Human development in the Anthropocene requires that we understand not only the rising human pressures on ecosystems, nature, and the planetary system as a whole, we must also understand how nature and the earth system responds.

We’re learning more and more from empirical research around the world, that nature doesn’t respond in just incremental and linear ways. In fact, we now recognize that systems from coral reefs, to rainforests, to temperate forests, have several distinctly different states, separated by thresholds.

So, a system can be either a rainforest or a savannah. And if a system is pushed through environmental changes, across this threshold, we talk of a tipping point.  When a system changes fundamentally its structure and function, and tips over from one stable state to another stable state.  So strictly speaking the definition of a tipping point is when a system fundamentally changes structure and function, and settles into a new stable state. And the prerequisite to do so is that a feedback mechanism, which keeps the system tightly in one state, changes direction.

For example, a rainforest, its feedback is that it sustains its own moisture – it’s a self-wettening system. The feedback is that the green canopy sucks out a tremendous amount of water from the soil, feeds that back a vapour back into the atmosphere, and self-generates rainfall, and also keeps moisture within its very tight, dense canopy. That’s the feedback keeping it in a rainforest state. When that system is cut open through deforestation, it dries out, and warms up due to climate change, the feedback can change into a self-drying system, where instead it being wettening, becomes a self-drying system, and the system crosses a threshold, it becomes a tipping point, and gets locked as a savannah.

This is “tipping points.” Now tipping points have been explored for decades, and have been understood in small ecosystems from lakes and forest systems, but increasingly we see evidence that large-scale systems can also be subject to tipping points.

And this is just one example of a potential tipping point that really, really concerns scientists across the world. It’s data from Greenland, showing on the x-axis months of the year, and on the y-axis showing the percentage of incoming heat from the sun, which is reflected back to space – what we call Albedo.

Now in the coloured thin lines, you see the stable state with a permanent ice layer on Greenland. When the ice is stable it is a very white colour, and as well all know, a white, light colour reflects back roughly 90-95% of incoming heat. And that’s exactly what we see. It goes down a little bit during the Arctic summer of June-July, when the fringes of Greenland always melt and become a slightly darker liquid surface, but overall, it’s a mirror, it’s a cooling system, it’s a prerequisite for the earth to stay stable in the Holocene.

But look at that thick red line, which are observations from NASA in 2012. An extraordinary exception suddenly, for two weeks in July, the feedback changes direction from being a mirror, reflecting back heat, ie. a cooler, to becoming a net heat absorber. More than 50% of incoming heat is sucked up because for the first time in observational history the entire Greenland ice sheet is melting and covered by a liquid darker surface. Now Jason Box at the Byrd Polar Research Institute concludes in calculation that just these two weeks of change in feedback corresponds to a new injection of heat of in the order of 300 exajoules of energy.

Now 300 exajoules is a very difficult number, but just to give you some comparisons, the annual energy consumption in the US is in the order of 200 exajoules. The annual global energy consumption is a bit more than 600 (exajoules). So momentarily this means that Denmark bypasses China and the US as the world’s largest climate forcing nation. And this occurs when Mother Earth changes directions in the feedback, which potentially could be a tipping point.

Now for the Arctic, for example, there is emerging research showing that several systems can be subject to these kind of tipping points.  Such as a flip in the Arctic Sea ice cover, meaning that it could suddenly flip over into a situation with permanent open sea.

And other systems that keep the ocean circulation functioning between the Arctic Sea, and for example, the Atlantic. Now recent research on Greenland shows something quite remarkable. Ice core data, looking at the conditions on earth the last time we had a warm interglacial, the Eemian warm interglacial period, some 120 000 years back. To explore whether or not the Greenland ice sheet melted in its entirety.

The reason why this question is so critical is that at the time, during several of thousands of years, mean average temperatures were more than 4°C warmer than today. And normally, we have always expected that if we would reach a 4°C warming, an exceptional situation which we haven’t seen for 4, 5, 6 million years in a longer time period, that the entire Greenland ice sheet would melt.

But this recent data, led by Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, one of the world’s leading glaciologist, shows something surprising. Maybe that Greenland, in fact, did not melt. In fact, only contributed to in the order of 2 metres sea level rise, in a world that we know, with high degree of certainty, had a sea level which was 6-8 metres higher.

How come we know that the sea level was 6-8 metres higher? Well, we see that from very, very good data on coastal regions that show remnants of fossils from this period. So, we’re quite certain about the sea level rise. This shows, and gives us something of quite remarkable good news. It indicates, in fact, that Greenland is most likely more resilient than we previously thought.

