Four days, 12 plenaries, 20 action workshops, 521 participants from 37 countries and one aim: push the earth and human systems towards positive tipping points.
The Global Tipping Points Conference (GTP) 2026, co-chaired by Sunway Centre for Planetary Health at Sunway University, the Global Systems Institute at the University of Exeter and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, was held in Asia for the first time.
The conference at Sunway University journeyed from science and the emergence of positive tipping points on day one to the human dimensions of change on day two, examining why values, culture and faith shape societies.
It then turned to the roles of finance, law and governance making change endure amid growing uncertainty on day three, before culminating in
practical solutions for cities and bioregions on day four.
The Global Tipping Points initiative, led by Global Systems Institute founding director Prof Tim Lenton, is a global research and policy programme that identifies critical thresholds in Earth systems and translates science into actionable solutions to accelerate climate action, clean energy adoption and ecosystem restoration.
Lenton said this third edition of GTP moved deliberately beyond establishing the science and evidence base to act on the science.
“The science of tipping points began necessarily perhaps in the laboratories and the institutions like my own that study global systems from wherever that expertise first takes root.
“But science of this kind matures in stages, and it’s at the stage now where we need to move from evidence to action, which means action that has to be shaped by and for the regions carrying the greatest exposure to the risks, and with the greatest capacity to lead in the great transformation ahead,” he said.
As fellow co-chair and Sunway Centre for Planetary Health executive director Tan Sri Dr Jemilah Mahmood put it: “If tipping points teaches us anything, it is that the time for patience was some years ago. The time for urgency is now.”
And there is something particularly fitting about a university hosting a conversation on tipping points, noted Sunway Education Group chief executive officer Datuk Elizabeth Lee.
“At its best, a university is itself a positive tipping point, a place where ideas are nurtured, shared and transformed into collective action that reaches far beyond campus walls.”
Responsible stewards
In his opening remarks, Perak Ruler Sultan Nazrin Shah called on human beings to be responsible stewards of the systems that sustain us.
He illustrated this commitment through his own experience of protecting the Belum rainforest, a 130 million-years-old forest that is also home to the Malayan tigers.
In 2003, the sultan’s late father, Sultan Azlan Shah, proclaimed it as a royal state park, and it was awarded full state protection status by 2007.
“A decade ago, poacher snares were still being found across the forest by the hundreds. Today, following sustained and unglamorous effort, active snares have fallen by more than 90%, and none have been recorded since 2022.
“Camera traps have caught images of a tigress with four cubs, and more recently, another with two,” Sultan Nazrin said.
He recalled bringing along his children to mark the Global Tiger Day this year to make them understand that what their grandfather chose to protect is now their responsibility.
“This is what stewardship looks like once the speeches end – generational, incremental and measured not in declarations, but in cubs born and snares removed.”
Sultan Nazrin shared that in Islam, the idea of khilafah, of stewardship over what has been entrusted to us, carries both a privilege and an obligation.
“We do not own the earth’s systems. We are their custodians, answerable to current and future generations for how we leave them.”
16 tipping points
Stewardship begins with understanding what is at stake.
Tipping points, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, are critical thresholds in a system that, when exceeded, can lead to a significant change in the state of the system, often with an understanding that the change is irreversible.
“Push (the large biophysical systems) too far, they cross thresholds and irreversibly move from one stable state – for example, a stable healthy rainforest or a stable ice sheet or a functioning coral reef system – into an irreversible pathway where feedbacks shift,” said Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research director Johan Rockstrom.
The shift from dampening warming to self-reinforcing warming pushes the systems away from a state that supports not only the health of the planet, but also the health, prosperity, equity and livelihoods for humans, he said.
Rockstrom cautioned that the exceedance of 1.5°C is now widely assessed as unavoidable in the United Nations Environment Programme’s Limiting Overshoot Spotlight Report.
