Anticipation-induced social tipping -- Can the environment be stabilised by social dynamics?

TL;DR

This paper introduces a socio-ecological model incorporating anticipation, showing that foresight can lead to social tipping points that stabilize the environment and prevent collapse.

Contribution

It develops a conceptual feedback model of socio-ecological co-evolution that explicitly includes anticipation as a mediating mechanism, highlighting its role in environmental stabilization.

Findings

Anticipation leads to metastability, allowing desired states to persist.

Foresight can foster social tipping points for environmental stabilization.

The model reproduces known sociological threshold behaviors with added foresight dynamics.

Abstract

In the past decades human activities caused global Earth system changes, e.g., climate change or biodiversity loss. Simultaneously, these associated impacts have increased environmental awareness within societies across the globe, thereby leading to dynamical feedbacks between the social and natural Earth system. Contemporary modelling attempts of Earth system dynamics rarely incorporate such co-evolutions and interactions are mostly studied unidirectionally through direct or remembered past impacts. Acknowledging that societies have the additional capability for foresight, this work proposes a conceptual feedback model of socio-ecological co-evolution with the specific construct of anticipation acting as a mediator between the social and natural system. Our model reproduces results from previous sociological threshold models with bi-stability if one assumes a static environment. Once the environment changes in response to societal behaviour the system instead converges towards a globally stable, but not necessarily desired, attractor. Ultimately, we show that anticipation of future ecological states then leads to metastability of the system where desired states can persist for a long time. We thereby demonstrate that foresight and anticipation form an important mechanism which, once its time horizon becomes large enough, fosters social tipping towards behaviour that can stabilise the environment and prevents potential socio-ecological collapse.