Tending the planetary: Toward an ecology of institutions for Earth system tipping points

Coral reefs could fade into the history books. The Amazon rainforest could evolve into a new, hotter, and drier ecosystem. The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), the Atlantic Ocean circulation that moderates temperatures and influences monsoons and rainfall around the world, could slow or collapse. These futures are not entirely predictable, but they are foreseeable—and increasingly likely as global temperatures rise. Each of these “system reorganizations”—a term used in Earth system science—would have far-reaching implications for today’s economies and societies.

Tipping elements—parts of the Earth system vulnerable to irreversible, self-reinforcing change—can be difficult for financial, political, and multilateral institutions to acknowledge and act on. Current market, political, and cultural institutions are calibrated for incremental, stable, and (often) nationally demarcated issues. In principle, politics, policymaking, markets, and businesses have stakes in the long run—future generations, long-lasting infrastructure, long-time horizon commitments to pensions, for example—but they are often more focused on short-run goals. Decisionmaking operates on yearly to decadal horizons. Multilateral governance is in place, but coordination and exercise of power are often sharply bounded by national sovereignty.

The result is that even those leaders that recognize risks of tipping points to Earth systems run into friction when moving from acknowledging these risks as individuals to responding to them as institutions. Neither the city planner in Jakarta, the central bank governor in Basel, nor the insurance underwriter in Zurich lacks intelligence or concern. The structures they work in, however, have no way of digesting the risks. The institutional infrastructure that makes tipping-element risk legible, actionable, and unignorable is missing.

Meanwhile, the communities closest to emerging changes are already living with their consequences. In the Arctic, Sami reindeer herders can no longer predict the seasons with the confidence that has organized their lives for generations. In Finland and Brazil, Indigenous people as well as traditional and agricultural communities report the same creeping unpredictability—the reliable rhythms of planting and harvest, embedded in cultural knowledge and practice, becoming guesswork year by year, with cascading consequences for maintaining livelihoods, health, and culture. Growing unpredictability is itself an early warning.

Opening the flow: Recognizing and responding to Earth system tipping points

Governance now has to close the gaps between (i) today’s risks and tomorrow’s consequences, and (ii) what is known at the edges and what is recognized at the centers of conventional power.

Closing those gaps requires looking beyond better science communication. It requires different kinds of institutions that can sense nonlinear change, route signals to the actors best positioned to respond, and coordinate diverse experimentation toward coherent efforts to prevent and prepare for dramatic changes in the Earth system context we live in now.

Upgrading global governance to prepare institutions against potential climate-induced tipping points has been a priority for the Presidency of COP30, the 30th United Nations Climate Change Conference, which took place in Belém, Brazil, in November 2025. The August 2023 Amazon Summit, hosted by Brazil in preparation for COP30, gathered leaders of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO) countries to adopt the Belém Declaration, containing the first-ever political recognition of tipping elements in the South American biome. Concrete actions were taken regionally, including unprecedented police, judicial, and intelligence cooperation against environmental crimes, the strengthening of the Amazon Regional Observatory, and the creation of an Intergovernmental Technical-Scientific Panel for the Amazon. In 2024, Brazil’s Presidency of the G20 helped encourage structural changes in national economies and the international financial system to respond to climate-related ecological transformation, and pushed for strengthened climate governance, including through a possible new U.N. Climate Change Council to accelerate implementation of the Paris Agreement. In an official letter, the COP30 Presidency argued that moving past slow, bureaucratic models would let international institutions share data, knowledge, and intelligence faster and better coordinate the networks, resources, and actors that remain fragmented across and beyond the U.N. system.

The “Tipping Element Monitoring and Response Facilities” (TEMRFs) outlined in a concept note published with the 2025 Global Tipping Points Report are one such governance innovation: a globally networked architecture grounded in regional leadership. TEMRFs propose to start by exploring and reducing the blockages between more regional signals of environmental change and the capacity to respond, then connecting these more dynamic exchanges together in a mesh that can coordinate on a larger scale. The proposal deliberately describes the facilities in terms of functions—representing tipping-element dynamics, recognizing these signals at an institutional level, and coordinating responses across scales—to create space to weave together existing organizations and to invite new initiatives to fill the gaps. It drew inspiration from the Convention on Long-range Transboundary Air Pollution, a successful regional treaty with a built-in, shared, jointly maintained model of how economic and policy decisions (emissions) affect environmental outcomes. The Convention’s initial political impulse came from local demand for healthy forests and cleaner air, but grew into diplomacy, the Convention, and a series of negotiated protocols as science helped uncover the transboundary roots of local concerns. The idea aligned with the “Global Mutirão” embedded in the COP30 process—a global mobilization against climate change.

Toward an ecology of institutions for Earth tipping-point governance

A group of leading experts in finance, governance, cultural engagement, and the Earth system science of three tipping elements—the Amazon, coral reefs, and AMOC—convened in April 2026 as part of the 17 Rooms initiative to ask how to develop and implement a globally networked regional architecture for global tipping-point governance.

The core insight that surfaced in conversations was that an effective tipping-point governance architecture should be understood as an ecology of institutions and actors, with common functions, varied forms, and ongoing investments in building the circulatory system for ideas, innovations, and implementation.

The three Earth systems considered in the Room are obviously distinct physical systems—and their human and political contexts vary at least as widely. The Amazon is a political and economic frontier governed across nine countries and Indigenous systems that predate the nation-states involved. It is a key link in global climate regulation as well as the regional water cycle, home to extraordinary biocultural diversity, and a reservoir of gold, minerals, and fossil fuels. Coral reefs ring the equator, spanning over a hundred countries, and sit at the intersection of fisheries, tourism, coastal protection, and cultural identity across oceans and countries. AMOC is an Atlantic current, but it is shaped by global energy imbalances, and the implications of destabilization reverberate through financial, security, and political systems around the world.

