Climate change scenarios
Predicted atmospheric CO₂ concentrations for different shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs) across the 21st century (projected by MAGICC7, a simple/reduced complexity climate model). Each data point represents an average of simulated values generated from five integrated assessment models .[1]
Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs ) are climate change scenarios of projected socioeconomic global changes up to 2100 as defined in the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report on climate change in 2021.[2] They are used to derive greenhouse gas emissions scenarios with different climate policies .[3] [4] [5] The SSPs provide narratives describing alternative socio-economic developments . These storylines are a qualitative description of logic relating elements of the narratives to each other.[3] In terms of quantitative elements, they provide data accompanying the scenarios on national population, urbanization and GDP (per capita).[6] The SSPs can be quantified with various Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) to explore possible future pathways both with regards to socioeconomic and climate pathways.[4] [5] [6]
The five scenarios are:
SSP1: Sustainability ("Taking the Green Road")
SSP2: "Middle of the Road"
SSP3: Regional Rivalry ("A Rocky Road")
SSP4: Inequality ("A Road Divided")
SSP5: Fossil-fueled Development ("Taking the Highway") [7]
^ Meinshausen, M., Nicholls, Z. R. J., Lewis, J., Gidden, M. J., Vogel, E., Freund, M., Beyerle, U., Gessner, C., Nauels, A., Bauer, N., Canadell, J. G., Daniel, J. S., John, A., Krummel, P. B., Luderer, G., Meinshausen, N., Montzka, S. A., Rayner, P. J., Reimann, S., . . . Wang, R. H. J. (2020). The shared socio-economic pathway (SSP) greenhouse gas concentrations and their extensions to 2500. Geoscientific Model Development, 13(8), 3571–3605. https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-13-3571-2020 Archived 2023-04-16 at the Wayback Machine
^ "Climate Change 2021 - The Physical Science Basis" (PDF) . ipcc.ch . Archived (PDF) from the original on 13 August 2021. Retrieved 15 August 2021 .
^ a b "Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs)" (PDF) . .
^ a b Cite error: The named reference :2
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^ a b Rogelj, Joeri ; Popp, Alexander; Calvin, Katherine V.; Luderer, Gunnar; Emmerling, Johannes; Gernaat, David; Fujimori, Shinichiro; Strefler, Jessica; Hasegawa, Tomoko; Marangoni, Giacomo; Krey, Volker (2018). "Scenarios towards limiting global mean temperature increase below 1.5 °C" . Nature Climate Change . 8 (4): 325–332. Bibcode :2018NatCC...8..325R . doi :10.1038/s41558-018-0091-3 . hdl :1874/372779 . ISSN 1758-678X . S2CID 56238230 . Archived from the original on 2022-04-23. Retrieved 2022-04-23 .
^ a b "SSP Database" . tntcat.iiasa.ac.at . Archived from the original on 2020-04-25. Retrieved 2019-11-09 .
^ Hausfather, Zeke (2018-04-19). "Explainer: How 'Shared Socioeconomic Pathways' explore future climate change" . Carbon Brief . Retrieved 2019-09-13 .