Resilient in the sense that even a +4°C degree warming would still keep the Greenland ice sheet, you know, relatively in tact. But the drama is the following: if that’s correct, and Greenland thereby only contributes to 2 metres sea level rise, where is the lacking difference?

Because we’re missing in the order of 4-6 metres sea level rise, which must have caused, or been triggered, from somewhere else. And the trick is that there is only one potential candidate as a source for that rise, and that is Antarctica.

Antarctica, which we’ve always thought to be a more resilient system than the Arctic. And remarkably, just this year, 2014, two separate research teams have recently published data of, I would call it even shocking nature, showing from observational evidence that several glaciers in the west Antarctic ice sheet potentially have crossed the tipping point, and now have entered irreversible melting, which could explain this rising vulnerability. If this is correct, it would actually mean that we have to revise our average estimates of sea level rise for this century, from roughly 1 metre to 2 metres, so a doubling in risk for this century.

So this is showing why it’s incredibly important for us now to understand the risk of tipping points in large systems that regulate the stability of the earth system. But it goes not only for the polar regions, similarly, science shows the same kind of risk pattern with regard to the large rainforest systems.

This is data from the Amazon rainforest, showing the unprecedented droughts  from 2005 and 2010, which led to a remarkable penetration of drying, even inside the rainforest. And increasing evidence indicates that these kind of shock events, of droughts related to global climate change, together with the large and vast deforestation, which open ups tracts of forest leading to more dry air penetrating the normally moist canopy, could in fact lead to abrupt behaviour, meaning that the system could tip over and, quite abruptly, shift into a savannah.  Mapping out these risks globally is increasingly a key priority for science.

What you see here is one such effort of trying to identify the hotspot systems in the world where we could anticipate this kind of shift occurring from one stable state to another stable state if we cross a threshold, leading to a tipping point.

And what you see here is that this goes not only for the polar regions and the Amazon rainforest, but for example, for the large rainfall systems, in both the southeast Asian monsoon, the west African monsoon, which sustains livelihoods for hundreds of millions of people.

The risk that we get abrupt shifts in methane release in permafrost; a shift from a frozen to a thawing, and permanently thawed system. And these risks of tipping points, now at the large scale, is a fundamental importance in understanding what occurs in the earth system. But finally, this also has direct operational implications for the way we manage large sectors in society.

This is an attempt to analyze, for example, is there a risk of inducing tipping points also when it comes to freshwater systems? Not due only to climate change, but the combination of climate change and land management. And what you see here is a first analysis of hotspot regions in the world where you could see a fundamental shift in freshwater supply, if continued unsustainable management is pursued.

Where we see shifts in moisture feedback related to deforestation, which changes rainfall patterns, which could abruptly shift runoff flows and rivers, and thereby undermine the possibility for irrigation, and freshwater supplies to cities. So, the large scale regulating systems in the polar regions, for example, connect to the direct operational scales of managing food security in the world, across different scales.

So overall the conclusion is that in order to navigate sustainable development in the Anthropocene, we need to understand both pressures and tipping points, and together this allows us to explore: what is a safe operating space for development?

When we’re exploring sustainable development in the Anthropocene in the era when we no longer can exclude undermining the way the entire Earth system operates, we must understand and explore what resilience means across different scales.

So we’ve been exploring the resilience of systems, the ability of a household or an economy or a rainforest to withstand different disturbances without shifting into a different structure or function, for example, a rainforest tipping over into a savannah. We must explore what is the risk of pushing the entire Earth system outside of its stable state. We call this Earth resilience.

Earth resilience is entirely dependent on the different components of the Earth system operating together and either through what we call negative feedbacks, meaning processes that dampen change, or through positive feedbacks, where processes actually accelerate change, and applying these interactions regulate the ability of the Earth system to remain either in a Holocene-like state or propel itself outside of that state.

So in exploring Earth resilience we must also understand what we call cross-scale interactions, how for example a carbon sink or a methane sink in a local forest, or a wetland, or a savannah, interacts with the atmosphere or the polar regions, so from a local, to a regional, to a global scale. That is different to Teleconnections, which is when one system changes in one place of the world and has domino effects on other systems.

For example when a forest system that feeds back moisture and creates rainfall affects the monsoon system several continents further away. These are complex notions but must be understood in the Anthropocene. And in this lecture we’ll explore a bit further what we need to understand when we define Earth resilience. Now it takes us back to the absolute starting point when defining our desired future, which is going back to the ice core data which defines our desired state, namely the Holocene. So this is again the hundred thousand years of change in the world showing that the last ten thousand years in the red circle here is an unprecedented stable state of the planet. In fact we can call this the Eden’s Garden of human development, the stable state within which we want to remain.

