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Socioeconomic Tipping Points in the Energy Transition
RAND
2025.09.26
The uncertain effects of decarbonizing the energy system, known as transition risk, could be substantial, depending on the state of policy, technology, and consumer preferences.
Climate stress tests of the financial system that measure transition risk are increasingly being mandated by state and national governments around the world.
The Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS) recently released short-term scenarios to improve climate stress tests beyond the commonly used long-term scenarios. Although the modeling approach improves on that of the long-term scenarios due to its ability to represent nonlinearity, heterogeneous agents, uncertainty, and bounded rationality, these newer scenarios do not represent fundamental socioeconomic changes (i.e., socioeconomic tipping points) that could result from the energy transition.
Socioeconomic tipping points, including the breakdown of democratic processes, increasingly future-oriented consumer behavior, or the transition to a circular rather than linear economic mode of production, might have substantial effects on the financial system and thus constitute major sources of either upside (i.e., economic benefits) or downside (i.e., economic damages) transition risk.
Existing models that represent tipping dynamics can be used to supplement the NGFS short- and long-term scenarios to quantify transition risk resulting from a socioeconomic tipping point. This could enable analysts to create more stressing scenarios that can test the resilience of the financial system.