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Open Access 2024 | Open Access | Buch

Positive Tipping Points Towards Sustainability

Understanding the Conditions and Strategies for Fast Decarbonization in Regions

herausgegeben von: J. David Tàbara, Alexandros Flamos, Diana Mangalagiu, Serafeim Michas

Verlag: Springer International Publishing

Buchreihe : Springer Climate

Enthalten in: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Über dieses Buch

This open access book provides the first comprehensive review of the state of the art of social tipping points applied to energy systems from a social interdisciplinary perspective. It does so by presenting a novel theory of systemic and transformative change, linking it to empirical cases assisted with relevant assessment methodologies, including modeling. The authors unveil the narratives and visions, the transformative capacities as well as deliberate strategies and collective actions that at one point in time have been able - or were prevented - to tip a given social-ecological system towards low-carbon, sustainable trajectories in diverse high-intensive carbon regions around the world.

This volume shows that self-reinforcing learning feedbacks connecting transformative solutions and strategies across scales and domains can be induced by targeted policy interventions both in local and regional contexts. It further indicates how changes in behavioral patterns, supported by good governance of disruptive technologies, carbon (dis)investment and finance processes as well as new forms of civic engagement, can create the necessary transformative enabling conditions for the emergence of positive tipping points towards low-carbon sustainable futures.

The book is a must-read for students, researchers, and scholars, as well as policy-makers and practitioners interested in a better understanding of sustainability, climate, and energy issues and in assessing the potential impacts and effectiveness of strategic interventions aimed at accelerating just sustainable decarbonization processes.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Frontmatter

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Open Access

The TIPPING+ Project Journey

Abstract

This chapter introduces and provides the research background of the several contributions of this book. It does so first by briefly reviewing the previous conceptual developments that over the course of two decades eventually led to the EU-funded project TIPPING+. The goal of the project was to improve our understanding of the enabling conditions and complex processes for fast structural sustainable transformations in coal and carbon intensive regions (CCIRs) using the notion of positive tipping points as a boundary concept able to bring together the insights of various social science and interdisciplinary perspectives. The main challenge facing these regions is understood not only as sectoral energy transitioning challenge; but the extent to which multiple socio-economic, political and cultural dimensions for full-systems transformations are taken into account. Second, it presents some of the conceptual and methodological proposals generated by the project and argues for ontological and epistemological diversity and to understand equity and justice as a key drivers and outcomes of positive tipping points. As a research journey, however, the TIPPING+ project did not search for a destination. Instead, it looked for a point of departure, for an opportunity space in which different disciplines, researchers and interests could jointly develop their own ideas and start their own new research ventures.

J. David Tàbara

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Tipping Points Emerge in the Interaction Between Narrative and Reality

Abstract

The paper considers narratives as dynamic memory banks and shifts understanding from emphasizing the origins of the present to the emergence of the present. In the construction of reality, imagined futures articulate with knowledge obtained in the past.

In another inversion, rather than explain change and consider stability as the norm, it focuses on change as the norm and investigates the creation of stability to explain, for example, why our societies are so slow in acting on climate change.

The creation of meaning is the result of an interaction between thinking and experience, like the interaction between a map and the territory it represents. It reduces the complexity of the territory to the simplicity of the map, shaping simultaneously the cognitive map and the territory it represents. Such cognitive structures evolve into dense networks of cognitive dimensions.

Tipping points emerge as a particular cognitive structure is no longer enabling a society to deal with its changing environment because it does not fully trace the logical and functional nature of the relationship between the two. To facilitate that, we need to understanding noise as signals for which no interpretative conceptual and cognitive structure has yet been identified.