The reason why referring to this state when exploring Earth resilience is that the Holocene is a state that we understand very well. We know the carbon cycle, the nitrogen cycle, the phosphorus cycle, and the limits within which essentially all the key parameters that regulate the stability of the Earth system have been operating over the past 10 000 years, illustrated for example in this extraordinary set of data showing concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane over the past 400 000 years.

And if you look very carefully you’ll see the very stable and narrow range within which these gases operate over the past Holocene, and the blue arrow showing how we are moving away from this very stable state.

This Is very helpful, it actually helps us define a safe operating space for human development because we understand fairly well how, and what are the conditions, within which the Earth system can operate in the Holocene. Now the excitement about this comes across I think in a very pedagogic way in the following exploration of what role does the biosphere, the ecosystems of the world, play in terms of trying or attempting to maintain a Holocene-like state? And let me just run through this example to you in quite detail.

So we are emitting greenhouse gases and have been doing so since the Industrial Revolution in the end of the 18th century. We’ve emitted an estimated 365 billion tons of carbon from industrial emissions, and another 180 billion tons of carbon from land use change.

That together ends up in an enormous 545 billion tons of carbon emitted cumulatively since the Industrial Revolution. This is relevant because carbon remains in the atmosphere for over 1000 years. So what we did 200 years back is still warming the planet.

The big question is temperature has risen with almost 1° Celsius since the Industrial Revolution. Is it all of these 545 billion tons of carbon that now reside in the atmosphere causing 1° Celsius warming? The answer is no, because the astonishing reality is that over half, roughly 55%, of these emissions are actually absorbed by the living biosphere, 155 billion tons in the oceans, and another 150 billion tons are estimated to have been taken up by terrestrial ecosystems.

This is the most profound proof that the Earth system, through its biogeophysical processes, is applying Earth resilience in practice, meaning that the Earth system is applying these processes to try to remain in its current stable state, the Holocene, by dampening the impacts of our disturbance, emitting of carbon dioxide in this case.

And these carbon sinks are tremendous. And the net remaining amount of carbon in the atmosphere is only 240 gigatons of carbon which has contributed to the temperature rise so far.

Same story goes for heat, for example. 95% of the heat caused by global warming is stored deep in the oceans. These are all processes that try to dampen and maintain the self-regulating biogeophysical processes in the Earth system in the Holocene-type state. Now it goes beyond just understanding the big climate system.

There are critical functions that all the biomes play in regulating Earth resilience. So the polar regions, for example, are permanent white surface areas that reflect roughly 90% of incoming heat from the Sun, reflecting it back to space. These polar regions are massive air conditioning, cooling systems for planet Earth, thanks to their permanent white surface.

These are negative feedbacks. They’re actually cooling the planet. When ice melts and changes color to a liquid surface, just that color change means that instead of reflecting back heat and functioning as a cooler polar regions can transform themselves into becoming net absorbers of heat, meaning becoming positive feedback triggers, self-generating heat.

Same with rainforests currently being huge carbon sinks, regulating moisture feedback and rainfall patterns across the world, being residuals or residing massive hosts for biodiversity, and also generating oxygen; marine systems functioning and heat conveyers, carbon sinks, and banks of genetic diversity; the world’s temperate organic systems being sinks and huge stores of methane; the temperate forests also being major carbon sinks and regulating rainfall patterns and generating oxygen across the world; and finally savannah systems that are playing also a role as moisture feedback, and regulating carbon and rainfall patterns; altogether systems that define Earth resilience.

And the key insight here is the recognition that in the past we’ve been very preoccupied of managing ecosystems at the local scale. This has been important for local livelihoods and local opportunities for good living conditions. Now we must connect the local to the biome scale, and the biome to the planetary scale, and recognize that we have to become stewards of all these systems collectively because they determine the ability for any scale, from household to business to nation, to develop in the future.

In the world of Anthropocene, with rising not only human pressures on the planet, but also an increasingly interconnected world in terms of social, financial, and economic exchange across all nations in the world, we must recognize that we are entering a realm where interconnectedness translates into what we call teleconnections.

Teleconnections are when changes in one part of the world cascades itself to impacts in other parts of the world. One example is when rainforest is cut down, changing rainfall patterns in, for example, Latin America, which can translate and propel itself and change rainfall conditions and temperatures all the way to inner China.

