Abstract
Localized ecological systems are known to shift abruptly and irreversibly from one state to another when they are forced across critical thresholds. Here we review evidence that the global ecosystem as a whole can react in the same way and is approaching a planetary-scale critical transition as a result of human influence. The plausibility of a planetary-scale ‘tipping point’ highlights the need to improve biological forecasting by detecting early warning signs of critical transitions on global as well as local scales, and by detecting feedbacks that promote such transitions. It is also necessary to address root causes of how humans are forcing biological changes.
This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution
Access options
Subscribe to this journal
Receive 51 print issues and online access
$199.00 per year
only $3.90 per issue
Buy this article
- Purchase on SpringerLink
- Instant access to full article PDF
Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Vitousek, P. M., Mooney, H. A., Lubchenco, J. & Melillo, J. M. Human domination of Earth’s ecosystems. Science 277, 494–499 (1997)
Haberl, H. et al. Quantifying and mapping the human appropriation of net primary production in Earth’s terrestrial ecosystems. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 104, 12942–12947 (2007)
Steffen, W. et al. The Anthropocene: from global change to planetary stewardship. AMBIO 40, 739–761 (2011)This paper summarizes the many ways in which humans are changing the planet, argues that the combined effect is as strong as geological forces and points to the likelihood of planetary tipping points.
Convention on Biological Diversity. Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011–2020, http://www.cbd.int/sp/ (2011)
Pereira, H. M. et al. Scenarios for global biodiversity in the 21st century. Science 330, 1496–1501 (2010)
Dawson, T. P., Jackson, S. T., House, J. I., Prentice, I. C. & Mace, G. M. Beyond predictions: biodiversity conservation in a changing climate. Science 332, 53–58 (2011)
Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Serviceswww.ipbes.net (2011)
Lavergne, S., Mouquet, N., Thuiller, W. & Ronce, O. Biodiversity and climate change: integrating evolutionary and ecological responses of species and communities. Annu. Rev. Ecol. Evol. Syst. 41, 321–350 (2010)
Jackson, S. T., Betancourt, J. L., Booth, R. K. & Gray, S. T. Ecology and the ratchet of events: climate variability, niche dimensions, and species distributions. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 106, 19685–19692 (2009)
Ramakrishnan, U. & Hadly, E. A. Using phylochronology to reveal cryptic population histories: review and synthesis of four ancient DNA studies. Mol. Ecol. 18, 1310–1330 (2009)
Gilman, S. E., Urban, M. C., Tewksbury, J., Gilchrist, G. W. & Holt, R. D. A framework for community interactions under climate change. Trends Ecol. Evol. 25, 325–331 (2010)
Scheffer, M. et al. Early-warning signals for critical transitions. Nature 461, 53–59 (2009)This paper presents a general approach to the detection of critical transitions and outlines the possibility of there being general indicators.
Carpenter, S. R. et al. Early warnings of regime shifts: a whole-ecosystem experiment. Science 332, 1079–1082 (2011)
Drake, J. M. & Griffen, B. D. Early warning signals of extinction in deteriorating environments. Nature 467, 456–459 (2010)
Folke, C. et al. Reconnecting to the biosphere. AMBIO 40, 719–738 (2011)
Rockström, J. et al. A safe operating space for humanity. Nature 461, 472–475 (2009)This paper specifies important planetary boundaries and explains why exceeding them would be detrimental to humanity.
Westley, F. et al. Tipping toward sustainability: emerging pathways of transformation. AMBIO 40, 762–780 (2011)
Lenton, T. M. Early warning of climate tipping points. Nature Clim. Change 1, 201–209 (2011)
Galaz, V. et al. ‘Planetary boundaries’ — exploring the challenges for global environmental governance. Curr. Opin. Environ. Sustain. 4, 80–87 (2012)
Hastings, A. & Wysham, D. Regime shifts in ecological systems can occur with no warning. Ecol. Lett. 13, 464–472 (2010)This paper points out that regime shifts in complex systems need not result from saddle-node bifurcations and thus may not show the typical early warning signals.