Sander van der Leeuw

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Open Access

Tipping Points. Deep Roots and Contemporary Challenges in Psychology

Abstract

As an object of study, tipping points raise several questions for psychology. Unless one wants to use this term as a generic metaphor to indicate sudden change, any attempt to better define this concept has to take into account some fundamental psychological features including acceptance, promotion or resistance to change, the relationship between quantitative and qualitative transformations, the dynamics between individual, social and societal levels, and the relationship between psychological and environmental changes. All these facets refer to classical approaches and theorisations developed in the early 1900s as well as to more recent systemic models, including societal and cultural psychology approaches and proposals for a socio-ecological psychology. In this chapter, we will identify points of contact with classics such as Insights and Dynamics of field forces, Cognitive dissonance, Grievance, Bounded rationality, Coping, and Socio-dynamical approaches to social representations. Moreover, looking at the recent literature, we will highlight advances in our understanding of tipping points provided by cognitive, socioecological and systemic models. Common to all these views is the attempt to describe and explain the processes that favour or hinder qualitative transformation, both in terms of its perception and its enactment. In this chapter, we will provide an overview of the different approaches mentioned, which should be read more as an agenda for future research rather than an exhaustive review of state of the art.

Mauro Sarrica, Paolo Cottone, Fulvio Biddau

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Transformations, Agency and Positive Tipping Points: A Resilience-Based Approach

Abstract

This chapter focuses on a social-ecological systems (SES) resilience-based approach to critically examine the relationship between tipping points and transformative change. Resilience science provides a framework for understanding the dynamics and interdependencies of complex systems and their ability to persist, adapt, or transform in response to change and uncertainty. Transformation refers to a deliberate and fundamental restructuring of a system or a set of relationships that hold a system in a particular state. We argue that the integration of a resilience-based approach to transformations can enhance the understanding of the link between tipping points and transformations, as well as the agency and capacities required to navigate them. In particular, we focus on how transformations research emphasizes the need to: better understand tipping points as one of many aspects of deeper transformation processes, include consideration of the distributed nature of agency and relationships, and how uncertainties will emerge in relation to shocks and disturbances which will surround tipping points. To achieve this, we drawing on the inter- and transdisciplinary scholarship related to transformations to sustainability including leverage points, social-ecological tipping points, disaster resilience, and case studies. We conclude that social tipping alone is insufficient; instead, there is a need for capacities to navigate the entire tipping process, or the full range of tipping dynamics, toward desired outcomes.

Per Olsson, Michele-Lee Moore

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Open Access

Principles for a Case Study Approach to Social Tipping Points

Abstract

Recent interdisciplinary study has led to significant conceptual advances and a broad empirical evidence base for ecological and climate tipping points. However, the literature has yet to present convincing empirical case studies of social tipping, as the data-driven identification of social tipping points remains a challenge. Arguing that the barriers to such empirical research are largely methodological in nature, we develop methodological guidance to identify social tipping processes in social-ecological system case studies, based on four key elements—multiple stable states, self-reinforcing feedback dynamics, abruptness, and limited reversibility. We apply our approach to food system changes linked to the Flint Water Crisis between 2010 and 2020. We identify seven principles that can simultaneously serve as a seven-step process for social tipping point analysis in any social-ecological system. We highlight two major challenges: the limited availability of high quality, longitudinal social data, and the possibility that value-driven social processes tend to curb abruptness and non-linear change. Utilizing the seven principles to study historical, ongoing, or anticipated cases of social tipping processes could facilitate a deeper understanding of the conditions and limitations of non-linear social change and, therefore, inform efforts to facilitate change towards more sustainable futures.

Jennifer Hodbod, Manjana Milkoreit, Jacopo Baggio, Jean-Denis Mathias, Michael Schoon

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Post-war Development Energy Scenarios for Ukraine

Abstract

The systemic shock provoked by the Russian invasion created a radical discontinuity in the national development policies of Ukraine. This research examines the state of energy policy and the consequences of the ongoing war on plausible decarbonisation scenarios. Ukraine’s commitment to decarbonization was firmly established before 2022, and the National Energy Strategy 2050 already aimed at a substantial 65% reduction in emissions of the economy in comparison to 1990. The war however, precipitated the need to adjust these targets and policy instrument to the current realities. For that, we conducted quantitative research to identify the most GHG intensive regions and sectors and related these to their Gross Regional Product and population. We found out that Zaporizhzhia, Dnipropetrovsk and Ivano-Frankivsk turn out be the most critical regions that require special consideration—so for the later region, we also identify particular decarbonization pathways. Our research shows that the Ukrainian war not only unveiled the inherent vulnerabilities of heavily centralised, carbon-dependent systems, but also can lead to the acceleration of non-linear structural low-carbon energy transformations more resilient to global change and systemic interdependences.