Researchers have found evidence that six of the 16 tipping points are at risk of crossing the thresholds if the world permanently exceeds and stays beyond 1.5°C in global mean surface temperature rise.
These include the Greenland ice sheet, the West Antarctic ice sheet, permafrost and coral reef systems.
“These are major systems that not only would, if we cross tipping points, accelerate the pathways in a dangerous direction, but also undermine the resilience of the planet as a whole.
“This is why we need not only tipping point science, but also the planetary boundary framework, which quantifies a safe operating space to keep the planet as close as possible to livable, life-supporting conditions that we’ve experienced over the past 12,000 years, the Holocene, since we left the last ice age.”
The challenge, Rockstrom stressed, is to go from linear incremental change to now find transformative, many times exponential pathways towards a safe landing that can secure prosperity, equity and resilience for humanity and the world on planet Earth.
Positive tipping points
Fortunately, tipping points with good outcomes are possible. Positive tipping points occur when reinforcing feedback in a system overwhelm balancing feedback, triggering self-propelling change towards a more sustainable state.
Citing the electrification of an economy powered by renewable energy, Lenton explained how reinforcing feedback can occur as more activities and sectors electrify, setting off a positive tipping cascade in which change in one sector or market can spread to others.
“For every doubling of installed capacity of solar power in the world over the last 50 years, the price has come down by roughly a quarter.”
He offered an example of a positive tipping in solar power in Pakistan, where grid electricity prices were skyrocketing and fossil fuel grid electricity supply was not stable.
At the same time, cheap solar panels became readily available, allowing people to generate electricity in areas beyond the reach of grid connection.
“People rushed to adopt them, including farmers who used them for electric irrigation pumps for agriculture,” he said.
The benefits extend beyond access to electricity. Electrification can also improve women’s safety, support education for kids and enhance health.
As renewable electricity gets cheaper, electrifying other things become more attractive, be it personal mobility or home heating and cooling.
Affordable batteries are also vital to reinforcing this transition, as it allows energy storage for when the sun is not shining or the wind is not blowing, Lenton said.
Policies can bring forward the tipping point for major sectors, he noted, as they can accelerate the transition as an effective way of activating amplifiers.
Social tipping points
Just as the planet has physical boundaries, societies also have safe operating spaces. When these social boundaries are breached, the consequences can trigger tipping points in economic, political and social systems, ranging from financial panic and inter-ethnic violence to revolution and war.
Columbia University’s Center for Sustainable Development director Jeffrey Sachs, who joined a fireside chat virtually, said the physical earth systems and the human systems obviously interact.
“In order for us to stave off the tipping points in the physical earth, we need a great deal of political and social cooperation because most of the changes needed in society in order to avoid planetary disasters are some kind of public good that require cooperation within societies and across societies.
“However, that kind of cooperation is undermined when we are outside of the safe operating
systems of our economic and political systems. So if inequality rises too much, then there’s no cooperation in our political systems, and without cooperation, we can’t control the environmental conditions,” he said.
The feedback works in both directions, Sachs said.
Social, political and economic breakdown can lead to further environmental catastrophes, while environmental catastrophes tend to exacerbate inequalities, poverty and debt that give rise to the social and political breakdowns.
Sachs pointed out that there are more wars now than there had been since 1945, and inequalities are rising, exacerbated by technological changes.
Restoring social stability requires tools, including income redistribution, compensation, measures to narrow gaps in society, efforts to address social grievances, and safeguards against financial crises.
Sachs pointed to sustainable development as a guidebook and the 17 sustainable development goals as the design framework. The key is to link policy instruments with targets.
“We should know where we would like the planet to be in the year 2050, and then we should understand how to use budgets, regulatory apparatus, international treaties, multilateral financial institutions and planning agencies to deliver the policies that get us from where we are today to where we want to be in 2050.”
