Socio-economic futures in climate change impact assessment: using scenarios as ‘learning machines’

By Frans Berkhout, J. Hertin, A. Jordan. 2002

461 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Climate impact assessment needs to take account of two interrelated processes: socio-economic change and climate change. To date, future change in socio-economic systems has not been sufficiently integrated with an analysis of climate change impacts. Participative and synthetic scenario approaches offer a means for dealing with critical issues of indeterminacy, innovation, reflexivity and framing in analysing change in socio-economic systems, paving the way for a coherent way of handling of socio-economic futures in impact assessment. We argue that scenarios represent heuristic tools that encourage social learning in climate impact assessment. The advantages and disadvantages of a scenario-based approach are explored using examples from regional climate impact assessment in the UK.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law, Management Science and Operations Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8ad56d996586291cbbc41567138d9ce467d8ff0d

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In Global and Planetary Change

In Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

In Management Science and Operations Research

Citations in the corpus

Climate and socio-economic scenarios for global-scale climate change impacts assessments: characterising the SRES storylines (2004, unknown): “N.W. Arnell et al. / Global Environmental Change 14 (2004) 3–204 future climate change (Berkhout and Hertin, 2000; Berkhout et al., 2002): see Parson et al. (2003) for a discussion of the difficulties involved in using socioeconomic scenarios in the US National Assessment.”
Towards extended shared socioeconomic pathways: A combined participatory bottom-up and top-down methodology with results from the Barents region (2017, methodology): “In addition, local scenarios have been used for assessing impacts of future climate change (Berkhout et al., 2002) and for adaptation planning (Kok et al., 2007; Baard et al., 2012; Carlsen et al., 2012; Berkhout et al., 2014).”
Enhancing the relevance of Shared Socioeconomic Pathways for climate change impacts, adaptation and vulnerability research (2014, background): “include institutions and governance (Berkhout et al. 2002), land use (Rounsevell et al.”
A proposal for a new scenario framework to support research and assessment in different climate research communities (2012, background): “Berkhout et al. (2002) and Zurek and Henrichs (2007) describe a potential application of this approach.”
Does climate adaptation policy need probabilities? (2004, background): “Humans are capable of reflecting critically on the implications of their behaviour and making adjustments in the light of experience (Berkhout et al., 2002).”
Does climate policy need probabilities (2003, background): “Humans are capable of reflecting critically on the implications of their behaviour and making adjustments in the light of experience (Berkhout et al., 2002).”