Understanding Interacting Transitions across Disciplines

Change rarely stays where it starts. When one part of the Earth system is pushed past a critical threshold, or tipping point, the disturbance can reverberate through the system, sometimes accelerating change like falling dominoes, sometimes holding it back instead. Because similar problems arise far beyond climate science, an interdisciplinary group of researchers gathered at Utrecht University from 3 to 5 June 2026 for the Interacting Transitions workshop, an initiative by researchers from the Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research Utrecht (IMAU), bringing together perspectives from across the natural and social sciences.

When tipping elements interact

For climate scientists, the familiar starting point is the study of tipping elements. The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation and the polar ice sheets, for example, may each shift abruptly, while also altering the conditions that govern one another’s stability. Understanding whether these interactions amplify or dampen change is therefore central to assessing the risks facing the Earth system as a whole.

Looking beyond climate science

The workshop’s main ambition was to look beyond climate science and ask how other fields study transitions in interacting systems. Ecologists examine how changes can propagate through food webs, economists study cascading shifts across technologies, markets, and institutions, psychologists investigate how behaviours and social norms influence one another, and physicists draw on a century of research into phase transitions. Bringing this expertise into one room, revealed how much these fields have to learn from one another and where the analogies begin to break down.

The challenge of scale and complexity

One shared challenge is how to understand interactions across scales. How should we describe an interactions between systems that operate over timescales ranging from days to millennia and spatial scales ranging from regional to global? A fundamental difference between domains, however, is where the complexity lies. In some fields, it arises mainly from a large network of many relatively similar components; in climate tipping research, however, it often lies within a small number of highly complex and physically distinct subsystems. This is one of several reasons why concepts and methods do not always transfer straightforwardly across disciplines. 

Exchanging methods and perspectives

Even so, the exchange paid off quickly. While no single method emerged as universally best, the discussions clarified which tools suit which questions. Network-based approaches, for example, offered a promising common language for describing connections and tracing how changes spread, while causal-inference methods provided ways to distinguish genuine interactions from mere correlation and to estimate their effects. More broadly, the exchange offered a wider view of how interactions can shape a system. Whereas climate tipping research often frames them in terms of cascading risk, other perspectives emphasise how interactions can strengthen resilience, enable adaptation, or give rise to entirely new collective states.

Towards a shared research agenda

The workshop closed by looking ahead: developing a shared vocabulary for interacting transitions, establishing benchmark case studies against which different methods can be tested, and building stronger connections between climate science and the broader study of complex systems. Much remains to be understood, but the central lesson was clear: no single discipline has all the answers. Progress will depend on bringing together these different perspectives and on turning that diversity into a stronger shared understanding of interacting transitions.

Sacha Sinet 

The workshop was organized by Sacha Sinet, Sjoerd Terpstra, Andrea di Benedetto, Nico Wunderling, and Anna von der Heydt. It was funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) through the NWO Vici project “Interacting climate tipping elements: When does tipping cause tipping?” (project no. vi.C.202.081).