Special Issue on the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs)
Climatic Change Special Issue: A Framework for the Development of New Socioeconomic Scenarios for Climate Change Research
Edited by Nebojsa Nakicenovic, Robert Lempert, and Anthony Janetos
A 2013 special issue in the journal Climatic Change describes the theoretical framework for the development of the new socioeconomic scenarios for climate change research. This framework was developed during a series of workshops and meetings of both the Integrated Assessment Modeling (IAM) and the Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability (IAV) communities. More information on the process for developing new scenarios can be found here.
The first four papers in the special issue describe the theoretical framework itself and describe the process, the scenarios matrix architecture, the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs), and Shared Policy Assumptions (SPAs). The other papers discuss specific aspects of the framework. This includes the consistency of the new SSPs with past scenarios, the internal consistency of the SSPs, making the new SSPs more useful to different user communities, and discussing the new concepts in the framework.
Journal Articles
Nakicenovic N., Lempert R.J., and Janetos A.C., 2013. A framework for the development of new socio-economic scenarios for climate change research: introductory essay. Climatic Change, 351-361. DOI: 10.1007/s10584-013-0982-2.
Ebi K., Hallegatte S., Kram T., Arnell N., Carter T., Edmonds J., Kriegler E., Mathur R., O’Neill B., Riahi K., Winkler H., Vuuren D., Zwickel T., 2013. A new scenario framework for climate change research: background, process, and future directions. Climatic Change, 363-372. DOI: 10.1007/s10584-013-0912-3.
van Vuuren D.P., Kriegler E., O’Neill B.C., Ebi K., Riahi K., Carter T., Edmonds J., Hallegatte S., Kram T., Mathur R., Winkler H., 2013. A new scenario framework for Climate Change Research: scenario matrix architecture. Climatic Change, 373-386. DOI: 10.1007/s10584-013-0906-1.
O’Neill B.C., Kriegler E., Riahi K., Ebi K., Hallegatte S., Carter T., Mathur R., Vuuren D., 2013. A new scenario framework for climate change research: the concept of shared socioeconomic pathways. Climatic Change, 387-400. DOI: 10.1007/s10584-013-0905-2.
Kriegler E., Edmonds J., Hallegatte S., Ebi K., Kram T., Riahi K., Winkler H., Van Vuuren D.P., 2013. A new scenario framework for climate change research: The concept of Shared Climate Policy Assumptions. Climatic Change, 401-414. DOI: 10.1007/s10584-013-0971-5.
van Vuuren D.P., Carter T., 2013. Climate and socio-economic scenarios for climate change research and assessment: reconciling the new with the old. Climatic Change, 415-429. DOI: 10.1007/s10584-013-0974-2.
Schweizer V., O’Neill B.C., 2013. Systematic construction of global socioeconomic pathways using internally consistent element combinations. Climatic Change, 431-445. DOI: 10.1007/s10584-013-0908-z.
Lane L., Montgomery W.D., 2013. An institutional critique of new climate scenarios. Climatic Change, 447-458. DOI: 10.1007/s10584-013-0919-9.
Tebaldi C., 2013. Pattern scaling: a review of its strengths and limitations, and an update on the latest model simulations. Climatic Change, 459-471. DOI: 10.1007/s10584-013-1032-9.
Wilbanks T., Ebi K., 2013. SSPs from an impact and adaptation perspective. Climatic Change, 473-479. DOI: 10.1007/s10584-013-0903-4. DOI:
van Ruijven B.J., Levy M., Agrawal A., Biermann F., Birkmann J., Carter T.R., Ebi K.L., Garschagen M., Jones B., Jones R., Kemp-Benedict E., Kok M., Kok K., Lemos M.C., Lucas P.L., Orlove B., Pachauri S., Parris T.M., Patwardhan A., Petersen A.C., Preston B.L., Ribot J., Rothman D.S., Schweizer V., 2013. Enhancing the relevance of global shared socio-economic pathways for climate change vulnerability, impacts, and adaptation research. Climatic Change, 481-494. DOI: 10.1007/s10584-013-0931-0.
Rothman D., Romero-Lankao P., Schweizer V., Bee B., 2013. Challenges to adaptation: a fundamental concept for the shared socio-economic pathways and beyond. Climatic Change, 495-507. DOI: 10.1007/s10584-013-0907-0.
Rozenberg J., Guivarch C., Lempert R., Hallegatte S., 2013. Building SSPs for climate policy analysis: a scenario elicitation methodology to map the space of possible future challenges to mitigation and adaptation. Climatic Change, 509-522. DOI: 10.1007/s10584-013-0904-3.