Nature has the answer
Humans do not need to look far for solutions. Nature, representing an intelligence that is 3.8 billion years in the making, holds a wealth of blueprints, processes and strategies. In a plenary on “The Power of Nature”, Biomimicry Institute co-founder Janine Benyus cited Sharklet Technologies as an example of drawing inspiration from nature.
“The skin of the Galapagos shark happens to repel bacteria physically through pattern. So, Sharklet mimics that blueprint and puts it on thin film, which repels bacteria because they don’t like to land on its surface without causing antibiotic resistance,” she said.
In return, one way to thank nature is to protect the habitats and the people who steward them, Benyus added.
Ralph Chami, co-founder and chief executive officer of Blue Green Future and Rebalance Earth, made the economic case for protecting and restoring living nature, adding that doing so can strengthen food security, create resilience in nature and generate income from the sale of carbon credits.
“The new source of revenue is not from extraction and destruction of nature, but the opposite – from the protection and restoration of the living system.”
The Maldives illustrates this economic value. According to the World Bank, coral reefs contribute US$2bil to the country’s US$7bil economy through fisheries and coastal protection, Chami said.
Yet much of the value generated by nature is attributed to hotels, resorts and tourism operators, while the ecosystem remains invisible in financial accounts in the country with a debt-to-GDP ratio of 180%, he added.
Further developing resorts at the expense of coral reefs risks degrading the very asset on which its economy depends.
“What’s really the problem here is a problem of attribution. Nature services and living nature are already in the economy, but it’s invisible. It’s being attributed to everybody else except to nature.”
Through properly accounting nature’s contributions in the balance sheet, economics will be encouraged to build thriving ecosystems, Chami stressed.
Such a shift could also pave the way for what he called “regenerative GDP” – a measure that recognises the value generated by living nature, both on land and in the ocean.
Legal actions
In July 2025, the International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion affirming states’ legal duties to protect the climate system from greenhouse gas emissions, strengthening the role of law in holding governments accountable.
Tax Justice Network chair Lyla Latif cited a 2019 case in Lamu, Kenya, where local communities successfully challenged a proposed coal-fired power plant in the Unesco World Heritage Site, which they argued lacked adequate public participation.
The project was eventually halted. “So that’s the law being used as a positive tipping point,” she said during a plenary on “Law and Legal Action to Catalyse Positive Tipping Points in Human Systems”.
Kiu Jia Yaw, a sustainable development lawyer at Kiu & Co, called for a shift in the fiduciary duty discussion in boards.
“Raising the standard of care and fiduciary duty specifically within decision-making in boardrooms, that’s one. Two is the strengthening of the recognition of environmental rights in the context of human rights.”
Rather than treating human rights and environmental concerns as separate issues, he said companies must recognise fundamental human rights to a safe, clean, healthy and sustainable environment.
Romchat Wachirarattanakornkul, who is the human rights officer at the United Nations Human Rights Office (OHCHR) Regional Hub for Asia, noted that people remain unaware of their existing human rights and the avenues to exercise them.
Beyond engaging policymakers and parliamentarians to embed human rights in legislations, she said, lawyers have a responsibility to make the law accessible and reduce barriers that prevent communities from exercising their rights.
KL Tipping Points Declaration
The four days of dialogues, discussions and debates coalesced into a collective commitment.
The Kuala Lumpur Tipping Points Declaration, which highlighted the priorities to trigger positive tipping points and committed to the production of an Asia Tipping Points report in 2028, was adopted.
It called on scientists, business leaders, communicators, investors, faith leaders, health professionals, financial regulators, lawyers, governments, regional bodies and cities to act within their own sphere.
Government commitments include removing fossil fuel subsidies, pricing carbon, building fiscal room before shocks and phasing out fossil fuels. There is also a specific commitment to artificial intelligence that strengthens human agency and operates within planetary limits.
“The same forces that can tip the world towards harm can tip it towards renewal, and we now know where to push. The future is still ours to shape, and from here we shape it together,” it said.
GTP 2027, hosted by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, will head to Germany.
