Concern and anticipation of sea-level rise increase potential for social tipping interventions

Effective climate change mitigation necessitates swift societal transformations. Social tipping processes, where relatively small triggers initiate qualitative systemic shifts, are a potential key mechanism for such large-scale societal change. Here we combine projected climate impacts, social survey data and a low-dimensional model of social activation to exemplify a transformative pathway where climate change concern increases social tipping potential, and extended anticipatory time horizons of future sea level rise shift the system closer towards a critical state. Climate change concern is sufficient in many countries such that an alternative stable tipped state currently exists, and event-induced tipping carries the potential for interventions to kick the system into that qualitatively different, potentially more desirable, state.