Regional Leadership for Global Tipping Points
Jessica Sidon: Co-founder of the Institutional Architecture Lab, Senior Lecturer and Director of the Dietz Family Initiative on the Environment and Global Affairs at the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs at Yale University.
Manjana Melchiorit: Principal co-author of the Governance section of the Global Tipping Points Report 2025, she is a researcher at the Stockholm Resilience Centre and the Global Systems Institute at the University of Exeter.
The consequences of climatic tipping points are nearly beyond our imagination. The mere thought of the Amazon rainforest transforming into savanna within a few decades, or coral reefs facing extinction, seems almost like science fiction. Given the vast numbers of people who have succumbed to a false sense of control over the environment, it may become increasingly difficult to grasp the reality that gradual changes in temperatures and rainfall are reorganizing systems on a planetary scale irreversibly.
However, data derived from increasingly sophisticated Earth system models suggest that these tipping points are approaching rapidly or, in the case of coral reefs and the West Antarctic ice sheet, may already be unfolding. It is far from clear that climate interventions can alleviate the issue.
In reality, institutions at all levels are not prepared to manage such possibilities. Current processes to embed climate science within public policy recommendations have become stronger regarding global changes than in relation to the local insights needed by a city planner in Jakarta, a finance minister in Brazil, or a farmer in the Sahel. This is because these processes are better equipped to highlight areas of consensus than to map out zones of uncertainty.
Most infrastructure plans, policy frameworks, financial markets, and risk management strategies do not acknowledge the possibility of surpassing climatic tipping points, which we can anticipate in the near future but cannot predict with precision. This makes it challenging to balance investments in immediate needs with the potential long-term impacts of such spending.
The inability to respond to climatic tipping points must be addressed now. Mitigating the risks of exceeding these points presents a global collective action challenge, especially as it spans multiple domains. For instance, various factors contribute to coral reef collapse, including global warming, ocean acidification, ecosystem loss, pollution runoff, and overfishing. Yet, climate science, biodiversity research, pollution monitoring, and resource management are placed in separate silos, leaving no single entity accountable for monitoring and mitigating the dynamics of tipping.
Establishing the necessary institutional framework for governing tipping points boils down to three core tasks. The first is continuous tracking of tipping dynamics—including human and social dimensions—and developing a shared and applicable understanding of these dynamics. The second is the increasing recognition of risks, which means ensuring they are central considerations in governmental and business decision-making. Finally, it is crucial to create the capacity for coordinated responses across policy areas, sectors, and scales.
In a Memorandum of Understanding regarding the Global Tipping Points Report 2025, we outline how these capacities can be developed through regional facilities to monitor and respond to tipping elements (TEMRFs), which will focus on information sharing and coordinating actions as needed. Each of these facilities will concentrate on a specific tipping element and will be regionally based, yet interconnected globally. These facilities can weave together existing regional cooperation frameworks, including networks of scientists, policymakers, city governments, indigenous peoples, and diplomats.
These facilities can learn from other successful initiatives that have developed new ways to concatenate climate science for decision-makers, such as the climate risk lighthouse activity of the World Climate Research Programme, the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme, and the scientific teams studying the Amazon and Congo Basin as well as Borneo and the Amazon Regional Observatory. These programs have demonstrated how to represent systemic risks in ways that are concrete and tailored to various stakeholders. These facilities should emulate these programs by aggregating information from a broad range of sources—such as quantitative models, satellite data, and indigenous knowledge—and create a comprehensive picture for diverse stakeholder groups.
Political leaders and business executives, in addition to their focus on election cycles and quarterly profits, need contextual frameworks that recognize the risks of surpassing climatic tipping points and work to integrate them. To achieve this, regional facilities focusing on monitoring and responding to tipping elements must account for long-term timeframes spanning decades and ensure that tipping elements are part of the policy frameworks for infrastructure planning, financial regulation, and development policy. Difficult trade-offs must be navigated—between short-term growth and long-term resilience, and between maintaining the status quo and adapting to new realities.
Ultimately, regional facilities focusing on monitoring and responding to tipping elements must organize responses at a scale and pace that matches the urgency of the situation. The Amazon rainforest stretches across nine countries, while ocean currents connect continents; each embodies dynamics of tipping that have local and global impacts unfolding over complex timescales. This requires institutions capable of coordinating efforts across different jurisdictions, bridging the public and private sectors, and responding flexibly to changing circumstances.
Regional bodies are well-positioned to achieve these goals because they are close enough to observe the impacts of cross-border tipping points, yet large enough to innovate and implement coordinated measures across borders. Organizations such as the Nordic Council of Ministers or the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization can play significant roles in developing this infrastructure, leveraging their experience in addressing changing concerns despite their lack of complete mandates. Regional development banks and regional alliances around shared interests, such as the International Coral Reef Initiative, can serve as effective starting points.
There is a profound need to bolster regional capacities. Efforts at the global level often falter under the weight of deep inequalities and persistent distrust—either between nations or within them—over which interests are genuinely being served in the end. In this context, it is easy to frame Earth system tipping points as yet another agenda from the global north aimed at regulating development elsewhere. Regional facilities monitoring and responding to tipping elements chart a different course: creating the necessary space for regions to claim their voice, nurturing their scientific capacities and grounded visions, and working with stakeholders across various realms to shape development pathways deeply rooted in their geographic areas and supported by the Earth systems they inhabit.
Regional facilities focusing on monitoring and responding to tipping elements provide a means to link global ambition to regional realities—on terms set by those living that reality.
