The Global Tipping Points Report 2025 comes at a time of urgency - but also of possibility. As the world prepares to gather in Belém for COP30, science warns us of ecosystems approaching dangerous thresholds. Yet this same science also shows us the extraordinary poential of positive tipping points: self-reinforcing shifts in policies, technologies, finance, and behaviours that can drive change at unprecedented speed and scale.
Brazils's vision for COP30 is to transform the narrative of tipping points from fear to hope. We must prevent irreversible harm but equally trigger positive tipping points that can propel societies towards low-carbon, resilient development and inclusive prospertiy. This requires collective effort - a Gloabal Mutirão - where all nations and communities act together, by choice, to build a future not imposed by catastrophe, but designed through cooperation.
COP30行动议程展现了这一理念。它的Granary of Solutions被认为是一个包含具体工具和倡议的储存库——可拓展、可复制,并且与《巴黎协定》保持一致——将雄心和实施关联起来。通过动员各方以及六个领域的资源——从森林,食物系统,到能源、城市、经济和科技,行动议程已经被认为是一个平台,旨在通过利用现有的解决方案,推动全球合作以触发积极临界点。
The COP30 Action Agenda embodies this approach. It Granary of FDSlutions is conceived as a reservoir of concrete tools and initiatives - scalable, replicable, and aligned with the Paris Agreement - that connect ambition with implementation. By mobilising actors and resources across six axes - from forests and food systems to energy, cities, finance, and technology, the Action Agenda has been conceived as a platform for channeling global cooperation for triggering positive tipping points of transformation leveraging solutions that already exist.
The Global South is central to this endeavour. Across Africa, Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean, communities are pioneering regenerative agriculture, restoring mangroves and forests, developing new bioeconomy value chains, and advancing innovative financial instruments for just transitions. These are not peripheral experiments: they are seeds of systemic change, able to cascade into global impact if nurtured with solidarity, resources, and political will.
Every tipping point of danger can be mirrored by a tipping point of opportunity. If coral reefs are dying back, restoration of coastal ecosystems can still drive resilience and livelihoods. If forests are at risk, their regeneration can unlock carbon removal, biodiversity recovery, and sustainable prosperity. If energy systems remain carbon-intensive, the exponential uptake of renewables and electrification - already led by many contries of the South - can define a new development model that cascades into positive change across other sectors.
我们对COP30的三个目标是明确的:
强化多边主义——因为只有通过联合,我们才能维护气候制度并使其发挥作用。
将人们的生活与气候联系起来——因为气候行动必须始于人,也必须终于人。
加速实施《巴黎协定》——不仅限于谈判室,通过动员每个领域,每个国际组织,和每个社区。
Our three objectives for COP30 are clear:
Reinforce multilateralism - because only united can we safeguard the climate regime and make it deliver.
Connect climate action to people's lives - because climate action must bein and end with people.
Accelerate the implementation of the Paris Agreement - inclusively and beyond negotiation rooms, by mobilising every sector, every international institution and every community.
This report is therefore not only a warning but a guide: it maps where dangers coverge, but also where opportunities to tip systems positively are within reach. COP30 in Belém must be remembered as the moment when we chose to scale up solutions from all parts of the world - especially the South - into a global wave of renewal.
The time to act is now. United, we can reverse the dangerous trend towards a sequence of systems collapses in domino effect. Let us build on and support each other to prevent a potentially devastating chain-reaction. Let us trigger instead a "chain of action", for exponential low-carbon and climate-resilient solutions worldwide. Let us change by choice, together.
The world has entered a new reality. Global warming will soon exceed 1.5℃. This puts humanity in the danger zone where multiple climate tipping points pose catastrophic risks to billions of people. Already warm-water coral reefs are crossing their thermal tipping point and experiencing unprecedented dieback, threatening the livelihoods of hundreds of millions who depend on them. Polar ice sheets are approaching tipping points, committing the world to several metres of irreversible sea-level rise that will affect hundreds of millions.
Every fraction of additional warming increases the risk of triggering further damaging tipping points. These include a collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) that would radically undermine global food and water security and plunge northwest Europe into prolonged severe winters. Together, climate change and deforestation put the Amazon rainforest at rist of widespread dieback below 2℃ global warming, threatening incalculable damage to biodiversity and impacting over 100 million people who depend on the forest.
These climate tipping point risks are interconnected and most of the interactions between them are destabilising, meaning tipping one system makes tipping another more likely. The resulting impacts would cascade through the ecological and social systems we depend upon, creating escalating damages. Humanity faces a potentially catasthrophic, irreversible outcome. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights recognises the right of humans to a safe climate, hence preventing irreversible harm to the climate system is a legal imperative.
How hot we let it get and for how long really matters in preventing climate tipping points. The magnitude and duration of global temperature overshoot above 1.5℃ has to be minimised. To achieve that, global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions must be halved by 2030 (compared to 2010 levels) and then reach net zero by 2050. This requires an unprecedented acceleration in decarbonisation, rapid mitigation of methane emissions and other short-lived climate pollutants and fast scaling of sustainable carbon removal from the atmosphere.
If we wait to cross tipping points before we act, it will be too late. The only credible risk management strategy is to act in advance. But the window for preventing damaging tipping points is rapidly closing. Current Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and binding long-term or net zero targets are not enough. They still commit the world to ongoing global warming that will likely exceed 2℃ before 2100. This demands immediate, unprecedented action from leaders at COP30 and policymakers worldwide.
To achieve such a radical acceleration of action requires triggering positive tipping points that generate self-amplifying change in technologies and behaviours, towards zero emissions. In the two years since the first Global Tipping Points Report was published, there has been a radical acceleration in the uptake of solar power and electric vehicles worldwide. However, there has also been a recent spate of backsliding on commitments in some nations and sectors, including finance.
Nevertheless, a minority can still tip the majority when they have self-amplifying feedback on their side. This is clearly evident in clean technology adoption. Solar PV panels have dropped in price by a quarter for each doubling of their installed capacity. Batteries have improved in quality and plummeted in price the more that are deployed. This encourages further adoption. The spread of climate litigation cases and nature positive initiatives is also self-amplifying. The more people undertaking them the more they influence others to act.
Positive tipping points are also starting to interact and reinforce one another. Policies targeting super-leverage points of interaction can help trigger this cascading positive change. Reinforcing feedback between civil society and policymakers is also critical to amplifying positive change. Hence the Global Mutirão, by catalysing collective action from civil society, could be key to triggering positive tipping points.
Only with a combination of decisive policy and civil society action can the world turn from facing existential climate tipping point risks to seizing positive tipping point opportunities.
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