staff and EC policy officers. Furthermore, the event aimed to gather insights and highlights on the lastest scientific developments across the projects to be fed into EU climate policy agenda.

After a successful proposal for the event, TipESM was selected to contribute to the first session on “NDC ambition, long-term strategies and implementation of climate action”. The session welcomed project presentations from PARIS, SDGs, RESCUE, NEVERMORE, ACHIEVE, and TipESM.

Given that TipESM is still in its early stages, having started on January 1, 2024, the focus of the presentation pinpointed the key expected outcomes of the project and their policy-relevance. Shuting Yang, Project Coordinator for TipESM represented the project.

Presentation Highlights

The TipESM project expects three key outcome that can be directly relevant to policy development. These include the following:

1. Tipping Point Risk Register: Informing on the likelihood of certain tipping points being reached
2. Safe Emission Pathways: Providing guidance on emission levels that decrease the likelihood of tipping
3. Early Warning for Climate Tipping Points: identifying which phenomena in the Earth system that signal a tipping is about to occur

In the later stages of the project, all results will be translated and communicated – with the key milestones of two policy briefing events planned to take place in the more mature phases on the project in June 2026 and September 2026.

Key Expected Outcomes

Tipping Point Risk Register
The Risk Register provides critical information on the likelihood of crossing individual tipping points at various levels of global warming and overshoot scenarios. More importantly, it highlights the consequences of tipping events for both ecosystems and society.  

Understanding the likelihood of tipping and the consequence of tipping together is invaluable. This is because it will help us to prepare for what can happen. Incorporating this information into policy making enables us to develop more targeted adaptation and mitigation strategies to avoid the worst outcomes of tipping or to reduce their impacts.  

One example is the potential collapse of Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, also known as AMOC. AMOC is an ocean circulation in the Atlantic that carries warm water northwards in the upper ocean and cold water southwards at the deeper ocean, distributing heat around the planet and, consequently, influencing weather patterns, sea levels, and stability of ecosystems. Climate change can weaken this circulation, and it has been a hot topic recently on whether there is sufficient evidence suggesting that AMOC currently is the weakest in over 1,000 years. Severe weakening could lead it to fully shut down, bringing extreme conditions that are far beyond those to which people, infrastructure and nature are currently adapted.

The likelihood of an AMOC collapse is highly uncertain, but it doesn’t mean that it can be ruled out; this is one of the highlighted research areas of TipESM. At the same time, more research is also needed into the impacts of AMOC collapse on different sectors.  

Our risk register aims to provide more updated information on the likelihoods and consequences of tipping events, like the AMOC collapse, seeing them as part of an integrated system. It will allow national climate risk assessments to consider the interconnections and cascading effects between different tipping points, feeding into more robust security planning and preparedness for specific industries and sectors.

Safe Emission Pathways
The Safe Emission Pathways outline what efforts are required in reducing emissions to minimize the chance of crossing tipping points and extreme event thresholds. The pathways will help policymakers make informed decisions on the best direction for reducing emissions, that keep global warming within safe limits to protect ecosystems and societies. We imagine that this information could feed into different recommendations for carbon emission distribution and reduction across sectors or nations, including policy recommendations to IPCC or COP.

Early Warning Indicators
A key issue in climate adaptation is getting early warnings of when we are reaching a tipping point which enables us to act. Either to implement preventative measures or to prepare for its consequences. To our knowledge, currently no nation in Europe has an early warning system for tipping points that would be useful in decision-making, creating a dangerous blind spot in adaptation efforts, particularly for tipping points that will result in either severe or rapid consequences. TipESM will identify and test early warning indicators that can be determined through observations, providing meteorological or environmental agencies, national governments, and systems like Copernicus with a tool to better forecast the tipping. 

One critical case is the subpolar gyre. ue to Arctic ice melting from global warming, more freshwater is entering the gyre, reducing its salinity and weakening the sinking process of surface water into the deep currents. Different studies suggest that once triggered, the collapse of the subpolar gyre could happen abruptly within a decade, with a recent assessment indicating a 45% chance of collapse in this century, possibly as early as 2040. Consequences of subpolar gyre collapse would result in harsher winters and more severe summer heatwaves in parts of Europe, leading to shorter growing seasons and subsequently damaging domestic food production in many European countries, further triggering weakened international food security, and cascading to human health, poverty, and political instability. The rapid and compounding impact of these consequences highlights the need for early warning indicators that spark quick adaptation actions and responses across communities.

Key Messages

TipESM emphasizes two critical priorities for effective policymaking:

First, recognition of the interconnections and cascading effects of tipping points and climate risks needs to be addressed in policymaking. This understanding should be integrated into national security risk assessments, adaptation and mitigation strategies, and preparedness plans.

Second, mitigation action, which means to avoid crossing tipping points, and adaptation action, which means to prepare for the consequences of tipping, should be continuously supported. To drive effective mitigation and adaptation action, it should be grounded in:  

• Usable climate information for risk and security assessments 

• Closing major knowledge gaps (such as on cascading effects of tipping points or on the consequences of climate tipping for different economic sectors) 

• Development of early warning systems to strengthen the ability to forecast and prepare 

TipESM is a starting point trying to bridge the research gaps and working towards providing these results, and continued ongoing support of collaborative research projects is crucial to achieve them.