Discussion Series: Tipping Towards Positive Social Change

Location: Virtual
Dates: 12 May 2022, 10:30 CEST
Register: https://tipping-series-positive-social-tipping.confetti.events/

Join AIMES, Earth Commission, Future Earth and WCRP for the Amazon focused webinar in a series that aims to advance the knowledge about tipping elements, irreversibility, and abrupt changes in the Earth system. The event includes two presentations on socioeconomic tipping for achieving positive change. We will look into social and financial systems. 

Jonathan Donges and Tim Lenton will moderate the event.

  •  Social tipping dynamics – Ilona Otta
  • What are the sensitive intervention points needed to make the green energy transition happen as quickly as possible? – Doyne Farmer
  • Q&A/ Discussion

Speaker Information

Prof. Doyne Farmer 
Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford
J. Doyne Farmer is Director of the Complexity Economics programme at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School, Baillie Gifford Professor in the Mathematical Institute at the University of Oxford, and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. His current research is in economics, including agent-based modeling, financial instability and technological progress. He was a founder of Prediction Company, a quantitative automated trading firm that was sold to the United Bank of Switzerland in 2006. His past research includes complex systems, dynamical systems theory, time series analysis and theoretical biology. During the 1980s he was an Oppenheimer Fellow and the founder of the Complex Systems Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory. While a graduate student in the 1970s he built the first wearable digital computer, which was successfully used to predict the game of roulette.
Prof. Ilona Otto 
Wegener Center for Climate and Global Change, University of Graz
Ilona M. Otto holds the Professorship in Societal Impacts of Climate Change at the Wegener Center for Climate and Global Change, University of Graz. She leads a research group focusing on Social Complexity and System Transformation. The group’s ambition is to use complex science theory and novel research methods to analyse social dynamic processes and interventions that are likely to spark rapid social changes necessary to radically transform the interactions of human societies with nature and ecosystem services in the next 30 years. The last ten years she spent at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. Prof. Otto is a social scientist by training. She uses various research methods including social surveys, case studies, behavioural experiments, and simulations in analysing problems related to global environment changes, development, adaptation and sustainability. Prof. Otto is a principal investigator in an EU Horizon 2020 Project CASCADES: Cascading climate risks: Towards adaptive and resilient European Societies. She also coordinates a newly founded Climate KIC Project REBOOST: A Boost for Rural Lignite Regions. She led a chapter on human health in the World Bank Report Turn Down the Heat: Confronting the New Climate Normal as well she led a Report on Modelling the Impact of Climate Change on Poverty at a Subnational Scale that was contracted by the World Bank. She is a dedicated university teacher as well as she occasionally she gives talks about climate change impacts and sustainability transformation to businesses and other stakeholder groups as well as to school children and young people.