A new scenario framework for climate change research: the concept of shared socioeconomic pathways
Open accessAbstract
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.
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The Shared Socioeconomic Pathways are tacitly founded on the assumption that the future will be devoid of economic growth distortions, political instability, and armed conflict.
“the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways, which are widely used in climate change impact assessments to explore societal implications of alternative climate change and development trajectories (186-188), are tacitly founded on the assumption that the future will be devoid of economic growth distortions, political instability, and armed conflict.”
From Vicious Circles: Violence, Vulnerability, and Climate Change (2021) · cites this paper as [188]
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- Authors
- O’Neill, B. C., Kriegler, E., Riahi, K., Ebi, K. L., Hallegatte, S., Carter, T. R., Mathur, R., & van Vuuren, D. P.
- Affiliations
- NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research (US)
- Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (DE)
- International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (AT)
- Finnish Environment Institute (FI)
- TERI University (IN)
- Corresponding author
- O’Neill, Brian C.
- Venue
- Climatic Change
- Published
- 2013-10-15
- Volume
- 122
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 387-400
- ISSN
- 0165-0009 (ISSN-L)
- 1573-1480
- OpenAlex
- W1964308073
- Cited by
- 2,716
- References
- 1
- Citations by year
- 2026: 203 · 2025: 278 · 2024: 293 · 2023: 311 · 2022: 335 · 2021: 324 · 2020: 231 · 2019: 187 · 2018: 186 · 2017: 121 · 2016: 118 · 2015: 84 · 2014: 32 · 2013: 12 · 2012: 1
- FWCI
- 192.49
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Locations
- Climatic Change (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- Utrecht University Repository (Utrecht University) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- RENATE (submittedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- Publication Database PIK (Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK)) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- IIASA PURE (International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis) (submittedVersion)
- RENATE (cc-by)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Economics, Econometrics and Finance › Economics and Econometrics › Climate Change Policy and Economics
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Global and Planetary Change › Sustainability and Climate Change Governance
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Global and Planetary Change › Climate variability and models
- Keywords
- Shared Socioeconomic Pathways, climate change scenarios, climate change adaptation, climate change mitigation, skeletal-related events, conceptual framework
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