Anticipation-induced social tipping -- Can the environment be stabilised by social dynamics?
Paul Manuel M\"uller, Jobst Heitzig, J\"urgen Kurths, Kathy L\"udge,, and Marc Wiedermann

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…
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