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Over the past decade, the climate change research community developed a scenario framework that combines alternative futures of climate and society to facilitate integrated research and consistent assessment to inform policy. An international team of researchers, including Utrecht ľ�ϸ���Ӱ��’s Detlef van Vuuren, have assessed how well this framework is working and what challenges it faces. Their paper was recently published in Nature Climate Change.

The Scenario Framework contains a set of scenarios about how society may evolve in the future  - so-called Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) - and defines different levels of climate change  ̶  so-called representative concentration pathways (RCPs). Combining both aspects of the framework allows researchers to develop integrated analyses of how future societies can avoid climate change and cope with its impacts. 

In their paper, the authors synthesize the insights from the first ever organized by the ľ�ϸ���Ӱ�� of Denver and in Denver, CO in March 2019, and present the first in-depth literature analysis of the SSP-RCP scenarios framework. They specifically looked into how useful the framework has been for researchers, which topics the SSPs have been used for, and what can be done to improve the framework and make it more useful for future studies.  

Use scenarios for the right purpose

The framework has been used in almost over the past five years of which about half are related to climate impacts, one-third to avoiding climate change, and the remainder to extensions or methodological improvements. The findings also indicate that the scenarios framework enables research that had not been possible before, such as . The insights from this new study will help researchers to improve the framework and make it even more useful over the next five years.

The framework provides both low and high-risk climate futures. The researchers notice that some studies use unlikely combinations of socioeconomic assumptions with the highest climate change outcomes (the so-called RCP8.5 scenario) without emphasizing these futures are not very likely. They caution that researchers should be more careful using this high climate change scenario for their studies and in the communication about their findings.

Recommendations

The authors identified seven recommendations for future work:

• improving the integration of societal and climate conditions
• improving applicability to regional and local scales
• improving relevance beyond the climate research community
• producing a broader range of reference scenarios that include impacts and policy
• capturing relevant perspectives and uncertainties
• keeping scenarios up to date
• improving the relevance of climate change scenario applications for users. 

“The scenarios framework has been an enormous step forward”, emphasizes Detlef van Vuuren (Utrecht ľ�ϸ���Ӱ�� and PBL), who also is a study author. “It clearly has an impact on how we study climate change and distinguish both socio-economic and climate change implications for the ability to mitigate and adapt to climate change. It allows us provide a more concrete picture of what future societies might look like and what the challenges will be that they have to deal with. But maybe more importantly, the framework has also allowed science disciplines to work together on one set of visions of the future – as the scenarios were also used to look into biodiversity and development issues, or the implications of governance."

Publication

O’Neill B, Carter T, Ebi K, Harrison P, Kemp-Benedict E, Kok K, Kriegler E, Preston B, Riahi K, et al. (2020). 'Achievements and needs for the climate change scenario framework', Nature Climate Change