Research on tipping points in climate and coastal systems has mainly focused on biophysical thresholds within the Earth system. This paper starts from a complementary premise: in ocean–climate governance, social-crisis tipping points can precede natural climate tipping points. States, markets and institutions often act on observed trends, changing rates and expectations of future loss before the climate system crosses an irreversible physical threshold. Because identifying governance problems and establishing effective international legal or market mechanisms can take more than a decade, early warning for ocean–climate systems should also include pre-emptive institutional arrangements that reduce social-crisis risks in advance.

Within this framework, blue carbon provides an effective response pathway. By linking climate mitigation, marine conservation, coastal development and carbon-market governance, blue carbon can help transform coastal ecosystem protection into operational climate action and resource coordination. This paper argues that credible blue carbon credit trading can serve as a practical governance instrument for responding to social-crisis tipping risks before they escalate into persistent institutional crises.

Using a doctrinal and policy-oriented institutional analysis, the paper proposes a blockchain-enabled legal-institutional architecture for blue carbon credit trading. The architecture is designed to support four governance functions: coordinating project information and rights claims; maintaining traceable credit status across registration, issuance, transfer, retirement and offset use; enabling risk governance and collaborative oversight; and preserving benefit-sharing records and dispute-related evidence. Blockchain is treated not as a standalone technical solution, but as digital institutional infrastructure embedded within legal and regulatory arrangements. Through distributed records, immutability, smart contracts, traceability, transparency and timestamped evidence, it can strengthen information reliability, procedural accountability and coordination throughout the blue carbon credit lifecycle.

China is examined as a plausible early implementation setting because of its developing blue carbon practices, carbon-market institutions, blockchain capacity and digital governance conditions. By connecting social-crisis tipping points with blue carbon institutional design, this paper contributes to interdisciplinary discussions on tipping, resilience, early warning and management in changing climate and coastal systems.