This variety can be understood as a source of strength. The varying Earth systems and institutional contexts are an invitation to expand the notion of what might work and where to start. If the goal is functional—to represent, recognize, and coordinate responses—then the form can vary enormously. An Amazon facility might involve ACTO, frontline municipalities, and Indigenous and traditional populations’ organizations and governance networks, working in different ways to translate climate signals to inform culturally grounded socioeconomic policy at different levels of government. A coral reef facility might center on observatories and scenario planning processes organized around regional reef systems, with finance and insurance sectors brought in to internalize the risks that the decline and reorganization of this critical ecological infrastructure may represent to economies. An AMOC facility might plug into ocean governance structures as well as the comprehensive security frameworks of Nordic countries, where whole-of-society preparedness creates unusual openings for long-horizon risk recognition.

Three focus areas for coordination: Science, finance, and policy

Conversations also highlighted several clear focus areas for maturing and coordinating across institutions and actors.

First, it is important to build a more dynamic system of observatories, interactions, and iterative exploration of potential futures in addition to the ongoing emphasis on assessments. There is a growing body of scientific research on tipping dynamics, and more is underway for the forthcoming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Seventh Assessment Report (IPCC AR7) as well as the 2027 Global Tipping Points Report. The research needs to be evaluated, compared, and synthesized—but it is also important to expand observations and to tailor the exploration of new insights to the scale, questions, and decision contexts of those working on implementation on the ground to prevent and prepare for change. U.K. ARIA’s Forecasting Tipping Points program is one example of such efforts. Equally importantly, these systems should operate on the principles of equity and justice and include frontline communities and traditional knowledge holders, whose ability to manage the effects of Earth system tipping points cannot wait for global governance to mature. There is precedent to learn from the efforts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) to include Indigenous and local knowledge in assessments, the Science Panel for the Amazon, and the Arctic Council’s inclusion of Indigenous Peoples as Permanent Participants.

Second, Room participants also noted that the financial system is an important arena for addressing the horizon gap between urgent action and long-term risks. The financial system is already the circulatory system for matching resources to emerging needs—the challenges are to tune it toward valuing longer-term security rather than short-term returns and connect it to the signals on options to prevent and prepare for Earth system tipping elements. Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) and credit rating reforms, insurance pricing, regulatory frameworks for central banks and financial supervisors, payment for ecosystem services, and natural capital accounting all offer potential ways to amplify signals from observatories. Experiments like the Bank for International Settlements’ Project Danu, which explores digital twin technology to share climate-related systemic risks with central banks, point toward a future in which Earth system signals flow more directly into the institutions that steward financial stability. Legal mechanisms such as director liability, fiduciary duty, and contract law could offer parallel routes, distributing tipping-element risk through infrastructure already standardized across borders. Where insurance prices risk, the law can require it to be disclosed, planned for, and acted upon. The TEMRFs have a specific role to play here by providing a consistent, credible evidentiary foundation that they can all draw on simultaneously.

Third, the TEMRFs should connect with new multilateral structures for coordinating locally diverse, functionally coherent responses to nonlinear risks. The COP30 Presidency called for climate multilateralism to evolve toward a two-speed model, in which COPs’ consensus decisionmaking is complemented by accelerated implementation initiatives beyond the climate regime. COP30 formally launched a new Global Implementation Accelerator to trigger exponential and cascading change for system transformation—the so-called “positive tipping points.” At the same time, the COP Presidency is leading global roadmaps for planning the energy, land, and finance transitions, including transitioning away from fossil fuels and halting and reversing deforestation by 2030. In 2025, the International Court of Justice and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights further issued advisory opinions that consolidate legal obligations to prevent significant and irreversible harm to the environment. All these developments are early signs of a multilateral system feeling its way toward the kind of complexity-aware, distributed governance that tipping elements actually require.

The need for an ongoing dance between tensions

Three tensions will have to be balanced rather than resolved. The first is standardization versus legitimacy: The tipping-element facilities need to generate somewhat standardized, comparable signals and (risk) assessments to be useful to financial regulators and multilateral bodies, but indicators designed at a distance risk rejection by the communities closest to the systems. Co-design is essential and takes time that urgency does not always allow. The second is urgency versus emergence: an organic, distributed approach is more likely to take root and last, but tipping elements do not wait for the decades that institutions may take to mature. The third is prevention versus adaptation. For some tipping elements, prevention is still possible. For others, the question is increasingly how to prepare and steward a transition rather than stop one.

Conclusion and next steps

Despite and because of these tensions, initiatives to anticipate and shape systemic transformation are already emerging. Connecting them into a cohort for peer learning in the early days and for data exchange and collaboration as they mature could create an ecology of institutions that conserves heterogeneity while also ensuring coherence.

An ecology is far more resilient and adaptive than an institutional monoculture of centralization, silos, and delegation. But ecologies are tended rather than designed. They evolve. The tending has already begun—in the Arctic, in the Amazon, on coral reefs, in finance ministries and frontline municipalities. The work now is to help the initiatives already growing find their way toward each other, support their communication and coordination, and to do so with the urgency the science—and the escalating impacts—demand. Planning processes are essential, but they should be paired with a sustained commitment to anticipation, agility, and the slow, relational, experimental work of governance, and with the recognition that in this case, slow and fast approaches are not opposites. They are complementary. Deepening the roots is what makes rapid growth possible.