Peters, D. P. C. et al. in Real World Ecology (eds Miao, S. L., Carstenn, S. & Nungesser, M. K. ) 47–71 (Springer, 2009)
Getz, W. M. Disease and the dynamics of foodwebs. PLoS Biol. 7, e1000209 (2009)
Getz, W. M. Biomass transformation webs provide a unified approach to consumer–resource modeling. Ecol. Lett. 14, 113–124 (2011)
Hoek, W. Z. The last glacial-interglacial transition. Episodes 31, 226–229 (2008)
Barnosky, A. D. et al. Has the Earth’s sixth mass extinction already arrived? Nature 471, 51–57 (2011)
Marshall, C. R. Explaining the Cambrian “Explosion” of animals. Annu. Rev. Earth Planet. Sci. 34, 355–384 (2006)
Barnosky, A. D. Megafauna biomass tradeoff as a driver of Quaternary and future extinctions. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 105, 11543–11548 (2008)
Brown, J. H. et al. Energetic limits to economic growth. Bioscience 61, 19–26 (2011)
McDaniel, C. N. & Borton, D. N. Increased human energy use causes biological diversity loss and undermines prospects for sustainability. Bioscience 52, 929–936 (2002)
Koch, P. L. & Barnosky, A. D. Late Quaternary extinctions: state of the debate. Annu. Rev. Ecol. Evol. Syst. 37, 215–250 (2006)
United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs. World Population Prospects, the 2010 Revision, http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Analytical-Figures/htm/fig_1.htm (2011)
Population Reference Bureau. Population Projections 2050, http://www.prb.org/DataFinder/Topic/Rankings.aspx?ind=15 (2012)
United Nations. World Population to 2300 1–254 (United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs Population Division, 2004)
Foley, J. A. et al. Solutions for a cultivated planet. Nature 478, 337–342 (2011)This paper provides estimates for the amount of land that has been transformed by agricultural activities and summarizes steps required to feed 9,000,000,000 people.
Vitousek, P. M., Ehrlich, P. R., Ehrlich, A. H. & Matson, P. A. Human appropriation of the products of photosynthesis. Bioscience 36, 368–373 (1986)
Maurer, B. A. Relating human population growth to the loss of biodiversity. Biodivers. Lett. 3, 1–5 (1996)
Blois, J. L. & Hadly, E. A. Mammalian response to Cenozoic climatic change. Annu. Rev. Earth Planet. Sci. 37, 181–208 (2009)
Doney, S. C. The growing human footprint on coastal and open-ocean biogeochemistry. Science 328, 1512–1516 (2010)
Jackson, J. B. C. Ecological extinction and evolution in the brave new ocean. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 105, 11458–11465 (2008)
Ellis, E. C. Anthropogenic transformation of the terrestrial biosphere. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A 369, 1010–1035 (2011)
Parmesan, C. Ecological and evolutionary responses to recent climate change. Annu. Rev. Ecol. Evol. Syst. 37, 637–669 (2006)
Ellis, E. C., Antill, E. C. & Kref, H. Plant biodiversity in the Anthropocene. PLoS ONE 7, e30535 (2012)
Vié, J.-C., Hilton-Taylor, C., Stuart, S. N., eds. Wildlife in a Changing World: An Analysis of the 2008 IUCN Red List of Threatened Species 180 (IUCN, 2009)
Hoffmann, M. et al. The impact of conservation on the status of the world’s vertebrates. Science 330, 1503–1509 (2010)
Jackson, J. B. C. et al. Historical overfishing and the recent collapse of coastal ecosystems. Science 293, 629–637 (2001)
Bascompte, J., Melián, C. J. & Sala, E. Interaction strength combinations and the overfishing of a marine food web. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 102, 5443–5447 (2005)
Loarie, S. R. et al. The velocity of climate change. Nature 462, 1052–1055 (2009)
Williams, J. W., Jackson, S. T. & Kutzbach, J. E. Projected distributions of novel and disappearing climates by 2100 AD. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 104, 5738–5742 (2007)
Graham, R. W. et al. Spatial response of mammals to late Quaternary environmental fluctuations. Science 272, 1601–1606 (1996)
Blois, J. L., McGuire, J. L. & Hadly, E. A. Small mammal diversity loss in response to late-Pleistocene climatic change. Nature 465, 771–774 (2010)
Carrasco, M. A., Barnosky, A. D. & Graham, R. W. Quantifying the extent of North American mammal extinction relative to the pre-anthropogenic baseline. PLoS ONE 4, e8331 (2009)
Williams, J. W. & Jackson, S. T. Novel climates, no-analog communities, and ecological surprises. Front. Ecol. Environ 5, 475–482 (2007)
Williams, J. W., Shuman, B. N. & Webb, T., III Dissimilarity analyses of late-Quaternary vegetation and climate in eastern North America. Ecology 82, 3346–3362 (2001)