Olha Lukash, Vasyl Namoniuk

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Exploring Transition in Coal- and Carbon-Intensive Regions Through an Interdisciplinary Lens

Abstract

This chapter introduces an interdisciplinary perspective to investigate the transition process and to identify empirical evidence of social-ecological tipping points (SETPs) in the case studies on coal and carbon intensive regions (CCIRs) analyzed in the project TIPPING+. The interdisciplinary lens considers different modes of thought, frameworks, and multiple perspectives and interests from diverse stakeholders, a systems’ understanding, and different culture considerations across the CCIRs. Within this interdisciplinary process, we applied various lenses to study the potential for SETPs by combining insights from human geography, social psychology, regional socio-technical systems, and political economy perspectives on the phases of low carbon transitions and on the justice component of the transitions. Subsequently, this chapter gives an overview of how the eight CCIRs case studies in this book have applied various interdisciplinary lenses to investigate the regional transition and the emergence of SETPs.

Diana Mangalagiu, Jenny Lieu, Fulvio Biddau, Johan Lilliestam, Siri Veland, Mauro Sarrica, Amanda Martinez-Reyes, Franziska Mey, Antoine Mandel

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Social Tipping Processes in the Transformation of Civitavecchia’s Socio-energy System

Abstract

The chapter introduces the notion of ‘social tipping processes’, an interdisciplinary framework for the analysis of complex transformation processes which helps to identify the sequence of, broadly understood, socio-political events that can trigger positive or negative dynamics of transformations of current social-ecological systems. Social tipping processes are first framed and delineated, then this category is applied to a spatially and temporally delimited empirical case, the long-standing Italian energy city of Civitavecchia—near Rome—to investigate the transformation to renewables of the local socio-energy systems as a dynamic and relational process. The chapter concludes by outlining the main paths forward for a sustainable future, as advocated by the social tipping processes perspective put into action in the case under scrutiny.

Daniel Delatin Rodrigues, Marco Grasso

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Realizing Alternative Energy Futures: From the Promise of a Petroleum Future to Imagining Lofoten as the Green Islands

Abstract

This chapter examines the 20-year-long oil dispute in Lofoten and the decision to deviate from oil and gas development in the region. Our objectives are three-fold: (1) to better understand how carbon-intensive development pathways can rapidly shift towards decarbonization, (2) to yield insights into how alternative narratives about the future materialize in historically pro-carbon contexts such as Norway, and (3) examining to which extent we can identify and assess potential social tipping events that impacted the decision to deviate from oil and gas development in Lofoten. Drawing on a qualitative framework, we address our objectives by identifying and assessing important events between 2000–2020 that impacted the decision to halt plans for oil and gas development and by examining how alternative visions of an oil free Lofoten emerged and took shape over the last two decades. We argue that the fact that the Lofoten regions remains closed to petroleum development is unusual given the significance of petroleum production to the Norwegian economy and the dominant logic of the Norwegian resource regime. Examining the Lofoten case thus yields insights into conditions and interventions that can both unsettle fossil fuel energy systems and foster lasting transformation towards less-carbon intensive emissions trajectories.

Anna G. Sveinsdóttir, Brigt Dale

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Exploring the Role of Identities and Perceptions of the Future in a Post-coal Mining Region: The Demolition of Andorra Coal-fired Cooling Towers (Spain) as a Tipping Point

Abstract

In May 2022, the last cooling tower of the coal-fired power plant in the Spanish region of Andorra in Teruel province was demolished. After forty years in operation such an event had a huge emotional effect on the local population, since much of the local identity and tradition was built around this industrial emblem. On the one hand, it represented a final symbolic farewell to a way of life around coal, now perceived to have inevitably ceased to exist. On the other hand, it highlighted the need to accelerate the full regional transformation towards a new socio-economic structure whose agents of change, content and new identities were not yet well-defined. Our research explores the role of identities and perceptions of the future as key constraining or enabling factors in tipping former carbon-intensive regions towards clean energy and sustainable development pathways. Understanding how local populations see their uncertainties about the future, and examining other views on relative deprivation and inequality, are central in developing enabling governance arrangements and continuous learning feedback loops required in rapid socio-energy transformations. We found out that embracing transformative change towards green transformations may entail adopting more diversified, self-defined complex forms of collective sense-making processes based on project identities.

