The positive tipping points helping nature bounce back

Worldwide, landscapes that have fallen to the peril of overfished seas and arid farmlands can come back to life thanks to the stealth of “positive tipping points,” where small actions unlock self-sustaining, large-scale change.

Positive tipping points are already occurring and understanding how these feedback loops work could help reverse ecosystem collapse, restore biodiversity and build a nature-positive future.

Nature-based solutions utilize natural systems to address man-made challenges; they are often more cost-effective and sustainable than technology-based approaches.

These solutions improve biodiversity, provide cleaner air and water, which in turn enhance human health, increase biological resources and tackle climate change by sequestering carbon and creating natural defences against extreme weather events. And they are all interlinked.

When nature is restored and protected, biodiversity increases and the climate, carbon and water cycles become healthier, thereby contributing to improved human health and well-being.

The idea of becoming “nature-positive” has gained huge support, with 2030 being the next milestone for a net gain in biodiversity relative to a 2020 baseline.

By way of targets, the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), signed by 196 countries in 2022 and promoted as a “Paris Agreement for nature,” aims to restore 30% of all degraded ecosystems and conserve 30% of land, waters and seas by 2030.

The World Economic Forum’s Nature Positive Transitions initiative works with business, cities and finance to protect and restore nature in alignment with the GBF target.

Yet, more than halfway through this UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, progress is so far too slow to meet this aim. A radical acceleration of nature-positive change and specific actions are therefore needed.

This is where positive tipping points can help. If we understand how nature and society influence each other, we can take small actions that lead to bigger, lasting changes. These changes can build on themselves, speeding up progress toward a healthier, more sustainable world.

There is a rich, established literature on “negative” tipping points leading to degraded natural systems but the same principles also apply to “positive” tipping points that lead back to a restored state.

Famous examples include the reintroduction of the grey wolf to Yellowstone National Park in the United States and the ecological recovery of polluted shallow lakes in the Norfolk Broads, United Kingdom.

Positively tipping ecosystems back from degraded to healthy states is rarely easy. More effort is usually required to tip the positive ecological recovery than was required to trigger the initial collapse (due to a physical law called hysteresis).

Global drivers of ecosystem degradation, notably climate change, are harder to address than local ones. Increasing global temperatures and extreme weather events are reducing the capacity of natural carbon sinks, particularly terrestrial ecosystems, to absorb carbon dioxide.

Unless we stop and reverse global warming, local improvements may be short-lived. As we’ve witnessed over the past 30 years of international climate negotiations, society can be slow to respond and actively support corrective measures. Still, there are many cases where ecosystems have been positively tipped.

In the Yellowstone case, the eradication of the wolf population occurred in 1926 after decades of indiscriminate killing.

This inadvertently caused a cascade of changes to species abundance across the entire ecosystem due to the wolf’s role in maintaining it. Elk and deer populations exploded, leading to overgrazing, particularly of the younger aspen, cottonwood and willow species of trees and shrubs.

Riverbanks became more easily eroded, leading to the decline of fish and amphibian populations as water became shallower and warmer. After a 70-year absence, wolves were reintroduced in 1995.

This positively tipped the entire ecosystem and helped to restore its full biodiversity from soil to forest canopy at an unprecedented rate.

There are also cases of positive tipping points in social-ecological systems, for example, when careful governance leads to the recovery of collapsed fish stocks and associated marine life, benefiting both nature and people.

Strict international regulations and enforcement, along with adherence to a maximum sustainable yield, have led to positive tipping points for some cod, plaice and hake stocks in the North Sea and North Atlantic.

Other interventions include the establishment of marine protected areas to help the recovery of coastal fisheries and endangered coral reef ecosystems, a famous example being Apo Island in the Philippines.

Managing fish stocks and coral reefs are examples of a broader challenge in cooperating to manage common-pool resources – arguably the greatest such challenge being to stop global warming.

Cooperation to manage resources is an evolved social norm in many local cultures but it tends to break down with increased population size and social complexity, exhibiting its own negative tipping point.

When a common pool resource reaches a tipping point – as in fisheries – factors such as levels of trust and uncertainty about where the tipping point lies can determine whether the social dynamics shift towards cooperation or not.

Even when a common pool resource lacks a tipping point, a positive human cooperation tipping point can still emerge, affecting the entire social-ecological system.

For example, in drier parts of India, the traditional practice was for communities to cooperate in maintaining artificial water reservoirs (johadi) that capture monsoon rains, which then infiltrate to recharge groundwater that, in turn, supports agriculture and the broader ecosystem and community.

With independence, the state appropriated control over water resources and in the Alwar District of Rajasthan, deforestation led to the johadi silting up. Villagers resorted to digging ever-deeper wells but the water supplies dwindled and with them crops and livestock.

A vicious cycle ensued: forests were further exploited, women had to walk longer distances to find water and men left to work elsewhere. A positive tipping point began in Bhikampura village in 1984 as a collaboration between villagers and the Tarun Bharat Sangh (TBS) youth organization to repair one johad.

Rapid positive results triggered a self-reinforcing feedback loop of cooperation to repair more johadi, leading to a virtuous cycle of increasing agricultural harvests, forest recovery, the easing of women’s workloads and the return of men. The cooperative, village-level governance of water resources (Gram Sabha) was reinstated.

The TBS initiative to restore abandoned johadi has now diffused throughout the region, with over 3,000 now repaired. Local governance of groundwater resources has also spread more widely across Asia and Africa, improving agricultural productivity by up to 250%.

These success stories raise the question of how such nature-positive practices spread and how we can bring forward their positive tipping points.

A key insight from our work at the Global Systems Institute – and with colleagues around the world with whom we produce the Global Tipping Points Report – is that we need to identify and work with (rather than against) the built-in feedback loops that exist in nature, in society and in their coupled interactions.

When people come together to protect nature, the results can go far beyond local success. Social cooperation can spark ecological recovery and when the two align, they can create thriving local economies rooted in healthy ecosystems. These successes don’t have to stay small; they can grow, spread, and inspire change around the world.

This is the first in a series of blogs entitled “Positive Tipping Points: informed optimism for nature- and climate-positive transformations.”