Williams, J. W., Shuman, B. N., Webb, T., III, Bartlein, P. J. & Leduc, P. L. Late Quaternary vegetation dynamics in North America: scaling from taxa to biomes. Ecol. Monogr. 74, 309–334 (2004)
Hadly, E. A. et al. Genetic response to climatic change: insights from ancient DNA and phylochronology. PLoS Biol. 2, e290 (2004)
Shapiro, B. et al. Rise and fall of the Beringian steppe bison. Science 306, 1561–1565 (2004)
Hewitt, G. M. Genetic consequences of climatic oscillations in the Quaternary. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B 359, 183–195 (2004)
Lister, A. M. The impact of Quaternary Ice Ages on mammalian evolution. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B 359, 221–241 (2004)
Barnosky, A. D., Carrasco, M. A. & Graham, R. W. in Comparing the Geological and Fossil Records: Implications for Biodiversity Studies (eds McGowan, A. J. & Smith, A. B. ) 179–189 (Geological Society, 2011)
Foley, J. A. et al. Global consequences of land use. Science 309, 570–574 (2005)
Olsen, E. M. et al. Maturation trends indicative of rapid evolution preceded the collapse of northern cod. 428, 932–935 (2004)
Estes, J. A. et al. Trophic downgrading of planet Earth. Science 333, 301–306 (2011)
Kurz, W. A. et al. Mountain pine beetle and forest carbon feedback to climate change. Nature 452, 987–990 (2008)
Shearer, A. W. Whether the weather: comments on ‘An abrupt climate change scenario and its implications for United States national security’. Futures 37, 445–463 (2005)
Biggs, R., Carpenter, S. R. & Brock, W. A. Turning back from the brink: detecting an impending regime shift in time to avert it. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 106, 826–831 (2009)
Bascompte, J. & Solé, R. V. Habitat fragmentation and extinction thresholds in spatially explicit models. J. Anim. Ecol. 65, 465–473 (1996)
Swift, T. L. & Hannon, S. J. Critical thresholds associated with habitat loss: a review of the concepts, evidence, and applications. Biol. Rev. Camb. Philos. Soc. 85, 35–53 (2010)This paper synthesizes studies that quantify thresholds of habitat disturbance above which regime shifts can propagate to undisturbed patches.
Noss, R. F. et al. Bolder thinking for conservation. Conserv. Biol. 26, 1–4 (2012)
Pardini, R., Bueno, A. A., Gardner, T. A., Prado, P. I. & Metzger, J. P. Beyond the fragmentation threshold hypothesis: regime shifts in biodiversity across fragmented landscapes. PLoS ONE 5, e13666 (2010)
Bradonjić, M. & Hagberg, A. &. Percus, A. G. in Algorithms and Models for the Web-Graph (WAW 2007) (eds Bonato, A. & Chung, F. ) 209–216 (Springer, 2007)
McMenamin, S. K., Hadly, E. A. & Wright, C. K. Climatic change and wetland desiccation cause amphibian decline in Yellowstone National Park. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 105, 16988–16993 (2008)
Holtgrieve, G. W. et al. A coherent signature of anthropogenic nitrogen deposition to remote watersheds of the northern hemisphere. Science 334, 1545–1548 (2011)This paper documents how human impacts are reaching into remote ecosystems.
Peñuelas, J., Sardans, J., Rivas-Ubach, A. & Janssens, I. A. The human-induced imbalance between C, N and P in Earth’s life system. Glob. Change Biol. 18, 3–6 (2012)
Johnson, K. G. et al. Climate change and biosphere response: unlocking the collections vault. Bioscience 61, 147–153 (2011)
Ramakrishnan, U., Hadly, E. A. & Mountain, J. L. Detecting past population bottlenecks using temporal genetic data. Mol. Ecol. 14, 2915–2922 (2005)
Forrest, J. & Miller-Rushing, A. J. Toward a synthetic understanding of the role of phenology in ecology and evolution. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 365, 3101–3112 (2010)
Hanski, I. & Ovaskainen, O. Extinction debt at extinction threshold. Conserv. Biol. 16, 666–673 (2002)
Zalasiewicz, J., Williams, M., Haywood, A. & Ellis, M. The Anthropocene: a new epoch of geological time? Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A 369, 835–841 (2011)
Pacala, S. & Socolow, R. Stabilization wedges: solving the climate problem for the next 50 years with current technologies. Science 305, 968–972 (2004)
Hadly, E. A. & Barnosky, A. D. in Conservation Paleobiology: Using the Past to Manage for the Future (eds Dietl, G. P. & Flessa, K. W. ) 39–59 (Paleontological Society, 2009)This paper summarized metrics that can be tracked through millennia and into the future to assess when ecosystems are perturbed from the Holocene baseline, and discusses conservation strategies that will be needed in the future.
