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