Publications

Wunderling, N., Staal, A., Sakschewski, B., Hirota, M., Tuinenburg, O., Donges, J., Barbosa, H., Winkelmann, R. 2022. Recurrent droughts increase risk of cascading tipping events by outpacing adaptive capacities in the Amazon rainforest. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2120777119

Tipping elements are nonlinear subsystems of the Earth system that have the potential to abruptly shift to another state if environmental change occurs close to a critical threshold with large consequences for human societies and ecosystems. Among these tipping elements may be the Amazon rainforest, which has been undergoing intensive anthropogenic activities and increasingly frequent droughts. Here, we assess how extreme dev...

Zeitz, M., Haacker, J., Donges, J., Albrecht, T., Winkelmann, R. 2022. Dynamic regimes of the Greenland Ice Sheet emerging from interacting melt–elevation and glacial isostatic adjustment feedbacks. Earth System Dynamics. http://dx.doi.org/10.5194/esd-13-1077-2022

The stability of the Greenland Ice Sheet under global warming is governed by a number of dynamic processes and interacting feedback mechanisms in the ice sheet, atmosphere and solid Earth. Here we study the long-term effects due to the interplay of the competing melt–elevation and glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA) feedbacks for different temperature step forcing experiments with a coupled ice-sheet and solid-Earth model. Our...

Kitzmann, N., Romanczuk, P., Wunderling, N., Donges, J. 2022. Detecting contagious spreading of urban innovations on the global city network. The European Physical Journal Special Topics. http://dx.doi.org/10.1140/epjs/s11734-022-00470-4

Only a fast and global transformation towards decarbonization and sustainability can keep the Earth in a civilization-friendly state. As hotspots for (green) innovation and experimentation, cities could play an important role in this transition. They are also known to profit from each other’s ideas, with policy and technology innovations spreading to other cities. In this way, cities can be conceptualized as nodes in a globe-s...

Tamberg, L., Heitzig, J., Donges, J. 2022. A modeler’s guide to studying the resilience of social-technical-environmental systems. Environmental Research Letters. http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ac60d9

The term ‘resilience’ is increasingly being used in Earth system science and other disciplines which study what could be called ‘social-technical-environmental systems’—systems composed of closely interacting social (e.g. economic and political), technical (e.g. energy production infrastructure), and environmental components (e.g. climate and the biosphere). However, the diversity of resilience theories and a certain (intended...

Wunderling, N., Krönke, J., Wohlfarth, V., Kohler, J., Heitzig, J., Staal, A., Willner, S., Winkelmann, R. & Donges, J.F. 2021. Modelling nonlinear dynamics of interacting tipping elements on complex networks: The PyCascades package. The European Physical Journal Special Topics 230(14–15), 3163–3176.

Tipping elements occur in various systems such as in socio-economics, ecology and the climate system. In many cases, the individual tipping elements are not independent from each other, but they interact across scales in time and space. To model systems of interacting tipping elements, we here introduce the PyCascades open source software package for studying interacting tipping elements (doi: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4...

Chu, O.J., Donges, J.F., Robertson, G.B. & Pop-Eleches, G. 2021. The microdynamics of spatial polarization: A model and an application to survey data from Ukraine. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 118(50) e2104194118.

Although spatial polarization of attitudes is extremely common around the world, we understand little about the mechanisms through which polarization on divisive issues rises and falls over time. We develop a theory that explains how political shocks can have different effects in different regions of a country depending upon local dynamics generated by the preexisting spatial distribution of attitudes and discussion networks. ...

Bak-Coleman, J.B., Alfano, M., Barfuss, W., Bergstrom, C.T., Centeno, M.A., Couzin, I.D., Donges, J.F., Galesic, M., Gersick, A.S., Jacquet, J., Kao, A.B., Moran, R.E., Romanczuk, P., Rubenstein, D., I., Tombak, K.J., Van Bavel, J.J. & Weber, E.U. 2021. Stewardship of global collective behavior. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 118(27), e2025764118.

Collective behavior provides a framework for understanding how the actions and properties of groups emerge from the way individuals generate and share information. In humans, information flows were initially shaped by natural selection yet are increasingly structured by emerging communication technologies. Our larger, more complex social networks now transfer high-fidelity information over vast distances at low cost. The digit...

Klose, A., Wunderling, N., Winkelmann, R., Donges, J.. 2021. What do we mean, ‘tipping cascade’? Environmental Research Letters. http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ac3955

Based on suggested interactions of potential tipping elements in the Earth’s climate and in ecological systems, tipping cascades as possible dynamics are increasingly discussed and studied. The activation of such tipping cascades would impose a considerable risk for human societies and biosphere integrity. However, there are ambiguities in the description of tipping cascades within the literature so far. Here we illustrate how...

Marwan, N., Donges, J., Donner, R., Eroglu, D.. 2021. Nonlinear time series analysis of palaeoclimate proxy records. Quaternary Science Reviews. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2021.107245

Identifying and characterising dynamical regime shifts, critical transitions or potential tipping points in palaeoclimate time series is relevant for improving the understanding of often highly nonlinear Earth system dynamics. Beyond linear changes in time series properties such as mean, variance, or trend, these nonlinear regime shifts can manifest as changes in signal predictability, regularity, complexity, or higher-order s...

Donges, J., Lucht, W., Cornell, S., Heitzig, J., Barfuss, W., Lade, S., Schlüter, M.. 2021. Taxonomies for structuring models for World–Earth systems analysis of the Anthropocene: subsystems, their interactions and social–ecological feedback loops. Earth System Dynamics. http://dx.doi.org/10.5194/esd-12-1115-2021

In the Anthropocene, the social dynamics of human societies have become critical to understanding planetary-scale Earth system dynamics. The conceptual foundations of Earth system modelling have externalised social processes in ways that now hinder progress in understanding Earth resilience and informing governance of global environmental change.New approaches to global modelling of the human World are needed to address these ...