Francesc Cots, J. David Tàbara, Jérémie Fosse, Gerard Codina

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Narrative-Network Dynamics in Tipping Processes Towards Low-Carbon Energy Futures: The Case of Indonesia

Abstract

Deliberate actions by social networks and their transformative visions can generate the necessary conditions for the emergence of positive tipping points towards sustainability, such as those that create qualitative, structural changes in sustainable development goals. However, there is a need for more empirical research conducted in non-Western countries to assess these complex processes. In this research, we customised Integrated Sustainability Assessment (ISA) and combined it with participatory narrative analysis, social-ecological network analysis and Q-methodology to capture the transformation processes in social network structures with their guiding visions in two coal- and carbon-intensive regions (CCIRs) of Indonesia: Banten and Bali Province. Our research approach tracked transformation narratives and visions and their associated network dynamics and showed that they could be used as anticipatory social tipping signals (ASTS) in deliberate transformation-oriented tipping point processes. Our study revealed two guiding visions actors use to guide their transformative actions to change the energy system. Those transformations emphasise (i) governance coordination and (ii) socio-economic diversification. We argue that making explicit the presence of and promoting dialogue among different visions towards sustainability can promote new opportunities for mutual learning and transformative strategy building among diverse social networks.

Cynthia Ismail, J. David Tàbara, Takeshi Takama, David Saurí

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Situated Knowledge and Energy Transformations: A Socio-Anthropological Exploration

Abstract

This chapter focuses on San Pietro island case study and uses an ethnographic, micro and qualitative approach. San Pietro island is facing Sulcis, the southwestern corner of the Sardinia, a region of coal-mining and industrial vocation currently involved in a challenging energy transition. San Pietro local residents claim their ethnic difference as descendants of the eighteenth century settlers from Liguria. Today, contrary to Sulcis, the island benefits from several EU grants aiming to improve energy efficiency and renewables. I explore if the orientation of the community towards a shared idea of its past and future could be a determining factor in triggering a positive and stable tipping point towards decarbonization. I use energyscape framework to understand the spatial dimension and ethnography to explore local imaginaries on renewables as context for examination of social agency. I find that the attempt at deep transformations driven by policy plans may experience implementation difficulties, since local residents’ futures and horizons do not align to the timescales, worldviews on humans or technology, or many other dimensions and narratives arriving “from outside” the community.

Elena Apostoli Cappello

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Tipping Away from Coal?: Exploring Narratives and Tipping Dynamics in the Phaseout of Coal on Svalbard

Abstract

This chapter explores societal tipping points in energy transitions in the Arctic through the case of the phasing out of coal mining on Svalbard. The economy of the region, which has high geopolitical importance in the Arctic, was founded based on extractivism. More than a century ago, coal mining not only consolidated as Svalbard’s main industrial activity, but also crystalized in the region’s identity and in Norway’s strategy for sustaining its presence on the archipelago. International agreements and debates concerning green transitions, in combination with fluctuating coal prices and ageing infrastructure, have provoked the emergence of various narratives concerning the future of the archipelago. These narratives entail both low-carbon alternatives for the local economy, and alternative energy sources to power human life on Svalbard. This chapter examines these narratives, focusing on the interplay between demographic and socio-economic developments of the past 20 years. Several kinds of societal tipping points can be observed, from politico-economic to demographic and socio-cultural tipping points. The question remains, however, whether the Svalbard case also exemplifies tipping points in the biophysical dimensions of social-ecological systems. This will in large part depend on the ability to find viable energy alternatives that harmonize with regional geopolitical security.

