5 November 2024 | Brussels, Belgium

A full report from this workshop has been published by the Publications Office of the European Union:
Galmarini, S., Roman-Cuesta, R.M., Dentener, F., Ruiz Moreno, A., Alessi, L. et al. (2025). Raising Awareness of Earth System Tipping Points: Implications for EU Governance – Workshop report, Publications Office of the European Union, JRC141821, https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2760/9047293.

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Representatives: Shuting Yang (DMI)

On Tuesday, 5 November 2024, TipESM Project Coordinator, Shuting Yang (DMI), took part in the workshop, “Raising Awareness of Earth System Tipping Points: Implications for EU Governance”.

Session on Advances in Biophysical Modelling of Risks and Impacts of Tipping Points (I)

The session, “Advances in biophysical modelling of risks and impacts of Tipping Points (I)” was led by Sina Loriani from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK).

After a brief introduction to the session, TipESM Advisory Board member, Ricarda Winkelmann (PIK), laid the foundation for the session, presenting Europe-relevant tipping systems from a climate risk perspective. Ricarda outlined critical elements of the Earth system, including:

• Ocean circulation
• the cryosphere
• the biosphere
• Tipping interconnetions and cascading

Moving into the next part of the session, projects, TIPMIP and ClimTip, alongside TipESM covered the topic of modelling tipping points, also giving attention to the gaps and uncertainities that come with this.

Earth System Modelling to Explore Climate Tipping Points

As part of these insights to the modelling of tipping, Shuting Yang delivered the presentation entitled, “Earth System Modelling to explore climate tipping points”.

She demonstrated what climate models can simulate in tipping, giving examples of abrupt changes as simulated by climate models with the specific case of AMOC projections by CMIP6 ensemble of models.

Moving forward, following the TIPMIP protocol presented by TIPMIP project coordinator, Donovan Dennis, Shuting reiterated the new framework of Earth System Model (ESM) experiments designed to investigate tipping points and their impacts across the Earth system. A first look from the TIPMIP ESM experiments protocol was shown, including an overview of the international model participants across Europe, North America, Asia, and Australia. With this, new possibilities with ESM experiments open up, including to run “see what hapens” experiments giving insights on the likelihood, consequences and irreversibility behind various tipping points, interactions between different Earth system components, cascading effects across the Earth system, potential unknown tipping points, and early warning indicators of tipping.

Take Home Messages

To close off, Shuting Yang, coordinator of TipESM, sent home a few key messages, underlining that with coordinated ESM experiments that start to be available, we can investigate climate tipping points which enable assessment of tipping risks in various Earth system components under different warming levels, enable assessments of the risk of tipping in societal systems due to climate change, develop early warning systems based on ESMs, observations and process-based understanding.