RT Journal Article
T1 Equity and justice should underpin the discourse on tipping points
A1 Pereira, Laura M.
A1 Villasante Larramendi, Carlos Sebastián
A1 Sumaila, U. Rashid
AB Radical and quick transformations towards sustainability will be fundamental to achieving a more sustainable future. However, deliberate interventions to reconfigure systems will result in winners and losers, with the potential for greater or lesser equity and justice outcomes. Positive tipping points (PTPs) have been proposed as interventions in complex systems with the aim to (a) reduce the likelihood of negative Earth system tipping points and/or (b) increase the likelihood of achieving just social foundations. However, many narratives around PTPs often do not take into account the entire spectrum of impacts the proposed alternatives could have or still rely on narratives that maintain current unsustainable behaviours and marginalize many people (i.e. do not take “b” into account). One such example is the move from petrol-based to electric vehicles. An energy transition that remains based on natural resource inputs from the Global South must be unpacked with an equity and justice lens to understand the true cost of this transition. There are two arguments why a critical engagement with these and other similar proposals needs to be made. First, the idea of transitioning through a substitution (e.g. of fuel) while maintaining the system structure (e.g. of private vehicles) may not necessarily be conceived as the kind of radical transformation being called for by global scientific bodies like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). Second, and probably more importantly, the question of positive for whom, positive where, and positive how must be considered. In this paper, we unpack these narratives using a critical decolonial view from the south and outline their implications for the concept of tipping points.
PB Copernicus Publications
SN 2190-4979
YR 2024
FD 2024
LK https://hdl.handle.net/10347/44671
UL https://hdl.handle.net/10347/44671
LA eng
NO Pereira, L. M., Gianelli, I., Achieng, T., Amon, D., Archibald, S., Arif, S., Castro, A., Chimbadzwa, T. P., Coetzer, K., Field, T.-L., Selomane, O., Sitas, N., Stevens, N., Villasante, S., Armani, M., Kimuyu, D. M., Adewumi, I. J., Lapola, D. M., Obura, D., Pinho, P., Roa-Clavijo, F., Rocha, J., and Sumaila, U. R.: Equity and justice should underpin the discourse on tipping points, Earth Syst. Dynam., 15, 341–366, https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-15-341-2024, 2024.
NO Laura Pereira has been funded by the Future Ecosystems for Africa Programme in partnership with Oppenheimer Generations Research and Conservation and by the Swedish Research Council FORMAS (project no. 2020-00670). Sebastian Villasante has received financial support from EqualSea (Transformative adaptation towards ocean equity) project, under the European Horizon 2020 Program, ERC Consolidator (grant no. 101002784) funded by the European Research Council. Kaera Coetzer has been funded by the National Research Foundation (NRF) Global Change Social Science Research Programme (GCSSRP V2) (grant no. 129482). Diva Amon has received funding from the University of California, Santa Barbara, Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory. Tracy-Lynn Field has received generous continued support from the Claude Leon Foundation.
DS Minerva
RD 20 may 2026