Hot off the press...

A quick post to highlight a new report published by the Arctic Council highlight resilience and potential tipping points in the Arctic. This report is particularly relevant to this blog and the past few posts on tipping points in and around the Arctic region. 

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The authors identified 19 explicit tipping points which consists of both climatic and non-climatic (socio-ecological) elements with local to global drivers and impacts. The tipping points identified fully embraced the very definition of tipping points I intended to define in the first post. Interestingly, this report also uses an ecosystem services approach when classifying and analyzing various impacts of crossing certain tipping points. Popularized in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005, the ecosystem services framework aims to link anthropogenic change to biophysical and economic values of ecosystem functions. [Self promotion: I have been blogging about ecosystem services in another blog for my other university module (check it out here!).]

Source

This report efficiently sums up the wide variety (climatic and non-climatic, local or global) of impending tipping points with a multitude of different drivers (socio-ecological, climate change) with a wide range of impacts (local to global, ecosystem services).  An example of such impacts would be a loss of Arctic summer sea ice after surpassing a critical threshold and a subsequent loss of cultural ecosystem services of subsistence hunting and transportation of indigenous Alaskans. Although I focused on climatic tipping points until now, I will also be blogging about ecological and societal tipping points in future posts.