Earth Resilience Science Unit (ERSU)
In the Anthropocene, with the exponential rise in human pressures such as greenhouse gas emissions and land-use change, there is an increasing risk of crossing critical thresholds and thereby degrading biophysical processes that regulate the state of the entire Earth system. Continuing along this trajectory could eventually lead to a shift in Earth system feedbacks, from self-dampening (negative feedbacks) to self-amplifying (positive feedbacks). There is therefore an urgent need to understand and quantify the state of the self-regulatory and regenerative capacities of our planetary life-support system, in short, Earth system resilience.
ERSU is a science network unit jointly hosted by the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology (MPI-GEA) and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), co-lead by directors Ricarda Winkelmann and Johan Rockström, with funding from diverse sources, fostering collaboration across institutes. ERSU functions as a bridge group and aims to develop a framework to characterise the resilience of the Earth system in the Anthropocene, exploring stability landscapes of critical geophysical, ecological and societal components, which are only fragmentarily known so far. This includes the identification of critical conditions and tipping points for these subsystems, their capacity to resist and recover from disruptions, as well as the risk of cascading interactions between them. Within MPI-GEA, this research links to various Core Research Topics (see the list below) and to the Carl-Zeiss Research Group on Coevolutionary Human-Earth System Modelling In particular, both local (e.g. PISM) and global (e.g. ISMIP) ice sheet modelling projects have improved our understanding of the stability of the ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland and their role for potential global sea level rise.
Internationally, ERSU at PIK and MPI-GEA, together with the Earth Commission, coordinates the Tipping Point Modelling Intercomparison Project (TIPMIP) (Science lead: Prof. Ricarda Winkelmann), a collaborative project involving a wide range of international institutions. Prior to her directorship at MPI-GEA, Prof. Winkelmann held a joint professorship at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and the University of Potsdam. During this time, she led the ‘Ice Dynamics’ research group and the ‘Earth Resilience in the Anthropocene Lab’ at PIK. To ensure continuity upon taking up her directorship, and to foster collaboration across institutional boundaries, she co-founded the Earth Resilience Science Unit (ERSU) together with Johan Rockström. This unique partnership integrates expertise from both research institutes and across disciplines to address scientific challenges ranging from tipping dynamics in the Earth system to co-evolutionary modelling.
