The Shared Socioeconomic Pathways: The Human Dimensions of Global Change

The climate research community is currently focusing on the second phase of the  “parallel process” to elaborate the socioeconomic dimension of the new community scenarios. The primary goal of this phase is the development of the  Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs). The SSPs are part of the new framework that the climate change research community has adopted to facilitate the integrated analysis of future climate impacts, vulnerabilities, adaptation, and mitigation.

SSP research enhances collaboration at IIASA

ENE has played a leading role in both the design of the community process and providing scientific input to it. Of particular importance, the SSPs have provided the much needed opportunity to enhance collaboration across Programs at IIASA: ENE, ESM, and POP have made critical first steps toward the integration of IIASA’s research on the human dimensions of global change with socioeconomic and technical analysis of energy, land-use, and ecosystem changes. The collaboration between the three Programs, which started in 2012, should be seen as an initial step towards an integrated approach to climate policy analysis at IIASA.

Rapid progress on the SSPs in 2012.

First, a series of papers were submitted to a special issue of Climatic Change summarizing the scientific community’s efforts in establishing the SSP concepts for joint impacts, adaptation and mitigation analysis. Nebojsa Nakicenovic serves as the co-editor of the issue, and Keywan Riahi is co-authoring five of the papers that explain the main SSP logic, concepts, architecture, and policy assumptions. Furthermore, ENE led the scientific community review of quantitative SSP projections in 2012. Initial quantifications of SSP drivers for population and economic projections were developed by the POP program and were posted at the IIASA-IPCC SSP database for review by the scientific community between May and October 2012. The review advanced the involvement of IPCC WGII impacts/adaptation community and led to important comments and revisions for the SSP storylines and demographic/economic driver projections.

A second SSP Special Issue on IAM scenarios in the journal Global Environmental Change was established in 2012. The special issue is co-edited by Keywan Riahi and will include 13 papers summarizing the SSP storylines, quantification of population and economic drivers as well as SSP scenarios for the energy and land-use transformation. So far a first paper by POP researchers Samir KC and Wolfgang Lutz on the SSP population projections has been submitted. Other papers are expected to become available in 2013.

New methodologies

From the science perspective, important methodological developments by ESM and ENE (Nils Johnson, Oliver Fricko, Manfred Strubegger) comprised establishing formal soft-linkages between the models housed in these two Programs (MESSAGE and GLOBIOM). These new methods, which are fundamental to the SSP scenario development process at IIASA, were extensively tested during 2012 and are now ready to be applied in 2013. 

Other main contributors to the SSPs

Major institutions involved in the quantification of the SSPs in 2012 included the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), National Institute for Environmental Studies (NIES), Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL), Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), and other programs at IIASA. 

Last edited: 14 October 2013