Accelerating the transition to regenerative agriculture: A participatory modeling framework for analyzing social tipping elements and their interactions in the food and land use system

Transforming the food and land use system is urgent, as current practices threaten both biosphere integrity and human health. Triggering social tipping processes has been proposed as a way to accelerate such large-scale systemic change. These processes occur in social tipping elements which are parts of a larger complex system such as the food and land use system, where initial critical interventions are amplified via reinforcing feedback loops. This paper introduces and pilots a participatory modeling framework to analyze the role of social tipping elements and their interactions in accelerating the transition to regenerative agriculture. The results show six highly interconnected social tipping elements, with policies supporting regenerative agriculture and farmer collaboration networks identified as the most influential interventions. Following on from this, future research should refine the framework and apply it to other contexts and systems and thereby advance approaches to understanding and analyzing social tipping processes in the context of the food and land use system, but also beyond it.