Uncertainty in Socioeconomic Pathways and Their Implications for Climate Forcing and Analysis—the Shared Socioeconomic Scenarios (SSPs)

The Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs; Moss, et al., 2010; van Vuuren, et al., 2011) were designed to span the range of anthropogenic climate forcing that existed in the literature. While these scenarios serve to reflect uncertainty in the domain of climate forcing, they are far less useful in exploring the range of potential future socioeconomic developments that might be experienced, and which might form the background from which climate forcing might emerge and against which climate impacts and adaptation might be experienced. A set of “Shared Socioeconomic Pathways” (SSPs) have been proposed, Ebi, et al., (2015), to address this deficiency. This architecture is being implemented in quantitative scenarios of human energy, economic, and land systems by researchers. This presentation provides an update on community quantitative implementation of the SSPs.

References:

Ebi, Kristie L., Stephane Hallegatte, Tom Kram, Nigel W. Arnell, Timothy R. Carter, Jae Edmonds, Elmar Kriegler, et al., A new scenario framework for climate change research: background, process, and future directions, Climatic Change (2014) 122:363-372. DOI 10.1007/s10584-013-0912-3

Moss, Richard H., Jae A. Edmonds, Kathy A. Hibbard, Martin R. Manning, Steven K. Rose, Detlef P. Van Vuuren, Timothy R. Carter et al. "The next generation of scenarios for climate change research and assessment." Nature 463, no. 7282 (2010): 747-756.

Van Vuuren, Detlef P., Jae Edmonds, Mikiko Kainuma, Keywan Riahi, Allison Thomson, Kathy Hibbard, George C. Hurtt et al. "The representative concentration pathways: an overview." Climatic Change 109 (2011): 5-31.