To save nature, aim for positive tipping points

Lean back on a chair to its balance point and you will appreciate that sometimes a small change makes a big difference to a system. A nudge can trigger a self-propelling and hard-to-reverse transition into a very different state: usually sprawled on your back on the floor. That is a tipping point. Many systems can exhibit them, including ecosystems and societies.

As the world warms and we destroy nature, negative tipping points in the biosphere are among the biggest risks we face. They lead to widespread and irreversible damage. 

Already, warm-water coral reefs are being decimated by unprecedented bleaching events that affect the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people. As we exceed 1.5°C of global warming, more systems will be put at risk of tipping. Large parts of the Amazon rainforest could die back, impacting hundreds of millions of people and destroying some of Earth’s most biodiverse habitats. The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) – the vast circular current that moves warmer water north – could collapse, plunging north-west Europe into glacial winters and disrupting the monsoons in West Africa and India. 

These profound risks increase with every 0.1°C of global warming and with the other pressures we put on nature, such as deforestation and pollution. 

To avoid them we must stop the planet warming and stop destroying nature – and we need to do so fast. Anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions need to end, and nature needs to be restored, within a generation.

This will require a spectacular acceleration of action. We need to be going more than five times faster at decarbonising the economy and radically scaling up the restoration of nature. This sounds daunting, but there is a credible path to achieving it. It lies in the evidence of positive tipping points, where change in a desirable direction becomes self-propelling.

Collapse to recovery

Tipping points happen when amplifying feedback within a system gets strong enough to support self-propelling change. They have happened repeatedly in social systems. Think of abrupt shifts in social norms – such as the abandonment of smoking in public, for example, or rapid transitions in technology such as Norwegians switching from petrol and diesel cars to electric vehicles in just the last decade.

Positive tipping points of nature regeneration have also been triggered. Famous examples include the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park, which controlled herbivore numbers, triggering a record-breaking recovery of vegetation. Or in the Norfolk Broads, where reducing nutrient input triggered the rapid recovery from a turbid to a clear water state. 

Tipping points happen when amplifying feedback within a system gets strong enough to support self-propelling change

It takes deliberate action to trigger a positive tipping point, and the reduction in pressures needed often exceeds that which caused negative tipping in the first place. So, it takes effort to create the enabling conditions. However, once positive tipping is underway, recovery is self-propelling. The secret to success is to learn to work with – rather than against – the amplifying feedback loops that are inherent in nature.

At the same time, amplifying feedback loops in societies can be used to positively tip the spread of nature-regenerating activities. One key amplifier is ‘social contagion’: the more of us who adopt something, the more we can influence others to adopt it as we learn from each other. Many bottom-up nature-regenerating activities, such as the community gardens movement, have spread like this. They can reach a ‘critical mass’ tipping point at which one more group triggers further self-propelling adoption. 

Cascade of change

Another key amplifier is ‘increasing returns’, where adopting something makes it more attractive for the next person to adopt. For example, smallholder farmers in Kenya and Uganda have adopted an initiative called the International Small Group and Tree Planting Program (known as TIST), in which they plant trees on their land and get paid for the carbon they sequester. As the network grew, it became easier to join, and the benefits grew as TIST’s growing reputation pushed up the price of its triple-gold-standard carbon credits.

Positive tipping of the spread of nature regeneration has been seen in many other initiatives across the world. In neighbouring Tanzania locally managed forest conservation initiatives have spread rapidly. In the Pacific the adoption of locally managed marine protected areas has cascaded within and across island nations. 

There are some simple ingredients to these success stories, including ensuring that local people benefit and promoting community control of initiatives. 

Meanwhile, the dominant cultural worldview still sees nature as separate from people and as being only there to serve human emancipation. However, when cognitive dissonance reaches a critical level, our worldviews can tip. There are already signs of people tipping towards a more ecocentric view, which recognises that we are part of and depend upon nature: the Rights of Nature movement is seeing an increasing number of jurisdictions assign legal status to non-human natural entities. 

Such a shift in worldview could be the deepest positive tipping point of all to help us accelerate out of the climate and ecological crises.

Tim Lenton FRSB OBE is professor of climate change and Earth system science at the University of Exeter, and author of Positive Tipping Points: How to Fix the Climate Crisis (Oxford University Press, 2025).

This article was first published in the print issue of The Biologist, the RSB's award-winning membership magazine. Subscribe by becoming a member today.