Elsevier

Global Environmental Change

Volume 42, January 2017, Pages 169-180
Global Environmental Change

The roads ahead: Narratives for shared socioeconomic pathways describing world futures in the 21st century

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2015.01.004Get rights and content

Highlights

  • We present narrative descriptions of future societal development associated with the shared socioeconomic pathways.

  • We describe the methods used to develop the narratives and how they produce particular combinations of challenges to mitigation and adaptation.

  • The narratives describe plausible future changes in demographics, human development, economy, institutions, technology, and environment.

  • The narratives span an uncertainty space in terms of socioeconomic challenges to adaptation and mitigation of climate change.

  • The narratives relate to Sustainability, Regional Rivalry, Inequality, and Fossil-fueled Development, and a Middle of the Road pathway.

Abstract

Long-term scenarios play an important role in research on global environmental change. The climate change research community is developing new scenarios integrating future changes in climate and society to investigate climate impacts as well as options for mitigation and adaptation. One component of these new scenarios is a set of alternative futures of societal development known as the shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs). The conceptual framework for the design and use of the SSPs calls for the development of global pathways describing the future evolution of key aspects of society that would together imply a range of challenges for mitigating and adapting to climate change. Here we present one component of these pathways: the SSP narratives, a set of five qualitative descriptions of future changes in demographics, human development, economy and lifestyle, policies and institutions, technology, and environment and natural resources. We describe the methods used to develop the narratives as well as how these pathways are hypothesized to produce particular combinations of challenges to mitigation and adaptation. Development of the narratives drew on expert opinion to (1) identify key determinants of these challenges that were essential to incorporate in the narratives and (2) combine these elements in the narratives in a manner consistent with scholarship on their inter-relationships. The narratives are intended as a description of plausible future conditions at the level of large world regions that can serve as a basis for integrated scenarios of emissions and land use, as well as climate impact, adaptation and vulnerability analyses.

Section snippets

Introduction and background

Long-term global scenarios have played a key role in climate change analysis for more than 20 years (Leggett et al., 1992, Nakicenovic et al., 2000, Raskin et al., 2005, van Vuuren et al., 2012). While other approaches to characterizing the future exist (Lempert et al., 2004, Webster et al., 2003), alternative scenarios are an important method for exploring uncertainty in future societal and climate conditions (Jones et al., 2014). Scenarios of global development focus on the uncertainty in

Methods: Development of narratives

The development of the SSP narratives was driven by three considerations: (1) the general purpose of narratives of societal development in the context of climate change scenarios; (2) the experience with narratives developed for past climate change and related scenarios; and (3) the specific role of the SSPs in the current scenario framework as characterizing societal futures that have particular combinations of challenges to mitigation and adaptation.

The general purpose of narratives of

Results: The basic SSP narratives

This section presents summaries of the five narratives developed to occupy each of the domains of the challenges space, along with some thoughts as to how the future societal development pathways they depict could plausibly emerge from current developments. Somewhat more discussion is provided for those SSPs, notably SSP4, which are less well represented in previous scenario exercises. More complete versions of all of the narratives are included in the Supporting Information. We employ the

The SSP narratives: Relationships to each other and to existing narratives

As important as the individual narratives are in and of themselves, we need to also consider them as a set. Are they sufficiently distinct in their socioeconomic challenges to mitigation and adaptation to meet the needs specified in the conceptual framework? Do they span a wide range of development outcomes? And how do they relate to other existing global scenario narratives?

Regarding the needs of the conceptual framework, the SSP narratives aim to capture the combinations of challenges to

Discussion and conclusions

There are several open questions about the design and use of SSPs. First, a broad question remains as to the effectiveness of pathways characterized by a global sense of the challenges to mitigation or adaptation they present. If, for example, challenges to adaptation are dominated by local considerations, and if many of these considerations have only weak connections to development trends in other regions or at a larger scale, then a global starting point for scenario development would seem to

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