Belém, Brazil, is the meeting place for this year’s COP30, which is underway right now. Climate change has been in the news of late with supertyphoons striking the Philippines and Vietnam, a Category 5 hurricane devastating Jamaica and Cuba, a Bill Gates article that got climate activists enraged, and alarms being raised by climatologists about tipping points creeping ever closer.
Even with the growing threat from nuclear proliferation, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists keep moving the Doomsday Clock closer to midnight, not because of imminent war, but rather because of rising global temperatures and sea levels, increasingly extreme weather events, and the global economic impact of growing food insecurity and population displacement as a result.
Before the gathering in Brazil, the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom published the Global Tipping Points Report 2025. The report highlights present and future tipping point risks from global atmospheric warming caused by human activities. Tipping points are limits beyond which irreversible consequences occur to our planet’s natural systems. The University of Exeter is home to the Global Systems Institute, a centre of research focused on understanding tipping points. The university served as the co-host of a 2025 conference on the subject and synthesized the scientific knowledge from 160 experts and 87 institutions in 23 countries to create this report. Tim Lenton, an Earth systems scientist and professor at the university, is the lead author of the report. He has been central in our understanding of tipping points and advancing our scientific understanding of their consequences.
In Belém, those gathered at COP30 hope to turn fear into hope by implementing a series of climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies to prevent negative tipping points from happening.
We cannot ignore tipping point risks, and we need to deploy the means to measure global climate change to know when we are crossing those tipping point lines. At the same time, however, we have to ensure that the more than 8 billion people on the planet are protected from the consequences of reaching and crossing those lines.
We already know tipping points that cannot be ignored. The most notable include:
- Decline in coral reef ecosystems.
- Deforestation of the Amazon rainforest makes the choice of Belém for COP30 apt.
- Deglaciation of continental and alpine ice fields.
- Weakening of Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC).
- Decline in crop yields caused by rising temperatures and drought.
How can COP30 address these prime tipping points?
- Encouraging and mandating changes in human behaviour for all of humanity, that will do more than anything else we consider, in turning negative tipping points into positive ones to restore the natural balance through the regeneration of marine, wetland, grassland and forests..
- Reducing natural system stressors using technological innovation, including artificial intelligence (AI), to map new strategies humans have previously not considered.
- Continuing to phase in low-carbon energy transportation and manufacturing production processes.
- Implementing agricultural and animal husbandry practices that are low-emission, while affordable and productive for small farmholders.
- Reducing the financial industry barriers to make funding more accessible for positive tipping point activities, both in the Global South and North, that address small and large low-carbon strategies and projects, relocation and resilient infrastructure development, agricultural innovation, and natural restoration.
