  In the past decades human activities caused global Earth system changes,
e.g., climate change or biodiversity loss. Simultaneously, these associated
impacts have increased environmental awareness within societies across the
globe, thereby leading to dynamical feedbacks between the social and natural
Earth system. Contemporary modelling attempts of Earth system dynamics rarely
incorporate such co-evolutions and interactions are mostly studied
unidirectionally through direct or remembered past impacts. Acknowledging that
societies have the additional capability for foresight, this work proposes a
conceptual feedback model of socio-ecological co-evolution with the specific
construct of anticipation acting as a mediator between the social and natural
system. Our model reproduces results from previous sociological threshold
models with bi-stability if one assumes a static environment. Once the
environment changes in response to societal behaviour the system instead
converges towards a globally stable, but not necessarily desired, attractor.
Ultimately, we show that anticipation of future ecological states then leads to
metastability of the system where desired states can persist for a long time.
We thereby demonstrate that foresight and anticipation form an important
mechanism which, once its time horizon becomes large enough, fosters social
tipping towards behaviour that can stabilise the environment and prevents
potential socio-ecological collapse.
