Description

26 February - 9:15AM Central European Time // 2:15AM USA CST

"Social Tipping Elements and Abrupt System Changes"

Limiting global warming to well below 2°C requires a decarbonized world by 2050 and a global transformation of our societies. Recessions of greenhouse gas emissions in the industrialized history so far have been often linked to socio-economic crisis, like the Second World War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the current COVID-19 pandemic. In my presentation I will explore the concept of social tipping elements that refer to planetary functional domains within which it is possible to activate contagious processes of rapidly spreading technologies, behaviors, social norms, and structural reorganization that can lead to fundamental societal changes towards decarbonization. 

Dr. Ilona M. Otto works as a senior researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. She analyzes social tipping dynamics for the stabilization of the Earth’s climate as well as the implications and implementation of human agency for modeling human-environmental system interactions. She is interested in environmental inequalities and the socio-metabolic implications of human resource and energy use. Dr. Otto combines various data bases, research methods, and stakeholders’ knowledge in analyzing problems related to global environment changes, development, adaptation and sustainability. She holds a PhD in resource economics, an MSc in sociology, and for the last ten years she has been working closely with physicists, hydrologists, and computer scientists. She leads two major research projects: CASCADES: Cascading climate risks: towards adaptive and resilient European Societies (funded by the Horizon 2020 Programme), and REBOOST: A Boost for Rural Lignite Regions (funded by the EIT Climate-KIC). Both projects are grounded in complex system science and committed to generating transdisciplinary knowledge addressing challenges of the global sustainability transformation.

**Please Note: For those people unable to attend the live plenary, this will be recorded and uploaded here following the session.