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17winter 2016/2017 + optionswww.iiasa.ac.at While previous scenarios had included population projections, demographers argued that factors like age, sex, and especially education levels are essential for understanding climate change vulnerability and adaptation, and needed to be included in the quantitative projections. KC explains, “Having a more educated population has effects on many other socioeconomic measures. For example, more educated societies have a higher level of productivity. And in societies where there are more highly educated people, technological advancement is faster.” Greenhouse gas emission scenarios were another area where IIASA experts provided major input. IIASA experts from the Energy and Ecosystems Services and Management programs worked together to develop an integrated set of energy and land‑use emissions scenarios, which account for greenhouse gas emissions not just from energy usage, but also from the conversion of forest and grasslands into agricultural lands. “This is important because land‑use related activities including agriculture or forestry are among those most directly impacted by climate change. What happens in these sectors directly influences how resilient the sector is to climate change,” says IIASA researcher Petr Havlík, who led the land‑use side of the projections, working closely with Riahi and colleagues in the IIASA Energy program. “On the mitigation side, the land‑use sector represents 25% or more of the total anthropogenic emissions. How these emissions develop across the different scenarios can change the challenge of mitigation quite substantially.” Other variables calculated for the SSPs included projections of urbanization and energy, and the narratives included trends for other variables. Health, for instance, is one area where researchers expect major impacts from climate change, including rising levels of malaria, diarrheal disease, and undernutrition, depending on the magnitude and pattern of changes in vulnerability and weather patterns. Kristie Ebi, a researcher at the University of Washington, USA, and cochair of the international committee overseeing SSP development, says, “The five SSPs describe development pathways that will lead to different degrees of vulnerability and burdens of climate‑sensitive health outcomes, before considering climate change. For example, SSP1 depicts a world where population health improves significantly, with increased emphasis on enhancing public health and health care functions that, in turn, increase the capacity to prepare for, respond to, cope with, and recover from climate‑related health risks, before considering any impacts of climate change.” The future of the SSPs With the SSPs now published, the scenarios are already in widespread use. At a 2015 meeting at IIASA, researchers presented the scenarios to the wider climate community, who are beginning to work on the next IPCC report, the Sixth Assessment Report 6 (AR6). Riahi says, “We expect that the SSPs will shape climate research in major ways in the next few years, starting with their use for the next generation of climate projections in AR6.” What will be the next step in SSP development? O’Neill says, “From the beginning the idea was that the SSPs should evolve as necessary and adapt to changes in the research agenda or changes with experience in using them.” One idea is to take the SSP scenarios, which were designed at a global level, and scale them down so they can be used for policy making at the national and local levels. IIASA researcher Amanda Palazzo is currently working on a set of food security scenarios for West Africa, where climate change is projected to have major impacts on both crop yields and grasslands. Other researchers are working to improve the representation of inequality, developing data on income inequality within countries, which was not included in the original SSP data. Havlík says, “The narrative, the storyline, of the scenarios is always much richer than what a model or even a set of models can properly take into account at a given point of time. So I think that one of the key future developments will be to try to improve the representation of the narratives in the models and bring more detail into the scenario results.” The SSPs were developed in order to aid in climate research, but researchers say they may prove useful also for other areas, such as biodiversity or for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. Havlík  says, “Other groups could certainly benefit from these scenarios and build on them. I  think that this is kind of a first dimension— we  would like to see these scenarios also taken up by initiatives which are not directly focused on climate.” KL Further info www.iiasa.ac.at/SSPs § Nakicenovic  N, Lempert  R, Janetos  A (eds) (2014).  A  Framework for the Development of New Socio‑economic Scenarios for Climate Change Research. Climatic Change 122(3) [pure.iiasa.ac.at/10985]. § Riahi  K, van  Vuuren  DP, Kriegler  E, et al. (2016). The  Shared Socioeconomic Pathways and their energy, land  use, and greenhouse gas emissions implications: An overview. Global Environmental Change [pure.iiasa.ac.at/13280]. Keywan Riahi riahi@iiasa.ac.at Petr Havlík havlikpt@iiasa.ac.at Samir KC kc@iiasa.ac.at 2020 2040 2060 2080 2100 GDP SSP markers compared to other literature studies SSP markers and non-marker ranges 1960 1980 2000 2020 2040 2060 2080 2100 0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140 GDP Per Capita & Gini Historical development UN urbanization trend to 2050 2000 2020 2040 2060 2080 2100 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.6 0.7 0.5 Gini (SSP markers)