And these kind of teleconnections must be understood because they can themselves trigger surprise and what we call inconvenient feedbacks that can implicate the possibilities for sustainable development. And this is a difference compared to the way we’ve perceived development in the past, where we’ve tried to map out resources, tried to predict and assume that things change linearly and incrementally. That’s on the basis upon which we built our entire economy, assuming that we can predict change in the environment. And now we are in a situation where surprise is a core element of change

But on top of that we must also add an element of complexity. Not only is climate, ecosystems, health, and development interacting with each other in the hyper-connected world, not only do we have teleconnections, but what can occur when a series of global drivers, for example climate change and financial change across an interconnected global financial systems, when these global drivers cause an impact which is totally unexpected often in a very, very different part of the world than the very source of the problems, we call that inconvenient feedbacks.

These are big, major surprising events that occur based on global drivers translating themselves to unexpected outcomes. These examples of social hyper-connectivity are increasingly well understood. They must be layered together with the recognition that we have exactly the same rising hyper-connectivity, even interdependence, given the teleconnections we see when it comes to changes in the environmental system.

And if you put this together, the larger scale changes in the social and environmental systems, you come to the recognition that we live in a much more complicated hyper-connected world where changes in the climate system affects ecosystems, which together influences both human health, economics, and development at large.

And that this is the new reality that we’re facing. Now the evidence around this of course is well illustrated by global internet connections, by the global transport systems that connect all continents, which means that for example a pandemic in one corner of the world can propel itself very rapidly, a volcanic eruption in Iceland can suddenly shut down large parts of the transport systems, affecting even the world economy. The fact that we’re interconnected in our energy fluxes, which means that a shift not only financially in one corner of the world but even in terms of resource use, for example prices on natural gas, or shutting down, or instabilities in the Middle East, propel themselves across the economy very rapidly.

The fact that we can now see changes and democratic movements in one part of the world propelling themselves across Facebook suddenly becoming global movements in the moment of seconds. This is in truth a connected world that has become a hyperconnected world in just the past couple of decades. But the key insight is that we’ve moved from a hyperconnected world to a totally interdependent world, where all the components of the Earth system, the biomes, the regulative resilience of planet Earth and its ability to stay in the Holocene-like condition is essential for every economy, business community in the world.

Now this has been increasingly explored scientifically, recognized the interactions between the climate system, ecosystems, human health, and the economy, and also articulated as a core component of our ability to navigate the Anthropocene. But now it’s not enough to have a stable financial system, we must also have a stable climate system in order to secure health in different parts of our economy.

But it’s also a world where we must now understand risk and the probability of what we call super wicked problems, that different changes interact and amplify change. And a few examples of this have been, and are, increasingly recognized also by organizations like the World Economic Forum and business leaders across the world.

This graph shows a recent analysis among thousands of CEOs, how they perceive risks in the hyperconnected and interdependent world of the 21st century. And what you see here is the fear of predictably financial crisis, regulatory failures, liquidity problems, instabilities in institutions, transparency corruption, which affects the failures or success of global governance in economy disparity. But if you look carefully at this graph you’ll see at the lower left-hand corner infectious disease, chronic diseases, water security, food security, climate change, air pollution, storms, flooding, biodiversity loss, a whole battery of large processes that are increasingly recognized that they do interact in real time with the social, financial, economic parameters in the world which together creates this complex cocktail of potential super wicked problems in the world.

An illustration of this, which is still very much debated but I think it’s worth sharing, is the tremendous disaster we’re now seeing playing out right in front of us in Syria, a civil war which is causing massive disaster for hundreds of thousands of people and a complete destabilization, not to say collapse, of an entire nation propelling itself to instabilities in an entire region. Interestingly data shows that just two years before the civil war in Syria was the longest and most profound drought period ever recorded in Syria, probably the worst drought ever recorded since agriculture was invented eight thousand years back, and that this series of years of drought triggered millions of Syrian farmers to move into cities.

Now it’s very difficult of course to make the connection between this transformative change of forced migration into cities among poor desperate farmers and the current uprising and the instability we see in Syria, but there’s no doubt that we start seeing example, example after example, of how these kinds of social changes also interact with abrupt ecological changes occurring in the Anthropocene.

