Climate Change, Demographic Change, Migration How climate-related tipping points can trigger mass migration and social chaos

November 8, 2019
By Perry World House | Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Perry World House contributes a regular column to The Bulletin on the implications of emerging technologies. This column is by François Gemenne, director of the Hugo Observatory at the University of Liège, in Belgium, a research center dedicated to the study of the interactions between environmental changes and migration. Gemenne is also a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This column is based on a piece drafted for Perry World House and made possible in part by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. 

As anyone who takes a quick scan at newspaper headlines can see, climate change has the potential to trigger major social transformations. Extreme weather events, such as bomb cyclones, can lead to food insecurity, riots, and mass migration, to name just a few effects.

But this is not a simple, one-to-one relationship. Sometimes, even limited climate change can  generate major social transformations, while at other times major climate events can have only limited social impact—due to the built-in resiliency of social, political and economic systems.

To understand why, it makes sense to borrow a concept from the world of physics, and consider the question as what is known as a “tipping point” problem, where a small quantitative change triggers a much larger, non-linear change. Social tipping points are reached when a community shifts from a state of stability to instability: from peace to violence, from a democracy to an authoritarian regime, or from a sedentary lifestyle to emergency migration, among others. They are defined as points within a socio and ecological system at which the social components, driven by self-reinforcing feedback loops, inevitably and often irreversibly lead to a qualitatively different state.

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