Socioeconomic Pathways

Workshop November 2-4, 2011

The Nature and Use of New Socioeconomic Pathways for Climate Change Research

• Narratives from the Workshop on The Nature and Use of New Socioeconomic Pathways for Climate Change Research
• Scientific Steering Committee

November 2-4, 2011
Hosted by the Integrated Science Program
National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)
Mesa Laboratory
Boulder, Colorado

The goals of this workshop were to agree on the general nature of a set of basic socioeconomic development pathways, and to prioritize new work on developing extended versions of these pathways that would improve their usefulness for evaluating mitigation strategies, adaptation options, and residual impacts.  In addition, the meeting further explored how such socioeconomic development pathways can be used in conjunction with climate model simulations to generate integrated scenarios useful for carrying out climate change research.

The meeting brought together researchers involved in the development or use of scenarios from the fields of integrated assessment modeling; social and economic development; assessment of impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability; and climate modeling.

It built on previous meetings that have facilitated the development of this new set of scenarios and a conceptual framework for employing them, including:

•  IPCC Workshop on Socioeconomic Scenarios, Berlin, November 2010

•  Workshop to Explore the New Scenario Matrix Architecture/Shared Socioeconomic Pathway Approach, Changwon City, South Korea, July 2011.
•  Integrated Assessment Modeling Consortium Annual Meeting, Laxenburg, Austria, October 2011

 

Final Workshop Report

• Meeting Report of the Workshop on The Nature and Use of New Socioeconomic Pathways for Climate Change Research, O’Neill, B.C., Carter, T., Ebi, K.L., Edmonds, J., Hallegatte, S., Kemp-Benedict, E., Kriegler, E., Mearns, L., Moss, R., Riahi, K., van Ruijven, B., van Vuuren, D.
• Participants

 

Primary Background Document

“A framework for a new generation of socioeconomic scenarios for climate change impact, adaptation, vulnerability and mitigation research” by Nigel Arnell, Tom Kram, Timothy Carter, Kristie Ebi, Jae Edmonds, Stephane Hallegatte, Elmar Kriegler, Ritu Mathur, Brian O’Neill, Keywan Riahi, Harald Winkler, Detlef van Vuuren, Timm Zwickel.