Siri Veland, Leticia Antunes Nogueira, Vida Marie Daae Steiro

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Confronting Local and Global Tipping Narratives: Green Energy Development in the Arctic and Why Greenland Is Not for Sale

Abstract

This research addresses a confrontation of narratives usually overlooked in global-local discourses about green energy futures by focusing on the case of Greenland. On the one hand, the call for keeping the vast amounts of Greenland’s fossil fuel deposits in the ground, as one of the most efficient and fastest strategies to limit global GHG emissions and avoid a climate catastrophe -hence preventing a negative global climate tipping point. And on the other, the need to exploit and provide alternative mineral resources for the global green energy transformation – hence enabling a global positive tipping point towards a sustainable development trajectory. For that, we trace the historical local conditions and events that eventually led towards green development trajectory pathways. These include indigenous groups’ opposition to oil drilling in the Arctic waters and more recently, the consideration of alternative resource governance mechanisms in support of a low-carbon transformation. We argue that overcoming such confrontation requires reconciling both Natural Resource Justice with Earth System Justice principles that consider the rights, needs, worldviews, and institutional traditions of local communities. Among them, the impossibility of privately owning land across generations in Greenland stems as a possible example of disruptive tipping intervention on how Western societies could learn to relate to biophysical systems in more sustainable ways to cope with accelerated global environmental change.

Anne Merrild Hansen, J. David Tàbara

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Assessing Macroeconomic Effects of a Carbon Tax as a Tipping Intervention in Economies Undergoing Coal Phase-Out: The Cases of Poland and Greece

Abstract

Introducing carbon taxation could accelerate systemic change towards a decarbonised future. In this book chapter, we aim to test to which extent this policy can be considered a tipping intervention that can encourage fast green technological innovation and infrastructure development in coal and carbon-intensive regions (CCIRs) and how this policy affects the sectoral structure of the economy. We use a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model (ΜΕΜΟ) to assess the impacts of implementing a carbon tax on GDP and unemployment in Poland and Greece. These two countries are currently phasing out coal. Our results show that carbon tax implementation significantly affects the macroeconomic indicators and may also lead to considerable labour market effects on sectors other than mining, such as the light industry and construction in Greece and energy-intensive and advanced manufacturing industries in Poland. We also discuss funding and recycling revenue mechanisms that could enable the successful implementation of a carbon tax. We conclude that it would be more reasonable to treat carbon tax as an additional political tool that must be combined with other interventions coordinated with an overall broader full-system transformation narrative rather than a single tool that can determine or ex-ante detect any future tipping point.

Jan Frankowski, Jakub Sokołowski, Serafeim Michas, Joanna Mazurkiewicz, Nikos Kleanthis, Marek Antosiewicz

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Transformative Emergence: Research Challenges for Enabling Social-ecological Tipping Points Toward Regional Sustainability Transformations

Abstract

A crucial task to accelerate global decarbonisation is to understand how to enable fast, equitable, low-carbon transformations in Coal and Carbon Intensive Regions (CCIRs). In this early literature review we underlined the relevance of the boundary concept of social-ecological tipping points (SETPs) and showed that the research and policy usage of SETPs applied to accelerate structural regional sustainability transformations faces three key challenges: (I) integrating theoretical and empirical contributions from diverse social and ecological sciences, together with complexity theory (II) designing open transdisciplinary assessment processes able to represent multiple qualities of systemic change and enable regionally situated transformative capacities, and (III) moving away from one-directional metaphors of social change, or static or homogeneous conceptions of individual agency and single equilibrium in energy transitions; and instead, focus on understanding the conditions and capacities for the emergence of systemic transformations and regenerative processes across multiple levels and forms of agency. We refer to these complex and place-situated processes as learning to enable regional transformative emergence.

J. David Tàbara, Diana Mangalagiu, Bohumil Frantal, Franziska Mey, Raphaela Maier, Johan Lilliestam, Mauro Sarrica, Antoine Mandel, Jenny Lieu, Paolo Cottone, Siri Veland, Amanda Martínez-Reyes

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Titel: Positive Tipping Points Towards Sustainability
herausgegeben von: J. David Tàbara
Alexandros Flamos
Diana Mangalagiu
Serafeim Michas
Verlag: Springer International Publishing
Electronic ISBN: 978-3-031-50762-5
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-50761-8
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-50762-5