page_title: Energy landscape
hierarchical_section_title: Energy landscape
caption_attribution_description: English: The concept of decarbonization transformation as social tipping dynamics. As illustrated in A by an abstract stability landscape (155), the world’s socioeconomic system today is trapped in a valley where it still depends heavily on burning fossil fuels, leading to high rates of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. STIs have the potential to erode the barrier through triggering social tipping dynamics in different sectors (Fig. 3) and thus paving the way for rapid transformative change. Uncertainties and complexities inherent in the many dimensions of human societies beyond their level of decarbonization (46) can be envisioned as forming a rougher stability landscape featuring multiple attracting states and a larger number of barriers that need to be eroded or overcome (B). This inherent “social noise” may complicate transformative change but could also accelerate it by means of dynamical phenomena such as stochastic resonance (156).
context_page_description: An energy landscape is a mapping of possible states of a system. The concept is frequently used in physics, chemistry, and biochemistry, e.g. to describe all possible conformations of a molecular entity, or the spatial positions of interacting molecules in a system, or parameters and their corresponding energy levels, typically Gibbs free energy. Geometrically, the energy landscape is the graph of the energy function across the configuration space of the system. The term is also used more generally in geometric perspectives to mathematical optimization, when the domain of the loss function is the parameter space of some system.
context_section_description: An energy landscape is a mapping of possible states of a system. The concept is frequently used in physics, chemistry, and biochemistry, e.g. to describe all possible conformations of a molecular entity, or the spatial positions of interacting molecules in a system, or parameters and their corresponding energy levels, typically Gibbs free energy. Geometrically, the energy landscape is the graph of the energy function across the configuration space of the system. The term is also used more generally in geometric perspectives to mathematical optimization, when the domain of the loss function is the parameter space of some system.
caption: Simplified energy landscape of the world's socioeconomic system and social tipping dynamics at different levels of detail, highlighting factors that influence transitions
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