A new scenario framework for climate change research: the concept of shared socioeconomic pathways

By Brian C. O'Neill, Elmar Kriegler, Keywan Riahi, K. Ebi, Stéphane Hallegatte, T. Carter, R. Mathur, D. P. Vuuren. Climatic Change, 2014

2,453 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The new scenario framework for climate change research envisions combining pathways of future radiative forcing and their associated climate changes with alternative pathways of socioeconomic development in order to carry out research on climate change impacts, adaptation, and mitigation. Here we propose a conceptual framework for how to define and develop a set of Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) for use within the scenario framework. We define SSPs as reference pathways describing plausible alternative trends in the evolution of society and ecosystems over a century timescale, in the absence of climate change or climate policies. We introduce the concept of a space of challenges to adaptation and to mitigation that should be spanned by the SSPs, and discuss how particular trends in social, economic, and environmental development could be combined to produce such outcomes. A comparison to the narratives from the scenarios developed in the Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES) illustrates how a starting point for developing SSPs can be defined. We suggest initial development of a set of basic SSPs that could then be extended to meet more specific purposes, and envision a process of application of basic and extended SSPs that would be iterative and potentially lead to modification of the original SSPs themselves.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e7f588638dd4ad1bf8a0a6b484bcf1ce1c3402dc

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

1. Gunnar Luderer
2. Elmar Kriegler
3. Keywan Riahi
4. John P. Weyant
5. D. V. van Vuuren
6. Ottmar Edenhofer
7. Volker Krey
8. D. P. Vuuren

In Global and Planetary Change

1. Reto Knutti
2. John P. Weyant
3. Jeroen C. J. H. Aerts
4. R. Lorenz
5. L. Brunner
6. Qingyun Duan
7. D. P. Vuuren
8. W. Botzen

In Management Science and Operations Research

1. John P. Weyant
2. Reto Knutti
3. Christophe Gouel
4. Houssein Guimbard
5. Elmar Kriegler
6. D. V. van Vuuren
7. Gunnar Luderer
8. Bas J. van Ruijven

Citations in the corpus

• Social tipping dynamics for stabilizing Earth’s climate by 2050 (2020, background): “These “tipping transformative pathways” can potentially show the bottom-up emergence of the global sustainability pathway (SSP1) (135).”
• Escalating global exposure to compound heat-humidity extremes with warming (2020, methodology): “Using gridded global population projection data based on Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) [47] in years when CESM-LE RCP8.”
• Achieving California's 80% greenhouse gas reduction target in 2050: Technology, policy and scenario analysis using CA-TIMES energy economic systems model (2015, background): “The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) develops and analyzes a large number of Reference Case scenarios (O’Neill et al., 2014), but we chose to focus on just two BAU scenarios to keep the comparisons manageable.”
• Impacts of land use, population, and climate change on global food security (2020, background): “The SSP scenarios are defined as “reference pathways describing plausible alternative trends in the evolution of society and ecosystems over a century timescale” (O'Neill et al., 2014).”
• Nutrition Transition and the Structure of Global Food Demand (2017, positive): “For the SSPs, population data are from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (KC and Lutz, 2017).”
• The Shared Socioeconomic Pathways and their energy, land use, and greenhouse gas emissions implications: An overview (2017, methodology): “Analo-gies between the SRES scenarios and the SSPs were identi fi ed already during the SSP development phase (Kriegler et al., 2012; O ’ Neill et al., 2014), and a systematic attempt to map the SSPs to SRES and other major scenarios was conducted by van Vuuren and Carter (2014).”
• 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.”