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The potential of extreme environmental change driven by a destabilizedclimate system is an alarming prospect for humanity. But the intricate, subtleways Earth's climate couples to social and economic systems raise the questionof when more incremental climate change signals the need for alarm. Questionsabout incremental sensitivity are particularly crucial for human systems thatare organized by optimization. Optimization is most valuable in resolvingcomplex interactions among multiple factors, however, those interactions canobscure coupling to underlying drivers such as environmental degradation. Here,using Multi-Objective Land Allocation as an example, we show that modelfeatures that are common across non-convex optimization problems drivehypersensitivities in climate-induced degradation--loss response. We show thatcatastrophic losses in human systems can occur well before catastrophic climatecollapse. We find punctuated insensitive/hypersensitive degradation--lossresponse, which we trace to the contrasting effects of environmentaldegradation on subleading, local versus global optima (SLO/GO). We argue thatthe SLO/GO response we identify in land-allocation problems traces to featuresthat are common across non-convex optimization problems more broadly. Given thebroad range of human systems that rely on non-convex optimization, our resultstherefore suggest that substantial social and economic risks could be lurkingin a broad range in human systems that are coupled to the environment, even inthe absence of catastrophic changes to the environment itself.

SLO/GO Degradation-Loss Sensitivity in Climate-Human System Coupling