Date:
December 8th + 9th + 10th
Location:
HIFMB
Im Technologiepark 5
26129 Oldenburg
The term ‘tipping point’ is increasingly used across natural and social sciences to understand and describe abrupt changes. It has come to signal disruptions in biogeophysical configurations that lead to catastrophic and largely irreversible transformations of natural systems. At the same time, use of this concept for social systems advocates for ‘positive’ tipping points as self-reinforcing feedback loops to return to safe operating zones away from ‘negative’ tipping points. Within this spectrum, ‘tipping points’ are investigated along various spatiotemporal scales and being increasingly taken up in policy frameworks. As a result, recent scholarship has been calling for careful discussion of the concept and its applications.
This interdisciplinary workshop brings together a diverse group of scholars to address these contentions. It is organized by a multidisciplinary cohort of early-career researchers focusing on the concept of tipping at the Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity (HIFMB) in Oldenburg, Germany. This event arrives after two years of collective discussions and work across the fields of biology, ecology, human geography and mathematics. We will combine multidisciplinary expertise to further unpack the very notion of tipping points, and the multiple ways they are characterized, debated and positioned in sciences and beyond academia. A collection of talks and discussions will reflect on the tipping discourses and practices that define contemporary environmental change and how they are shaping the future.
Program itinerary
| Morning session | Epistemologies of tipping. How has the term ‘tipping points’ been used, with what intentions and effects? This session will unpack the epistemological ways that scientists come to approach the notion of tipping points. Rather than focus on specific definitions or applications, it seeks to situate the broader historical trajectories of how various sciences have arrived at the tipping point question, and how it has come to frame, and continues to embed itself within scientific activity. This session grapples with how tipping points are therefore mobilized – as metaphor, model, behavior – in terms of how they are taken up and communicated as a worldview of climate change, and the effects this has across science and society. |
| 12:00 – 13:30 | Lunch break |
| Afternoon session | Ecological tipping. The application and significance of tipping points in ecology. We live in an intricately connected biosphere and as such, fast paced biodiversity loss represents a threat to ecosystem function and consequently, its ability to provide goods and services. This session aims to discuss the widespread use of the tipping points framework for understanding changes in ecological systems, particularly, if and how we can anticipate them and, its relevance for protecting biodiversity. With that, we are interested in critically discussing conceptual issues regarding tipping points when applied to ecological systems, whether we can detect them in biodiversity data and if these complex systems even “tip”. Further, we want to discuss whether we can look through the tipping point lens to help us understand biodiversity loss and what kind of insights we can take regarding the trajectory of our oceans under rapid climate change. |
| 16:00 – 17:30 | Break-out rooms |
| Morning session | How do we model tipping points? Examples from theoretical approaches working with various systems. Anthropogenic climate change causes fundamental turnover in ecosystem’s composition and function, with critical transitions like rainforest-savanna transitions or coral reef losses. In physics, tipping points are rigorously defined as losses of stability driven by non-linearity, often formalized through bifurcation theory and alternative stable states. Ecological communities, however, are high-dimensional, spatially structured, and observed through noisy and incomplete data. This complicates identification and formalization of ‘tipping points’. How are formal concepts from dynamical system theory adapted to fuzzy and complex ecological communities? Here our aim is to discuss how tipping dynamics can be modelled in practice across mathematical, statistical and data driven approaches. |
| 12:00 – 13:30 | Lunch break |
| 13:30 – 15:00 | Break-out rooms |
| 15:30 – 17:00 | Break-out rooms |
| Evening | Social event. Art-science jam |
| Morning session | Multidisciplinary reflections on the ‘tipping’ trend. How is ‘tipping point’ thinking shaping your scientific field and relations with society? This session aims to reflect across various disciplines on how the ‘trend’ of working with tipping points orients scientists’ work and relations to non-academic spheres. Organized as a roundtable, it offers an open discussion on the framings, opportunities, successes, failures, limits, that researchers contributing to tipping point sciences have experienced. We are especially interested in hearing about how panelists have engaged in interdisciplinary projects linked to tipping sciences, and how they position themselves within the increasingly mediatized and policy-related dimensions of tipping discussions. |
| 11:30 – 12:00 | Final reflections and workshop wrap-up |
Registration to follow
Registration – Tipping Point
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