The evolution of the IPCC's emissions scenarios
By Bastien Girod, Arnim Wiek, H. Mieg, M. Hulme. 2009
154 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract The IPCC's emissions scenarios form the basis for the majority of long-term climate change projections, including those of the current Fourth Assessment Report. The main characteristics of the IPCC's three scenario series – published in 1990, 1992 and 2000 – have changed significantly over time: titles, classification, assumptions and methods have all changed. This article analyses the evolution of the structure, description, process development and context of the IPCC's emissions scenarios, identifying the most important changes and their scientific and political causes. These changes are evaluated against the criteria of saliency, credibility and legitimacy. Our analysis indicates, first, enhanced credibility through an improved scenario construction methodology (multiple baseline scenarios; storylines), even though these achievements are diluted by particularities of the scenario approach used. Second, a reduced saliency through absence of titles, an inappropriate classification and the relatively high number of baseline scenarios, limits and weakens their wider applicability. These latter trends were due in part to concessions made to the intergovernmental nature of the construction process (trade-offs). The article concludes by proposing for the future the employment of a more formal qualitative construction approach as well as revisions to scenario labelling and classification practices.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Global and Planetary Change
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9475d559812fcc7a79cb8132a6f31ec58f8cc14f
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In Economics and Econometrics
- Xu Tang
- M. Höök
- Óscar Carpintero
- Íñigo Capellán-Pérez
- Peter de Haan
- Bastien Girod
- L. J. Miguel
- Inês Lima Azevedo
In Global and Planetary Change
Citations in the corpus
- Depletion of fossil fuels and anthropogenic climate change—A review (2013, methodology): “Titles, methods, classifications, assumptions have all changed over time and Girod et al. (2009) reviewed this in more detail.”
- More or Better? A Model for Changes in Household Greenhouse Gas Emissions due to Higher Income (2010, background): “This model could also be of use in improving long-term GHG emissions scenarios, such as the IPCC scenarios, which at present suffer from a partially unsatisfactory description and inconsistency (Girod et al. 2009).”
- Fossil fuel depletion and socio-economic scenarios: An integrated approach (2014, background): “18 In fact, although (IPCC SRES, 2000) scenarios do not consider explicitly the use of policies, it has been argued that they are implicitly assumed (Arvesen et al., 2011; Girod et al., 2009; Pielke et al., 2008).”