The Shared Socioeconomic Pathways and their energy, land use, and greenhouse gas emissions implications: An overview

Abstract

A B S T R A C TThis paper presents the overview of the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) and their energy, land use, and emissions implications. The SSPs are part of a new scenario framework, established by the climate change research community in order to facilitate the integrated analysis of future climate impacts, vulnerabilities, adaptation, and mitigation. The pathways were developed over the last years as a joint community effort and describe plausible major global developments that together would lead in the future to different challenges for mitigation and adaptation to climate change. The SSPs are based on five narratives describing alternative socio-economic developments, including sustainable development, regional rivalry, inequality, fossil-fueled development, and middle-of-the-road development. The longterm demographic and economic projections of the SSPs depict a wide uncertainty range consistent with the scenario literature. A multi-model approach was used for the elaboration of the energy, land-use and the emissions trajectories of SSP-based scenarios. The baseline scenarios lead to global energy consumption of 400-1200 EJ in 2100, and feature vastly different land-use dynamics, ranging from a possible reduction in cropland area up to a massive expansion by more than 700 million hectares by 2100.

Source influence on emission pathways and ambient PM<sub>2.5</sub> pollution over India (2015–2050)

“…Strategies for mitigation of air pollution require understanding pollutant emission, differentiated by emitting sectors and by sub-national regions, representing both present day conditions and future evolution under different pathways of growth and 5 technology change. Future projections of emissions, for climate relevant species, are available in the representative concentration pathway (RCP) scenarios (Fujino et al 2006;Clarke et al 2007; Van Vuuren et al 2007;Riahi et al 2007;Hijioka et al 2008), more recently for the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) scenarios (Riahi et al, 2017;Rao et al, 2017), while primary PM2.5 is included in inventories like ECLIPSE (Klimont et al, , 2018. Inventories developed for HTAP (Janssens-Maenhout et al 2015) address emissions of a suite of pollutants for 2008 and 2010.…”

Demand-side approaches for limiting global warming to 1.5 °C

“…Carbon pricing mechanisms (cap-and-trade schemes or carbon taxes) are often cited as a key part of the policy mix in 1.5°C (or 2°C) mitigation pathways (e.g., Bertram et al 2015;Riahi et al 2017;Rogelj et al 2018;Rogelj et al 2013;Stiglitz et al 2017). In this particular case, stringent policy takes the form of carbon prices that are considerably higher than today.…”

“…Both studies confirm the high degree of uncertainty about future energy use, which is often driven by complex relationships between economic development, technological progress, population growth, behavioral patterns, and policy assumptions (cf. Kriegler et al 2014;O'Neill et al 2017;Riahi et al 2017).…”

Umwelt und Gesellschaft. Herausforderung für Wissenschaft und Politik

“…Durch Zugang zu Bildung erhöht sich zudem die Frauenerwerbsquote, worauf die Geburtenraten sinken, weil die Opportunitätskosten einer weiteren Geburt nun höher ausfallen (Becker, 1981, Schultz, 2001. Bildung interagiert aber auch mit Gesundheit, wenn es um die Verbreitung gesundheitsrelevanter Informationen geht, welche zum Rückgang der Säuglings-und Kindersterblichkeit beiträgt (Dreze & Murthi 2001, Fuchs, Pamuk & Lutz, 2010 (Jiang & O'Neill, 2015), wirtschaftliches Wachstum (Crespo Cuaresma, 2017), Energie-und Bodennutzung (Riahi et al, 2017), aber auch Überschussmor-talität infolge extremer Wetterereignisse (Striessnig & Loichinger, 2015) Migration stellt eine mögliche Adaptionsstrategie bei sich verschlechterten Umweltbedingungen dar (Black et al, 2011, Bremner & Hunter, 2014 …”