Policy brief: Why tipping points are important when managing marine systems?

Practitioners are faced with managing marine ecosystems and their changes due to human activities and their resulting pressures. Those systems may have an ability to assimilate and resist change and/or a resilience to rebound from the effects of the stressors. As such, environmental managers need to know when that assimilative capacity of the system has been exceeded, i.e. the tipping point, when the system moves to an alternative state, from which returning to the original state is unlikely. Hence, environmental managers need to understand such trajectories of change and when and how such tipping points occur and their consequences.