Tipping Points in Australia's Future

Anticipating and preparing for rapid and surprising change on the way to a sustainable Australia

Introduction

A series of potentially rapid and surprising changes is looming in the next two decades of Australia’s future and beyond that could fundamentally change our natural environment, our society and our economy in either good or disastrous ways, depending on the preparations we make now.

Change is often not gradual. It often moves along slowly, building to a point at which things speed up and happen much more quickly. This is often called threshold or tipping point change. Once they have happened, tipping points can be very difficult, if not impossible, to reverse.

More often than not tipping points come as surprises to most people. These surprises can be welcome or unwelcome, convenient or inconvenient, triumphant or disastrous. While some tipping points in Australia’s future are inevitable, we can do better at anticipating and preparing for them, to take advantage of the upsides and avoid or minimise the downsides.

This project is partly about improving Australia’s ability to anticipate social, economic and environmental tipping points. It is partly about improving our ability to map where we are in relation to the precipitous or threshold part of change cycles. But it is also about identifying what makes a country like Australia able to cope with change, including surprising and unpredictable change, and what we can do to be better at it.

Click here to download the Executive Summary of our Roundtable on Resilience (51 KB)