Publications

Vajira Lasantha, Lan Wang-Erlandsson, Juan Rocha, Ruud van der Ent, Markus Hrachowitz. 2025. Characterizing Anthropogenic Modification of Root Zone Storage Capacity. EGU. https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-18391

Vegetation plays a crucial role in regulating the water cycle through transpiration, which is influenced by the root zone storage capacity ( S R ). S R is dynamically influenced by climate, land use, and vegetation, with ecosystems adapting to environmental changes by modulating S R . Human interventions, such as deforestation, agriculture, and irrigation, significantly alter S R by changing vegetation cover and w...

Lan Wang-Erlandsson, Fabian Stenzel, Dieter Gerten, Lauren Seaby Andersen, Miina Porkka, Lars Wiersma, Malin Lundberg Ingemarsson, Johan Rockström. 2025. Critical freshwater requirements for meeting the Paris Agreement. EGU. https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-15423

Intact land and freshwater ecosystems are a prerequisite for limiting global warming in accordance with the Paris Agreement. However, the critical co-dependence of climate mitigation outcomes and freshwater dynamics tends to be neglected in both research and policies. Here, we suggest a framework for systematically quantifying the indispensable freshwater requirements for mitigation measures, focused on natural and managed ter...

Simon Felix Fahrländer, Lauren Seaby Andersen, Dieter Gerten, Marta Tuninetti, Lan Wang-Erlandsson, Arie Staal, Johan Rockström, Nico Wunderling. 2025. Exploring global interdependencies from the hydrological cycle to virtual water flows through a network analysis. EGU. https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-15699

Freshwater is fundamental to Earth system processes, yet its global dynamics are often overlooked in water governance. With half of all terrestrial precipitation originating from land evaporation, the global interdependencies of atmospheric moisture flows remain underrepresented in policies addressing water security and climate adaptation. In particular, its impacts on global supply chains have not been assessed so far. Theref...

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...