That Hurricane Sandy, which veered in and is actually the largest ever invoice for any city, forty billion US dollars for New York City due to this unprecedented, totally expected veering of an hurricane moving right into shore, is an example of something that can no longer be disconnected from the Anthropocene. On the right-hand graph you see in yellow the normal trajectory of hurricanes, which do occur as part of the natural variability and the natural part of the weather systems. And in red you see the sudden veering in on land, the westward trajectory of Sunday, which can only today be explained by factoring in the warming the Arctic and the changes of the weather patterns up in the polar regions.

So again an example of how a financial abrupt change interacts with an ecological change at large scale. Now is this a trend that we’re seeing empirical evidence for? The answer is yes.

This is a very messy graph but it’s one of the most telling empirical observations over the past fifty years. This is data from NASA showing from 1955, each map here is a year – all the way to 2011 in the lower right-hand corner, the observed frequency of ultra-extreme events, so-called three sigma event. Three sigma event is statistically extreme weather events that occur less than one in a thousand years, so we’re talking absolute extreme droughts, floods, heat waves. In 1955 the occurrence across the world of these kind of extreme events covered only 1% of the world’s surface, totally stochastic, very chaotic, we can never predict where it occurs, but it occurs over essentially no part of the world, which is why we call them three sigma events, they should in fact not occur.

In 2011 it covers an astonishing 14.8% of the Earth’s surface. The unexpected has suddenly become normality.

We cannot predict where it occurs but it’s a recognition that we’re moving rapidly into a situation where interactions, feedbacks, and unprecedented inconvenient feedbacks are part of the normal, so to say, geopolitical situation that we now must face.

Now in terms of implications for development we must also recognize that it has directly profound operational impacts. Just to give you one example this is a photograph of a standing, stable rainforest, which pumps up vast amounts of water, which creates water vapor, develops into clouds, and generates rainfall. Now the latest science shows the following.

What you see here on this world map in red regions are the regions which to 80% or more gets its rainfall from evaporation from forests in neighboring countries. So just look at China here, the vast northern China plains depend to a very large extent on sustainable management of forests in the westward neighboring countries, all the way from Russia, Ukraine, to the Baltic Sea – Baltic states. This in my mind is a geopolitical bomb recognizing that a country like China depends on sustainable management of ecosystems in its neighboring countries. Same goes as you see in red here for the Congo region, the wet savannah regions in West Africa, but also the nations that reside downstream or in the southern parts of the Amazon rainforest.

Again, a proof of the interconnectedness and teleconnections that we do depend on in terms of development. Same for the Arctic. These are the kind of data we generally see from NASA showing the temperature distribution across the world. What you see here is the anomaly in January 2010 which is an extraordinary period because one, you see this blue region here which is an unprecedented cold lock-in with 2, 3, 4° Celsius colder than normal, an extraordinarily icy and snowy winter period in Russia and in the Scandinavian region. But also see in dark red, which is the extraordinarily heat in the Arctic region. Increasingly evidence shows that there’s a teleconnection between the extraordinary unprecedented warmth in the Arctic region and how that pushes down Arctic air to lower latitudes, explaining why we see these cold pockets of winter climate in lower latitudes.

To put it simple, Arctic climate moving southwards, and teleconnections in the Anthropocene. The food system is increasingly understood as being perhaps the core and most significant part of the Anthropocene. Here you see a whole set of front pages in media recognizing that the food system is the number one victim of change in the Anthropocene because food requires fresh water. Fresh water is the first victim of climate environmental change. And reverse, the food system is the number one driver of changes at the planetary scale, a teleconnection and an inconvenient feedback we must recognize.

Now the final story here is a complex one showing how small scale fishermen in communities in West Africa, due to European fish policy which means that large, large industrial fisheries empty the coasts of the African fish resources, have increasingly forced small scale fishing men and women to abandon fishing, their livelihoods, and basically, and literally put their boats on the shore and for a livelihood they’re forced to start moving inwards on land to chase bush meat.

Similarly with farmers that are losing their livelihoods because of land degradation and droughts, and you see a movement of communities desperately moving into, let’s say, natural ecosystems, forest systems, to hunt for bush meat which in turn leads to rising risk of zoonotic pandemics when we get infectious diseases moving across species from bush meat to human beings, showing a very complex interaction across scale. Climate change pushes changes at local level, political decision in one part of the world changing resource access in another part of the world, which in turn forces communities to suddenly change the life support systems, which in turns puts them in a vulnerability that triggers and unexpected change, in this case zoonotic pandemics that you normally would not see.

This is the kind of feedbacks and interactions that we must start understanding when we try to navigate a situation where human development is so tightly connected with abrupt environmental changes from local to global scale.