Building SSPs for climate policy analysis: a scenario elicitation methodology to map the space of possible future challenges to mitigation and adaptation

Julie Rozenberg (1) , Céline Guivarch (1) , Robert Lempert (2) , Stéphane Hallegatte (3)

1 CIRED - centre international de recherche sur l'environnement et le développement
2 RAND Corp
3 SDN - Sustainable Developpment Network

The scientific community is now developing a new set of scenarios, referred to as Shared Socio-economic Pathways (SSPs) that will be contrasted along two axes: challenges to mitigation, and challenges to adaptation. This paper proposes a methodology to develop SSPs with a "backwards" approach based on (i) an a priori identification of potential drivers of mitigation and adaptation challenges; (ii) a modelling exercise to transform these drivers into a large set of scenarios; (iii) an a posteriori selection of a few SSPs among these scenarios using statistical cluster-finding algorithms. This backwards approach could help inform the development of SSPs to ensure the storylines focus on the driving forces most relevant to distinguishing between the SSPs. In this illustrative analysis, we find that energy sobriety, equity and convergence prove most important towards explaining future difference in challenges to adaptation and mitigation. The results also demonstrate the difficulty in finding explanatory drivers for a middle scenario (SSP2). We argue that methodologies such as that used here are useful for broad questions such as the definition of SSPs, and could also be applied to any specific decisions faced by decision-makers in the field of climate change.

Mots clés: socio-economic scenarios; scenario discovery; mitigation; adaptation

Domaines: Economies et finances

Julie Rozenberg, Céline Guivarch, Robert Lempert, Stéphane Hallegatte. Building SSPs for climate policy analysis: a scenario elicitation methodology to map the space of possible future challenges to mitigation and adaptation. Climatic Change, 2014, 122, pp.509 - 522. ⟨10.1007/s10584-013-0904-3⟩. ⟨halshs-01053726⟩