11 looming climate tipping points that imperil our planet

The "vital organs of the Earth system are weakening, leading to a loss of resilience and rising risks of crossing tipping points," said Levke Caesar, a scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and one of the lead authors of the first ever Planetary Health Check, released in 2024. A tipping point is a "critical threshold in a system beyond which change becomes self-perpetuating, leading to substantial, widespread, frequently abrupt and often irreversible impacts," the report said. The report quantifies the health of the planet and offers suggestions for reversing climate change.

Several studies have outlined different tipping points and their risks, including the Planetary Health Check and the United Nations' 2023 Interconnected Disaster Risks Report. A 2023 by the University of Exeter Global Systems Institute specifically pointed to three broad areas where tipping points are concentrated: the cryosphere, the biosphere, and the ocean and atmosphere. Analyzing tipping points is more crucial than ever now, as the U.S. anticipates a new Trump administration that is expected to be a "body blow" to climate change efforts, said The New York Times.

Cryosphere tipping points

Mountain glaciers melting: As aquifers empty, the world's glaciers are "melting at double the speed they had in the past two decades," the U.N. report said. That increases the amount of freshwater in the short term — sometimes too much, causing flooding — but "many of those glaciers in the Rocky Mountains, the Himalayas and the Andes feed into these rivers and groundwater systems," Caitlyn Eberle, one of the lead authors of the U.N. report, said to Reuters. "So as those glaciers disappear, there is less water available." Many glacier-fed areas are rapidly approaching or have already reached "peak water," the point of maximum meltwater a glacier produces before its freshwater output steadily declines. Meltwater is crucial to sustaining certain regions during dry seasons with low rainfall.

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Ice sheets collapsing: The Greenland ice sheet and the Antarctic ice sheet, the two largest in the world, are on the brink of collapsing. According to NASA, Antarctica is losing ice mass of about 50 billion tons per year, and Greenland is losing about 270 billion tons per year. "Substantial ice loss is likely irreversible on multi-millennial timescales," said the University of Exeter report. In addition, ice sheets collapsing "would result in severe regional impacts, including significant contributions to sea level rise and destabilization of local infrastructure and water supplies," said the Planetary Health Check.

Biosphere tipping points

Accelerating extinctions: Human influence has greatly increased the rate of extinctions across the world, helping push the planet into its sixth mass extinction event, with almost a million plant and animal species currently at risk. Given "human activities such as land use change, overexploitation, climate change, pollution and introduction of invasive species, we have put our foot on the extinction accelerator," the University of Exeter report said, and the resulting threat to "our critical life-support systems is vastly underestimated." The Amazon rainforest as well as other rainforests are particularly at risk, suffering not only from human influence but also "unprecedented climate-driven disturbances such as increasing dry season length and intensity, more intense and frequent rainfall and temperature extremes," said the report. These extinctions have the potential to cause ecosystem collapses because species are largely interconnected. "We are increasing the risk of co-extinction," Sebesvari said to DW.

Dying coral reefs: Coral reefs are largely in danger due to climate change. Warming oceans are disrupting the delicate aquatic ecosystem causing bleaching, which is when "thermal stress causes corals to expel the symbiotic algae that provides them with food (resulting in a characteristic loss of color), and can result in death if it occurs frequently enough to prevent recovery," said the University of Exeter report. According to the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, 44% of coral reefs globally are at risk of extinction. "Without relevant decisions from those with the power to change this trajectory, we will see the further loss of reefs, and progressive disappearance of coral species at larger and larger scales," said David Obura, the co-chair of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) SSC Coral Specialist Group. Coral reefs also hold a quarter of all marine life on Earth and their collapse could drastically alter the ecosystem.

