Extending the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways at the City Scale to Inform Future Vulnerability Assessments — The Case of Boston, Massachusetts

Lino, Jayne; Rohat, Guillaume; Kirshen, Paul; Dao, Hy

doi:10.1142/s2345737620500098

Cited by 9 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 53 publications

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“…And while the SSPs address key socioeconomic drivers of climate change, the global SSPs do not address the nature of changes to the built environment, critical to understanding future vulnerabilities and consequences of different urban futures, nor do they speak to concerns that are prominent in city-life such as those relating to diversity, racial justice, or migration. Recent work to extend these narratives to regions (e.g., Absar and Preston 2015;Reimann et al, 2021) and cities (e.g., Kamei et al, 2016;Lino et al, 2019;Rohat et al, 2021) are just beginning to emerge. Similarly, other scholars use a visioning process to generate plausible scenarios for climate-adaptation futures-these tend to adopt a businessas-usual future (one of the five SSPs) along with stakeholderdriven framings to envision the future (Iwaniec et al, 2020b;Hamstead et al, 2021b).…”

Section: Population Projectionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Frameworks to envision equitable urban futures in a changing climate: A multi-level, multidisciplinary case study of New York City

Balk

Daniela²,

Jiang³

et al. 2022

Front. Built Environ.

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Cities are at the forefront of climate change action and planning for futures that are concomitantly more resilient and equitable, making local goals imperative for global sustainability. Under the multiple challenges of changing climatic, ecological and socio-economic conditions, cities need the means to meet these goals. We know cities are and will continue to be points of concentrated and diverse populations, socioeconomic vulnerability, amplified exposure, transformed ecosystems and are responsible for the bulk of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. Yet, much is also unknown and intrinsically uncertain about urban futures: there is a range of potential plausible futures which have differing implications for both potential mitigation and adaptation actions. To better assess these plausible futures, the “global change” research community developed a framework including scenarios that are applicable for global and regional policy, entitled the Shared Socio-economic Pathways (SSPs) and scenarios exploring future emissions that will drive climate change, entitled Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs). Importantly, this global scale framework does not include specific city-level perspectives or data at the spatial scales necessary to address questions of local relevance. While the SSPs address many of the key population and socioeconomic drivers of climate change, they do not address important concerns that are particularly relevant to cities, such as racial justice, ecosystem change or migration. Nevertheless, city-level impacts will evolve, in part, as a function of the global scale change characterized by the SSPs, and in part based on demographic and social processes already underway. As such, applying a modification of this framework to cities has the potential to help limit local climate impacts, and create a more resilient, equitable city. To address these needs and respond to city and regional stakeholders, we propose a framework for science-based narratives and quantitative projections for cities and metropolitan areas, such as Greater New York City. In this paper, we review a wide-range of existing approaches to generate estimates of future populations and identify their vulnerabilities to climate-change hazards, ranging from subnational population projections or the spatially-explicit allocation of populations linked to SSPs for the US and selected cities, city-specific population forecasting without climate considerations, and participatory approaches to future scenario development and fine-scale, within-city land use change models. By showcasing the strengths and limitations of various approaches and modeling efforts, their spatial and temporal scales, and thematic breadth, we propose a novel framework that leverages state-of-the art quantitative approaches and couples it with stakeholder engagement that can help cities plan equitably under uncertainty.

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Section: Population Projectionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Frameworks to envision equitable urban futures in a changing climate: A multi-level, multidisciplinary case study of New York City

Balk

Daniela²,

Jiang³

et al. 2022

Front. Built Environ.

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“…Downscaled climate data provided a basis for identifying and assessing suitable adaptation options (Table 2; National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, 2017) and with multiple scenario combinations. In other case studies, authors have used multiple scenarios in discussions with stakeholders, focusing on different combinations of drivers to quantify and evaluate management options (Lino et al, 2019;Reimann et al, 2021). In our experience, trying to test multiple possible worlds in a workshop setting can require more time to explore each scenario than is available as participants can struggle to accommodate several scenarios in a short time.…”

Section: Climate Modelingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Principles and process for developing participatory adaptation pathways in the primary industries

