Improving the relevance of the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways for sustainability science

Abstract

Sustainability science is a discipline which is strongly concerned with exploring the achievement of sustainable futures. One way in which this is done is through scenarios. The Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs), developed for climate science, have been widely adopted by modellers to analyse sustainable futures. We question whether the SSPs are fit-for-purpose for examining sustainable transformative futures. We have identified six challenges and propose aligned opportunities synthesised from existing research. These challenges are: the need for a sustainability context in the scenario space; better representation of sustainability challenges in the driving forces which form the scenarios; narrowed scope of storylines due to coupling the scenarios to modelling; constraint of economic futures to growth-only options; the scenarios are not goal-seeking, nor do they consider deep uncertainty; and the scenarios are insufficiently diverse. The inclusion of different driving forces, degrowth scenarios, and a different scenario space, are some of the proposed improvements suggested. Addressing these challenges and rethinking the use of climate-SSPs should be a priority for the sustainability science community, considering how critical scenario-based research is for policy and practice.

Emerging consensus on net energy paves the way for improved integrated assessment modeling

“…As countries seek to develop new nationally determined contributions (NDCs) and the IPCC currently considers reforming itself to produce more relevant knowledge for climate action (Asayama et al, 2023;Hermansen et al, 2023;Noy, 2023), current momentum is towards the development of a new generation of IAMs and scenarios (Pedersen et al, 2020;Gambhir et al, 2022;Pedersen et al, 2022a;Ranjan et al, 2023;Savin and van den Bergh, 2022;Meinshausen et al, 2023;Peters et al, 2023;Szetey et al, 2023). In this regard, we believe that fostering collaborative efforts among our different research communities is timely, and could help improve integrated assessment modeling, with these dynamics being all the more supported by the convergence of views on demand-side measures and alternative economic pathways.…”