Publications

Annika Högner, Giorgia Di Capua, Jonathan F. Donges, Reik V. Donner, Georg Feulner, Nico Wunderling. 2025. Causal pathway from AMOC to Southern Amazon Rainforest indicates stabilising interaction between two climate tipping elements. EGU. https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-8514

Climate tipping elements like the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) and the Amazon Rainforest (AR) are critical components of the Earth system that currently both show declining trends in their resilience due to anthropogenic climate change and other human disturbances such as deforestation. A shutdown of the AMOC or a large-scale dieback of the AR would have severe impacts on a global scale. Additionally, AMO...

Thomas Elliot, Jonathan Donges, Massimo Pizzol, Ilona Otto. 2025. Manifesting tipping points in pro-environmental behaviour for climate change mitigation. EGU. https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-10788

Achieving ambitious climate change targets, such as limiting global warming to 1.5°C, requires both political and social determination. Bottom-up pro-environmentalist behaviours can facilitate crossing social tipping points (STPs), resulting in new social norms with lower impact on global warming. While the passing of STPs has been described qualitatively, it remains poorly understood how the climate benefits of this phenomeno...

Max Bechthold, Wolfram Barfuss, André Butz, Jannes Breier, Sara Constantino, Jobst Heitzig, Luana Schwarz, Sanam Vardag, Jonathan Donges. 2025. Social norms and groups structure safe operating spaces and exhibit regime shifts in renewable resource use in a social-ecological multi-layer network model. EGU. https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-3532

Social norms are a key socio-cultural driver of human behaviour and have been identified as a central process in potential social tipping dynamics. They play a central role in governance and thus represent a possible intervention point for collective action problems in the Anthropocene, such as natural resource management. A detailed modelling framework for social norm change is needed to capture the dynamics of human societ...

Jonathan Krönke, Jonathan F. Donges, Johan Rockström, Nils Bochow, Nico Wunderling. 2025. Estimating parameters for a simple tipping model from complex Earth system model output. EGU. https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-15832

The existence of large-scale tipping points - thresholds where small changes can trigger drastic, often irreversible shifts in the climate system - has been a major concern of climate science in the past two decades. The ability to evaluate tipping risks using computationally manageable models is crucial to assess the resilience of the climate system and also to identify safe global warming trajectories for tipping elements. H...

Nico Wunderling, Annika Högner, Tessa Möller, Paul Ritchie, Johan Rockström, Norman Steinert, Jonathan F. Donges. 2025. Increased climate tipping risks from temperature overshoots. EGU. https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-15540

In Paris 2015, the global community agreed to keep global warming well below 2.0°C aiming to limit it to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. However, recent research has shown that overshooting this temperature guardrail is becoming increasingly likely and several climate data teams across the world recorded 2024 as the first individual year with a global warming level above 1.5°C. Such temperature levels endanger critical com...

Fritz Kühlein, Ilkhom Soliev, Jonathan Donges. 2025. Social tipping towards revolution? New perspectives for the MayaSim model. EGU. https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-21249

When assessing prerequisites for the resilience or collapse of present and future societies in the Anthropocene, computational models of ancient civilizations can provide valuable insights. The Classic Maya are a common example for a civilization that has experienced spectacular growth in population and technology before apparently undergoing catastrophic reorganization. The MayaSim social-ecological model was conceived by Hec...

Jannes Breier, Christoph Müller, Luana Schwarz, Hannah Prawitz, Werner von Bloh, Max Bechthold, Dieter Gerten, Jonathan Donges. 2025. copan:LPJmL: A new hybrid DGVM-based modeling framework for dynamic land use and agricultural management. EGU. https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-19244

Dynamic global vegetation models have been established as a useful tool in environmental and agricultural sciences for many purposes, e.g. modeling crop growth, fire disturbances, or biosphere-climate interactions. Nevertheless, DGVMs are often very limited in terms of interactions with the anthroposphere, particularly human-Earth interactions. DGVMs such as LPJmL have been successfully connected to integrated assessment model...

Woi Sok Oh, Wolfram Barfuss, Kelsea Best, Jonathan Donges, Simon Levin, Daniel Rubenstein. 2025. Timing dynamics of internal displacement in Somalia vary depending on the coincidence with local political and climatic conditions. Research Square. https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-4752717/v2

Human migration is one of the defining topics of our time, but the dynamics of when and how often migration events occur are poorly understood. Often, a single, context-unaware model is assumed without empirical evidence. Spatiotemporal dependencies and heterogeneities cannot be explained by such a viewpoint. These gaps produce misunderstanding of migration, leading to imprecise predictions and ineffective responses. To addres...

S. Loriani, A. Bartsch, E. Calamita, J. F. Donges, S. Hebden, M. Hirota, A. Landolfi, T. Nagler, B. Sakschewski, A. Staal, J. Verbesselt, R. Winkelmann, R. Wood, N. Wunderling. 2025. Monitoring the Multiple Stages of Climate Tipping Systems from Space: Do the GCOS Essential Climate Variables Meet the Needs?. Surveys in Geophysics. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10712-024-09866-4

Many components of the Earth system feature self-reinforcing feedback processes that can potentially scale up a small initial change to a fundamental state change of the underlying system in a sometimes abrupt or irreversible manner beyond a critical threshold. Such tipping points can be found across a wide range of spatial and temporal scales and are expressed in very different observable variables. For example, early-warning...

Johan Rockström, Jonathan F. Donges, Ingo Fetzer, Maria A. Martin, Lan Wang-Erlandsson, Katherine Richardson. 2025. Publisher Correction: Planetary Boundaries guide humanity’s future on Earth. Nature Reviews Earth & Environment. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43017-025-00696-5