The Earth system is on the verge of irreversible transition: Chinese scientists propose a new framework for prediction of tipping points

At present, more than 75% of the world's terrestrial ecosystems are experiencing a critical state of nonlinear shift driven by climate change and human activities. This nonlinear shift is reshaping the Earth's life support system at an unexpected speed. The Global Tipping Points Report released by the United Nations Climate Change Conference assesses 26 climate tipping points. Once these points are crossed, irreversible state transitions will occur in the Earth system.

Traditional models of ecological early warning are like the blind men touching the elephant. They either rely on the fluctuation of the number of a single species or are limited to the monitoring of local environmental parameters. They can only predict gradual changes and are unable to capture the key characteristics during the steady-state transition of the ecosystem. Professor Yanfen Wang’s team from the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences has focused on key issues such as the mechanism of alternative stable of ecosystems and critical point early warning. By integrating graph theory and game theory, they have proposed a framework for the steady-state transition of complex ecosystems based on energy flow networks, breaking through the difficulty of systematically quantifying the steady-state transition of complex systems. This framework relies on the optimization model. By simulating the energy transfer of the food web and based on the minimum resistance of energy transfer, it quantifies the energy distribution efficiency of the ecosystem and predicts the steady-state transition threshold of the system when the energy input fluctuates. Meanwhile, the model shows that when the resistance of energy transfer is higher than the critical threshold, the system will trigger an irreversible state transition. Based on this theoretical model, the research team successfully quantified the steady-state transition process of temperate grasslands in Inner Mongolia, accurately identified the transition threshold, and laid a theoretical foundation for the scientific protection and sustainable utilization of ecosystems.