Articles | Volume 16, issue 4
https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-16-1197-2025
https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-16-1197-2025
Review
 | 
30 Jul 2025
Review |  | 30 Jul 2025

Tipping cascades between conflict and cooperation in climate change

Jürgen Scheffran, Weisi Guo, Florian Krampe, and Uche Okpara

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Negative social tipping dynamics resulting from and reinforcing Earth system destabilization
Viktoria Spaiser, Sirkku Juhola, Sara M. Constantino, Weisi Guo, Tabitha Watson, Jana Sillmann, Alessandro Craparo, Ashleigh Basel, John T. Bruun, Krishna Krishnamurthy, Jürgen Scheffran, Patricia Pinho, Uche T. Okpara, Jonathan F. Donges, Avit Bhowmik, Taha Yasseri, Ricardo Safra de Campos, Graeme S. Cumming, Hugues Chenet, Florian Krampe, Jesse F. Abrams, James G. Dyke, Stefanie Rynders, Yevgeny Aksenov, and Bryan M. Spears
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Cross-system interactions for positive tipping cascades
Sibel Eker, Timothy M. Lenton, Tom Powell, Jürgen Scheffran, Steven R. Smith, Deepthi Swamy, and Caroline Zimm
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Grace W. Ngaruiya and Jürgen Scheffran
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Farmers' perceptions of and adaptation strategies to climate change and their determinants: the case of Punjab province, Pakistan
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Topics: Climate change | Interactions: Human/Earth system interactions | Methods: Other methods
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Cited articles

Abid, M., Scheffran, J., Schneider, U. A., and Ashfaq, M.: Farmers' perceptions of and adaptation strategies to climate change and their determinants: the case of Punjab province, Pakistan, Earth Syst. Dynam., 6, 225–243, https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-6-225-2015, 2015. 
Abrahams, D. and Carr, E. R.: Understanding the Connections Between Climate Change and Conflict: Contributions From Geography and Political Ecology, Current Climate Change Reports, 3, 233–42, https://doi.org/10.1007/s40641-017-0080-z, 2017. 
Açıkalın, Ş. N. and Artun, E. C.: The Concept of Self-Organized Criticality: The Case Study of the Arab Uprising, in: Chaos, Complexity and Leadership 2017, edited by: Erçetin, Ş. Ş., and Potas, N., Springer Nature, Berlin, 73–85, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89875-9_7, 2019. 
Adams, C., Ide, T., Barnett, J., and Detges, A.: Sampling Bias in Climate–Conflict Research, Nat. Clim. Change, 127, 1–203, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-018-0068-2, 2018. 
Adger, W. N., Fransen, S., de Campos, R. S., and Clark. W. C.: Scientific frontiers on migration and sustainability, P. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 121, e2321325121, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2321325121, 2024. 
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Short summary
To study tipping cascades in the climate–conflict nexus, a bi-stable tipping model analyses transitions between conflict and cooperation. The Lake Chad case demonstrates climate change as a risk multiplier combined with poor governance, lowering resilience and barriers of communities to conflict. Adaptive and anticipative governance can prevent tipping to violent conflict and induce positive tipping towards cooperation through civil conflict transformation and environmental peacebuilding.
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