The risks of “tipping points” for the planetary climate need all the attention they can get, including the note appearing here just three weeks ago. These can’t be made to go away by pretending they’re not real – but in meetings this past June in Germany, it was reported by the independent Earth Negotiations Bulletin that some of the participating parties apparently wished to obscure the threat:

Delegates disagreed on text relating to tipping points, with the EU and UK seeking to remove a reference to “varying perspectives” on the concept’s understanding, while INDIA and SAUDI ARABIA preferred to keep this, arguing that the issue is neither settled nor clear. INDIA, opposed by the EU and UK, suggested deleting the reference to irreversible changes.

With the next UN Climate Change Conference (COP31) upcoming this November, these notes from the June pre-meeting may presage possible efforts to weaken urgency and limit future commitments – echoing the efforts to edit reality that we saw last year at COP30 in Brazil.

There are, however, beneficial opportunities for “dynamic self-propelling change that can be triggered…when a threshold is crossed”: tipping points that can sometimes turn a small good thing into a cascade of larger good things, a positive-feedback acceleration that goes in good directions. That’s the TL;DR of Positive Tipping Points: Accelerating system change to repair our planet, a September 10 release from the University of Exeter.

There are too many voices, political and otherwise, that seek to downplay the necessity and exaggerate the costs of achieving a decarbonized and otherwise altered way of life. It’s therefore useful to have U.Exeter’s playbook for “environmental solutions that can trigger rapid and transformative change to repair our planet within the next five years.” Their list of opportunities, fifty-one in all, leads with one that deserves to be loudly and clearly shared – labeled as, “Clean energy as a master cascade”:

As solar and wind have become cheaper, the economics of electric transport, clean buildings, industry and cleaner air have improved. Solar power costs have fallen around 90% in the past decade; falling costs have unlocked further deployment, which has driven costs lower still, attracting more investment and improving the technology. Today, solar is the cheapest source of electricity in most of the world.

In addition to the remaining specific examples, the U.Exeter report also offers this top-level reframing of how to consider opportunities and set priorities:

Rather than asking only, “does this solution work?”, the more powerful question is: “can this solution trigger exponential, self-propelling change at scale?” Solutions with the greatest potential for ‘tipping’ are those positioned to unlock reinforcing feedbacks – where early adopters inspire others, costs fall with scale, ecosystems recover enough to sustain their own recovery, or new norms and policies spread from one community or country to the next.

Usefully and memorably, the report offers a three-point list of “prerequisites for positive tipping”:

• Affordable: the desired solution must be cost-competitive with the damaging incumbent.
• Accessible: it must be practically and geographically available to those who need to adopt it.
• Attractive: it must perform well enough, with enough social proof, to make adoption the obvious choice.

A notable enabler for positive feedback is what the report calls “monitoring democritisation”: the growing number, improving quality, and falling cost of observation satellites and on-the-ground sensor networks enabling “an information cascade that is bringing accountability capacity to communities and contexts that previously had none.” When the cost of doing the right thing is falling, and the consequences of bad behavior (legal, regulatory, or even just reputational) are becoming more likely, that’s a push-pull combination.

A “closing reflection” near the end of the U.Exeter report should also be emphasized. Any given element of climate change is likely to have an energetic community of concern. The Apparel Impact Institute, for example, is doing important work in an industry whose greenhouse gas emissions are comparable to the entire country of Japan – but targeting problem areas individually, and adding up individual successes, is not the most powerful way to allocate effort or assess results.

Greater impact can be had, the report observes, when we look across narrow problem domains to recognize broad-spectrum tools:

The same clean electricity cascade powers climate mitigation, urban air quality improvement, clean cooking access and electrified circular industry. The same monitoring democratisation enables air quality accountability, deforestation tracking, methane detection and fisheries enforcement. The same finance instruments scale ocean conservation, adaptation infrastructure and circular construction.

What matters, therefore, is seeking collaboration across communities that might seem to be defined by their differing interests and concerns – and maximizing “the product of the leverage on the cross-cutting enablers” of getting stuff done.

In every case, we need to begin by recognizing unwelcome facts; continue by taking on the burden of communicating affordability and accessibility, while also celebrating attractiveness; and persist in maintaining effort, despite what can seem like overwhelming headwinds of weak science, flawed math, and deceptive argument.

The good news, though, which these notes here don’t often feature, is that there are positive-change potentials that can build their own momentum when they’re given a starting push.