Uninsurable future: The combination of the aforementioned tipping points means more and more places on Earth are becoming uninhabitable — and uninsurable. There has been a seven-fold increase in the amount of damage from natural disasters since the 1970s. Homes and businesses in disaster-prone areas are starting to see either extremely high insurance premiums or in some cases, little or no coverage as insurance companies pull out. Once home insurance becomes too expensive or unavailable, "people are left without an economic safety net when disasters strike," the Interconnected Disaster Risks report said. This shift is a "flashing red light for an American economy that is built on real property," said The New York Times. "Without insurance, banks won't issue a mortgage; without a mortgage, most people can't buy a home. With fewer buyers, real estate values are likely to decline, along with property tax revenues, leaving communities with less money for schools, police and other basic services."

Groundwater depletion: Much of the world's drinking water comes from underground reservoirs called aquifers. The bad news is that these aquifers are rapidly emptying, with 21 of the 37 largest aquifers losing water faster than they can be replenished. The water in the aquifers "has accumulated over thousands of years, and would equally take thousands of years to fully recharge," the U.N. report said, so these crucial reservoirs are "essentially a non-renewable resource." Approximately 2 billion people worldwide rely on groundwater as a primary source of drinking water, but most groundwater is used in agriculture. "We can no longer consider groundwater as a boundless source of easily accessible freshwater," the report added. And its increasing inaccessibility has "worrying implications."

Ocean and atmospheric tipping points

Unbearable heat: This year, the planet has broken numerous heat records. The warmer temperatures have caused intense heat waves and led to "an average of 500,000 excess deaths annually in the last two decades," the U.N. said. The heat also disproportionately affects more vulnerable populations. Along with its toll on humans, heat exacerbates a number of other ecological problems, including melting glaciers, extreme storms and extinctions. "The reality is that we are quickly approaching a tipping point past which people will not survive," the report said. As temperatures rise even higher, the heat's impact will get more extreme and harder to reverse.

Changing ocean currents: The extreme heat has also caused a meteoric rise in ocean temperatures which can lead to a shift in ocean currents. For example, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) may be disrupted in the future because the "surface waters in the northern North Atlantic may become less dense," said the University of Exeter report. Cold water is denser than warm water and the current works through different water temperatures rising and sinking. "AMOC may have weakened by around 15" over the past 50 years and may be at its weakest in 1,000 years." The current is crucial to maintain the climates of western and northern Europe.

Ocean deoxygenation: A new study published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution found that "lakes and reservoirs have experienced oxygen losses of 5.5% and 18.6% respectively in the past 45 years, and the oceans have dropped by 2%," said Popular Mechanics. While not previously considered a tipping point, scientists argue that it should be. Deoxygenated water can be detrimental to marine populations, leading to mass extinctions. It stems from warming temperatures, along with human factors like fertilizer runoff. "Failure to address aquatic deoxygenation will, ultimately, not only affect ecosystems but also economic activity, and society at a global level," said the lead author of the study, Kevin Rose, in a press release.

Ocean acidification: The ocean is taking more hits than some other places on Earth. The big blue is also experiencing acidification, which is when the ocean becomes more acidic as a result of absorbing too much carbon dioxide. "Ocean acidification is approaching a critical threshold … particularly in high-latitude regions like the Arctic and Southern Ocean," said the Planetary Health Check. "These areas are vital for the marine carbon pump and global nutrient cycles, which support marine productivity, biodiversity and global fisheries." However, a larger problem is that "even these current conditions may already be problematic for a variety of marine organisms, suggesting a need [to] re-evaluate which levels can actually be called safe," Levke Caesar, a co-author of the report, said to The Guardian.

Space debris: The tipping points also extend to space, where floating detritus threatens both current satellites and our ability to put new ones into orbit. Satellites are crucial to our daily lives, from weather reporting and tracking natural disasters to navigating and communicating. "Each piece of debris becomes an obstacle in the orbital 'highway,' making it increasingly difficult for functional satellites to avoid collisions," the U.N. report said. "If we continue on the current trajectory, we risk sacrificing Earth's orbits and the opportunities they offer to society now and in the future."

Interconnected Disaster Risks 2023: Risk Tipping Points - YouTube

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