Achievements and needs for the climate change scenario framework

Abstract

Long-term global scenarios have underpinned research and assessment of global environmental change for four decades. Over the past ten years, the climate change research community has developed a scenario framework combining alternative futures of climate and society to facilitate integrated research and consistent assessment to inform policy. Here we assess how well this framework is working and what challenges it faces. We synthesize insights from scenario-based literature, community discussions and recent experience in assessments, concluding that the framework has been widely adopted across research communities and is largely meeting immediate needs. However, some mixed successes and a changing policy and research landscape present key challenges, and we recommend several new directions for the development and use of this framework.

Considering Life Cycle Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Power System Expansion Planning for Europe and North Africa Using Multi-Objective Optimization

“…Our modeling approach should be used to include further indicators to aim for completeness from the perspective of sustainability, such as societal aspects and other economic and environmental impacts of the energy transition [48]. Options for performing such analyses could include either multi-objective optimization considering a variety of conflicting objectives or ex-post assessment.…”

Advancing a toolkit of diverse futures approaches for global environmental assessments

“…More recently, the Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) (Van Vuuren et al 2011) and Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSP) (O'Neill et al 2017) were developed to facilitate the integrated analysis of future climate impacts, vulnerabilities, adaptation, and mitigation for IPCC assessments, and have subsequently been used to address other environmental issues such as biodiversity loss (Kim et al 2018;Chaplin-Kramer et al 2019). While these scenarios have helped scientists and decision-makers to conceive plausible pathways at global levels, they need elaboration to continue to be useful (O'Neill et al 2020;Pielke and Ritchie 2021).…”

Shared socioeconomic pathways for climate change research in Finland: co-developing extended SSP narratives for agriculture

“…Unlike SRES, these scenarios were not developed by the IPCC but by the international research community at large. 1 The scenario framework, which was recently reviewed and evaluated by O'Neill et al (2020), is designed around projections of global forcing of the climate (representative concentration pathways-RCPs), which have been developed in parallel with projections of social and economic development (shared socioeconomic pathways-SSPs). In this paper, we focus on SSP development, but it is worth noting that when used in climate change impact and adaptation assessment, it is conventional to combine SSPs with RCP-based projections of future climate to construct integrated scenarios.…”

“…Through such extensions, a richer and more relevant characterisation of SSPs would be possible. This argument is borne out by the growing number of regional and local SSP extensions now emerging around the world (O'Neill et al 2020). 2 Some of the socioeconomic and environmental factors regarded as important for assessing adaptation needs in Finland have been classified into nine categories in Finland's Climate Change Adaptation Plan 2022 (MMM 2014), which match closely the nine elements described for the basic SSPs listed above.…”