News

Tipping Points

(16 January 2009)

IHRR is leading for the University on an outline bid to Leverhulme for Tipping Points with involvement from a number of other departments. Two case examples have been identified which are the Greenland Ice Sheet and Financial Crisis. It is exciting because tipping points undermine much of the fundamental basis of risk management.

The term "tipping point" refers to a critical threshold at which a small change can qualitatively alter the state of a system. For example, there are "tipping points" in global warming. The best known is the Greenland Ice Sheet, which could begin a slow, irreversible meltdown if global temperature passes a certain threshold.