Spatially explicit global population scenarios consistent with the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways

By Bryan Jones, Brian C. O'Neill. 2016

715 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The projected size and spatial distribution of the future population are important drivers of global change and key determinants of exposure and vulnerability to hazards. Spatial demographic projections are widely used as inputs to spatial projections of land use, energy use, and emissions, as well as to assessments of the impacts of extreme events, sea level rise, and other climate-related outcomes. To date, however, there are very few global-scale, spatially explicit population projections, and those that do exist are often based on simple scaling or trend extrapolation. Here we present a new set of global, spatially explicit population scenarios that are consistent with the new Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) developed to facilitate global change research. We use a parameterized gravity-based downscaling model to produce projections of spatial population change that are quantitatively consistent with national population and urbanization projections for the SSPs and qualitatively consistent with assumptions in the SSP narratives regarding spatial development patterns. We show that the five SSPs lead to substantially different spatial population outcomes at the continental, national, and sub-national scale. In general, grid cell-level outcomes are most influenced by national-level population change, second by urbanization rate, and third by assumptions about the spatial style of development. However, the relative importance of these factors is a function of the magnitude of the projected change in total population and urbanization for each country and across SSPs. We also demonstrate variation in outcomes considering the example of population existing in a low-elevation coastal zone under alternative scenarios.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Management Science and Operations Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/417f5fac3eda49f992258eacedb0764c0c2a3069

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In Global and Planetary Change

In Management Science and Operations Research

Citations in the corpus

Global exposure and vulnerability to multi-sector development and climate change hotspots (2018, methodology): “Additional methodological information In this study, gridded projections of population and GDP for SSP 1-3 spanning 2010 to 2050 [48] at 0.”
Escalating global exposure to compound heat-humidity extremes with warming (2020, methodology): “To evaluate the effect of future changes in world population distribution on the impacts of extreme WBGT*, we also include results obtained using 2010-2100 population projections based on different Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) provided by SEDAC [35].”
A protocol for an intercomparison of biodiversity and ecosystem services models using harmonized land-use and climate scenarios (2018, background): “Coastal Vulnerability CMIP5 AOGCMs - sea level rise Nutrient delivery Digital elevation model (ASTER) Biophysical table (InVEST database) Rural population scenarios (Jones and O’Neill, 2016) Population raster (GPWv4, 2018)”
Quantifying the human cost of global warming (2022, methodology): “We obtained SSP population projection data at 1 km resolution from the spatial population scenarios dataset 76,77 .”
Estimation of Gridded Population and GDP Scenarios with Spatially Explicit Statistical Downscaling (2016, methodology): “Although [10] already published gridded SSP population scenarios, they apply a simple approach ignoring auxiliary variables.”