Cradock-Henry

Blackett

Connolly³

et al. 2021

Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene

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Adaptation pathways is an approach to identify, assess, and sequence climate change adaptation options over time, linking decisions to critical signals and triggers derived from scenarios of future conditions. However, conceptual differences in their development can hinder methodological advance and create a disconnect between those applying pathways approaches and the wider community of practitioners undertaking vulnerability, impacts, and adaptation assessments. Here, we contribute to close these gaps, advancing principles, and processes that may be used to guide the trajectory for adaptation pathways, without having to rely on data-rich or resource-intensive methods. To achieve this, concepts and practices from the broad pathways literature is combined with our own experience in developing adaptation pathways for primary industries facing the combined impacts of climate change and other, nonclimatic stressors. Each stage is guided by a goal and tools to facilitate discussions and produce feasible pathways. We illustrate the process with a case study from Hawke’s Bay, New Zealand, involving multiple data sources and methods in two catchments. Resulting guidelines and empirical examples are consistent with principles of adaptive management and planning and can provide a template for developing local-, regional- or issue-specific pathways elsewhere and enrich the diversity of vulnerability, impacts, and adaptation assessment practice.

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“…There are many examples of adaptation planning and decisionmaking ranging from adaptation pathways to resilience and vulnerability assessment. Here we restrict ourselves to the growing use of scenarios at the local level, and the corresponding increase in case studies (Nilsson et al, 2017;Lino et al, 2019;Zandersen et al, 2019;Butler et al, 2020;Lehtonen et al, 2021). Scenarios are narratives describing plausible future worlds.…”

Section: Nesting the Local In The Globalmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The combination of emissions, policy mixes, and socioeconomic pathways is contextualized for local conditions through stakeholder knowledge and experience. The resulting narratives represent alternative trends, with a loose or soft linkage to national and/or global conditions (Lino et al, 2019).…”

Section: Nesting the Local In The Globalmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…An emerging trend in impacts, vulnerability, and adaptation research, therefore, is to improve the links between the global and sub-national (hereafter local) level by extending the parallel scenario framework and incorporating outputs into applied adaptation decision-making processes (Campos et al, 2016;Cradock-Henry et al, 2018Aguiar et al, 2020;Schmitt Olabisi et al, 2020). Such extended SSPs have been developed for a range of settings and problems, including specific sectors and activities such as agriculture and forestry (Daigneault et al, 2019;Mitter et al, 2020;Lehtonen et al, 2021), and scales and places (Frame et al, 2018;Lino et al, 2019;Chen et al, 2020;Gomes et al, 2020;Pedde et al, 2021).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Advancing Relevance, Credibility, Legitimacy, and Effectiveness as a Heuristic for Local-Parallel Scenarios

Cradock-Henry¹,

Frame²

2021

Front. Clim.

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The parallel scenario process provides a framework for developing plausible scenarios of future conditions. Combining greenhouse gas emissions, social and economic trends, and policy responses, it enables researchers and policy makers to consider global-scale interactions, impacts and implications of climate change. Increasingly, researchers are developing extended scenarios, based on this framework, and incorporating them into adaptation planning and decision-making processes at the local level. To enable the identification of possible impacts and assess vulnerability, these local-parallel scenarios must successfully accommodate diverse knowledge systems, multiple values, and competing priorities including both “top down” modeling and “bottom-up” participatory processes. They must link across scales, to account for the ways in which global changes affect and influence decision-making in local places. Due to the growing use of scenarios, there is value in assessing these developments using criteria or, more specifically, heuristics that may be implicitly acknowledged rather than formally monitored and evaluated. In this Perspective, we reflect on various contributions regarding the value of heuristics and propose the adoption of current definitions for Relevance, Credibility, and Legitimacy for guiding local scenario development as the most useful as well as using Effectiveness for evaluation purposes. We summarize the internal trade-offs (personal time, clarity-complexity, speed-quality, push-pull) and the external stressors (equity and the role of science in society) that influence the extent to which heuristics are used as “rules of thumb,” rather than formal assessment. These heuristics may help refine the process of extending the parallel scenario framework to the local and enable cross-case comparisons.

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Extending the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways at the City Scale to Inform Future Vulnerability Assessments — The Case of Boston, Massachusetts

Cited by 9 publications

References 53 publications

Frameworks to envision equitable urban futures in a changing climate: A multi-level, multidisciplinary case study of New York City

Frameworks to envision equitable urban futures in a changing climate: A multi-level, multidisciplinary case study of New York City

Principles and process for developing participatory adaptation pathways in the primary industries

Advancing Relevance, Credibility, Legitimacy, and Effectiveness as a Heuristic for Local-Parallel Scenarios

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