Abstract
More often than not, assessments of future climate risks are based on future climatic conditions superimposed on current socioeconomic conditions only. The new IPCC-guided alternative global development trends, the shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs), have the potential to enhance the integration of future socioeconomic conditions—in the form of socioeconomic scenarios—within assessments of future climate risks. Being global development pathways, the SSPs lack regional and sectoral details. To increase their suitability in sectoral and/or regional studies and their relevance for local stakeholders, the SSPs have to be extended. We propose here a new method to extend the SSPs that makes use of existing scenario studies, the (re)use of which has been underestimated so far. Our approach lies in a systematic matching of multiple scenario sets that facilitates enrichment of the global SSPs with regional and sectoral information, in terms of both storylines and quantitative projections. We apply this method to develop extended SSPs of human vulnerability in Europe and to quantify them for a number of key indicators at the sub-national level up to 2050, based on the co-use of the matched scenarios’ quantitative outputs. Results show that such a method leads to internally consistent extended SSPs with detailed and highly quantified narratives that are tightly linked to global contexts. This method also provides multiple entry points where the relevance of scenarios to local stakeholders can be tested and strengthened. The extended SSPs can be readily employed to explore future populations’ vulnerability to climate hazards under varying levels of socioeconomic development.
Highlights
Being driven by both climatic and socioeconomic determinants, future climate risks depend on both future climatic and socioeconomic conditions (Birkmann et al 2013)
Applying the method presented in this paper, we develop a set of extended shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs) of human vulnerability for 25 member states of the European Union and quantify them for 259 sub-national regions up to 2050
With a focus on future human vulnerability in Europe, we presented in this paper a method that uses existing scenario studies to extend the global SSPs
Summary
Being driven by both climatic and socioeconomic determinants, future climate risks depend on both future climatic and socioeconomic conditions (Birkmann et al 2013). A rapidly growing number of studies have employed the SSPs to explore the joint influence of climate change and socioeconomic development on future climate risks, such as agricultural-related and hunger risks (e.g., Wiebe et al 2015), water scarcity risk (e.g., Arnell and Lloyd-Hughes 2014), flood risk (e.g., Alfieri et al 2016), fire risk (Knorr et al 2016), risk of vector-borne diseases (Monaghan et al 2018), and heat stress risk (e.g., Dong et al 2015; Marsha et al 2018; Rohat et al 2018) Most of these IAV studies made a straightforward use of the global SSPs and relied on quantitative projections at the national level only (IIASA 2016)—or simplistically downscaled at the sub-national level assuming homogenous growth/decline within the country—without accounting for the sectoral and regional context. Bearing in mind that the use and the combination of elements from different scenario studies has to be carried out with care in order to ensure internal consistency (Hunt et al 2012), we argue here that methods to combine and match existing scenario sets in a transparent and systematic manner must be developed in order to produce and quantify new scenario sets relevant for sectoral and regional IAV quantitative assessments
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
