Shared Socio-Economic Pathways of the Energy Sector – Quantifying the Narratives

By Nico Bauer, K. Calvin, J. Emmerling, Oliver Fricko, Shinichiro Fujimori, Jérôme Hilaire, Jiyong Eom, Volker Krey, Elmar Kriegler, I. Mouratiadou and 18 more. 2017

358 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Energy is crucial for supporting basic human needs, development and well-being. The future evolution of the scale and character of the energy system will be fundamentally shaped by socioeconomic conditions and drivers, available energy resources, technologies of energy supply and transformation, and end-use energy demand. However, because energy-related activities are significant sources of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and other environmental and social externalities, energy system development will also be influenced by social acceptance and strategic policy choices. All of these uncertainties have important implications for many aspects of economic and environmental sustainability, and climate change in particular. In the Shared-Socioeconomic Pathway (SSP) framework these uncertainties are structured into five narratives, arranged according to the challenges to climate change mitigation and adaptation. In this study we explore future energy sector developments across the five SSPs using Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs), and we also provide summary output and analysis for selected scenarios of global emissions mitigation policies. The mitigation challenge strongly corresponds with global baseline energy sector growth over the 21st century, which varies between 40% and 230% depending on final energy consumer behavior, technological improvements, resource availability and policies. The future baseline CO2-emission range is even larger, as the most energy-intensive SSP also incorporates a comparatively high share of carbon-intensive fossil fuels, and vice versa. Inter-regional disparities in the SSPs are consistent with the underlying socioeconomic assumptions; these differences are particularly strong in the SSPs with large adaptation challenges, which have little inter-regional convergence in long-term income and final energy demand levels. The scenarios presented do not include feedbacks of climate change on energy sector development. The energy sector SSPs with and without emissions mitigation policies are introduced and analyzed here in order to contribute to future research in climate sciences, mitigation analysis, and studies on impacts, adaptation and vulnerability.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Environmental Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b1a5e55b6071de94c9a7700e1ccc3fb970d0b521

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Citations in the corpus

Integrated assessment of biomass supply and demand in climate change mitigation scenarios (2019, methodology): “Popp et al. (2017) and Bauer et al. (2017) have used the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSP) scenario framework to explore potential futures for the land and energy systems, respectively.”
Energy, land-use and greenhouse gas emissions trajectories under a green growth paradigm (2017, background): “More detailed comparison of the marker scenarios are published for land (Popp et al., 2017), energy (Bauer et al., 2017) and emissions (Rao et al., 2017).”
The Shared Socioeconomic Pathways and their energy, land use, and greenhouse gas emissions implications: An overview (2017, background): “A detailed discussion of integrated scenarios for the individual SSPs (Calvin et al., 2016; Fricko et al., 2016; Fujimori et al., 2016; Kriegler et al., 2016; van Vuuren et al., 2016) complement the special issue.”
Fossil-fueled development (SSP5): An energy and resource intensive scenario for the 21st century (2017, neutral): “Afforestation occurs in the SSP5 mitigation scenarios by GCAM and AIM/CGE (only SSP5-26), but is not accessible as mitigation option in the REMIND-MAgPIE implementation of the SSPs.”
Solar, wind and logistic substitution in global energy supply to 2050 – Barriers and implications (2022, neutral): “…per year; the average rate of growth between 1990 and 2019 [4], comparable to quantifications of the ‘baseline’ scenario (i.e. no temperature or emission constraints) for Shared Socioeconomic Pathway 2 (SSP2), reflecting ‘middle of the road’ developments compared the other four SSP narratives [25].”
Net-zero emissions energy systems (2018, background): “For example, in some of the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways that were recently developed by the climate change research community in order to frame analysis of future climate impacts, global final energy demand more than doubles by 2100 (104); hence, the magnitude of these difficult-toeliminate emissi”
Potential and costs of carbon dioxide removal by enhanced weathering of rocks (2018, background): “Given the fact that EW would only become economic at carbon prices above 60 $ t CO2, it seems highly unlikely that it would be used with carbon-intensive energy production [38].”
Energy efficiency and economy-wide rebound effects: A review of the evidence and its implications (2021, methodology): “2020–2030 2030–2040 2040–2050 IPCC scenarios ~1.5 ◦C IMAGE [42] SSP1-1.”
Human well‐being and climate change mitigation (2017, background): “These now include education, health, infrastructure, equity and social features, and baseline per capita energy consumption levels of 30 GJ in all regions.(131,132) There is increasing attention paid in the modeling literature to the trade-offs between land-based mitigation (bioenergy), food product”
Societal Transformations in Models for Energy and Climate Policy: The Ambitious Next Step (2019, background): “One successful example is the integrationofdemographic research inSSPs.(10,44)Box4providesanother example of how a conventional energy-system model(4) can be modified to at least broadly cover deviations from cost-optimization rationale in real-world transformations.”
Negative emissions—Part 1: Research landscape and synthesis (2018, background): “While the scenario evidence for AR5 lacked larger variations of socio-economic baseline conditions, this evidence has become available in the meantime (Popp et al 2017, Bauer et al 2017, van Vuuren et al 2017, Riahi et al 2017, Rogelj et al 2018). As expected, the ranges observed in NETs deployment ”