The Shared Socio-economic Pathways: Trajectories for human development and global environmental change
Recently, a new set of scenarios has been developed called the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs). They represent a set of five different stories (containing both qualitative and quantitative elements) on possible trajectories for human development and global environmental change during the 21st century. The SSPs are described in detailed in a Special Issue of Global Environmental Change.
The SSPs forms a set of comprehensive scenarios supporting environmental and sustainable development research. Each SSPs consists of a narrative of future socio-economic development as well as quantitative data generated by state-of-the-art demographic, economic and integrated assessment models illustrating the narratives. The quantitative information includes projections on wide range of topics such population size, urbanization rates, income, energy use and production, agriculture and land use, emissions and climate change.
The futures described by the SSPs range from a more sustainable development future to a resource-intensive future characterised by regional competition.Together, the set provides information on a wide ranges of futures ranging from those more consistent with sustainable development trends to futures characterized by a strong increase in resource consumption rates, environmental pressure and large challenges with respect to human development. The SSPs can be used in climate change research as well as in other research areas such as biodiversity and sustainable development.
Authors
Specifications
- Publication title
- The Shared Socio-economic Pathways: Trajectories for human development and global environmental change
- Publication date
- 10 September 2016
- Publication type
- Publication
- Magazine
- Global Environmental Change Volume 42, January 2017, Pages 148-152
- Product number
- 2880