Dunne, J. A., Williams, R. J., Martinez, N. D., Wood, R. A. & Erwin, D. H. Compilation and network analysis of Cambrian food webs. PLoS Biol. 6, e102 (2008)
Roopnarine, P. D. in Quantitative Methods in Paleobiology (eds Alroy, J. & Hunt, G. ) 143–161 (Paleontological Society, 2010)
Polly, P. D. et al. History matters: ecometrics and integrative climate change biology. Proc. R. Soc. B 278, 1131–1140 (2011)
Brown, J. H. Macroecology (Univ. Chicago Press, 1995)
Harte, J. Maximum Entropy and Ecology: A Theory of Abundance, Distribution, and Energetics (Oxford Univ. Press, 2011)This book presents comprehensive evidence that prevailing patterns in the spatial distribution, abundance and energetics of species in relatively undisturbed ecosystems are predicted by the maximum-information-entropy inference procedure, and that systematic departures from theory arise in highly disturbed ecosystems.
Harte, J., Smith, A. B. & Storch, D. Biodiversity scales from plots to biomes with a universal species-area curve. Ecol. Lett. 12, 789–797 (2009)
White, E., Ernest, S., Kerkhoff, A. & Enquist, B. Relationships between body size and abundance in ecology. Trends Ecol. Evol. 22, 323–330 (2007)
Williams, R. J. Simple MaxEnt models explain foodweb degree distributions. Theor. Ecol. 3, 45–52 (2010)
Anderson, C. N. K., Ramakrishnan, U., Chan, Y. L. & Hadly, E. A. Serial SimCoal: a population genetics model for data from multiple populations and points in time. Bioinformatics 21, 1733–1734 (2005)
Brose, U., Williams, W. J. & Martinez, N. D. Allometric scaling enhances stability in complex food webs. Ecol. Lett. 9, 1228–1236 (2006)
Otto, S. B., Rall, B. C. & Brose, U. Allometric degree distributions facilitate food-web stability. Nature 450, 1226–1229 (2007)
Jordano, P., Bascompte, J. & Olesen, J. M. Invariant properties in coevolutionary networks of plant-animal interactions. Ecol. Lett. 6, 69–81 (2003)
Solé, R. V. & Montoya, J. M. Complexity and fragility in ecological networks. Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B 268, 2039–2045 (2001)
Kokkoris, G. D., Troumbis, A. Y. & Lawton, J. H. Patterns of species interaction strength in assembled theoretical competition communities. Ecol. Lett. 2, 70–74 (1999)
McCann, K. & Hastings, A. &. Huxel, G. R. Weak trophic interactions and the balance of nature. Nature 395, 794–798 (1998)
Neutel, A.-M., Heesterbeek, J. A. P. & de Ruiter, P. C. Stability in real food webs: weak links in long loops. Science 296, 1120–1123 (2002)
Sahasrabudhe, S. & Motter, A. E. Rescuing ecosystems from extinction cascades through compensatory perturbations. Nature Commun. 2, 170 (2011)
Kéfi, S. et al. More than a meal: integrating non-feeding interactions into food webs. Ecol. Lett. 15, 291–300 (2012)
Rezende, E. L., Lavabre, J. E., Guimarães, P. R., Jr, Jordano, P. & Bascompte, J. Non-random coextinctions in phylogenetically structured mutualistic networks. Nature 448, 925–928 (2007)
Berlow, E. L. et al. Simple prediction of interaction strengths in complex food webs. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 106, 187–191 (2009)This computational exploration of complex network structure and dynamics successfully predicts the quantitative effect of a species loss on other species within its community and therefore demonstrates the potential of ecological network theory to predict state changes following species loss.
Acknowledgements
This research grew out of a workshop funded by The University of California at Berkeley Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research under the auspices of the Berkeley Initiative for Global Change Biology. We thank J. Jackson for discussions and Paul Ehrlich for comments.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
All authors participated in the workshop and discussions that resulted in this paper, and provided key insights from their respective research specialties. A.D.B. and E.A.H. were the lead writers and synthesizers. J.B., E.L.B., J.H.B., M.F., W.M.G., J.H., A.H., A.M., P.A.M, N.D.M., P.R., G.V. and J.W.W. compiled data and/or figures and wrote parts of the text. R.G., J.K., C.M., N.M., D.P.M., E.R. and A.B.S. contributed to finalizing the text.
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing financial interests.
PowerPoint slides
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Barnosky, A., Hadly, E., Bascompte, J. et al. Approaching a state shift in Earth’s biosphere. Nature 486, 52–58 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature11018
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature11018
This article is cited by
-
Legally binding and ambitious biodiversity protection under the CBD, the global biodiversity framework, and human rights law
Environmental Sciences Europe (2023)
-
Diagnosing destabilization risk in global land carbon sinks
Nature (2023)
-
Climate change and ecosystem shifts in the southwestern United States
Scientific Reports (2023)
Comments
By submitting a comment you agree to abide by our Terms and Community Guidelines. If you find something abusive or that does not comply with our terms or guidelines please flag it as inappropriate.