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Why Governance Must Change

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Governance Across a Tipping Event

Continuous learning and early-warning required across all phases

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Current Global Context

  • Weakening multilateralism
  • Fragmented institutions
  • Eroding geopolitical cooperation
  • Heightened need for flexible, multi-actor governance

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Preventing Tipping Points: Why Prevention Matters

  • Several systems likely to tip between 1.5–2°C
  • Minimising peak warming and overshoot is essential
  • Rapid emissions reductions + structural transitions
  • Prevention remains the most effective governance strategy

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Governance Strategies for Prevention

  • Build on existing frameworks (UNFCCC, CBD, regional treaties)
  • Strengthen implementation, monitoring, and enforcement
  • Address non-climatic drivers (deforestation, pollution)
  • Integrate justice, rights of nature, Indigenous leadership
  • Enhance monitoring, enforcement and accountability

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Impact Governance: Managing Irreversible Change

  • Begins once a tipping point is crossed or unavoidable
  • Focus shifts from prevention to damage limitation, risk damping, and safeguarding lives & livelihoods
  • Integrates tipping impacts into adaptation, development, finance & humanitarian planning
  • Must address cross-border and cross-sector cascading impacts
  • Emphasises learning, monitoring, and preparing for the new stable state

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Governance of Climate Interventions

  • Carbon dioxide removal (CDR): risks, governance priorities
  • Solar radiation modification (SRM): high uncertainty, global implications
  • Need international oversight before deployment

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The Role of Finance

  • Finance both accelerates and mitigates tipping risks
  • Systemic risk from asset exposure
  • Investors beginning to consider tipping-point risk
  • Finance as a lever for positive tipping (rapid decarbonisation, land-use change)

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Multi-Actor Governance

  • Requires states, cities, civil society, Indigenous groups, finance, business
  • Governance must work across scales
  • Coordinated narratives and mobilisation
  • Polycentric approaches more resilient in strained geopolitics

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Human Rights and Justice

  • Tipping points threaten fundamental rights
  • Governance failures disproportionately harm vulnerable groups
  • Must integrate justice into every governance phase

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Conclusions