TipESM: Exploring Tipping Points and Their Impacts Using Earth System Models

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TipESM brings together scientists from a range of disciplines to deliver a step change in our understanding of climate tipping pointsin the Earth system, including their impact on ecosystems and society, combined with a set of early warning indicators and safe futureemission pathways that minimise the risk of exceeding such tipping points. TipESM assembles the latest Earth System Models (ESMs),including recent improvements to key processes: ice sheets, vegetation and land use, permafrost, marine and terrestrial biogeochemistry.In cooperation with the WCRP/Future-Earth project TIPMIP, TipESM will organise an international collaboration to design and realisea common ESM experiment protocol that will facilitate analysis of the likelihood of occurrence, and potential reversibility, of tippingelements at different levels and duration of global warming. These experiments, will be combined with more project-specific ESMexperiments, designed to investigate interactions and feedbacks across the Earth system. Based on the TipESM experiments, existingsimulations and observations, we will investigate tipping points, their driving processes, potential early warning signals and cascadingeffects across the climate, ecosystems and society. Including the most important components of the Earth system in our ESMs will alsoallow TipESM to identify potentially unknown tipping elements, their precursors and impacts. TipESM brings together expertise fromclimate science and climate impactsto investigate both the role of gradual climate change for tipping in individual ecosystems and society,and the impact of crossing specific climate tipping points for society, ecosystems, and biodiversity. Project findings will be synthesisedinto a tipping points risk register. New knowledge and data from TipESM will be regularly communicated to a broad range of researchcommunities, policymakers and the public, contributing to a prepared and resilient society