Abstract
This paper discusses the role and relevance of a new framework for global
socioeconomic scenarios - shared socio-economic pathways (SSPs) - for climate
change impacts, adaptation and vulnerability (IAV) research. It first provides an
overview of uses of socioeconomic scenarios in IAV studies and identifies the main
shortcomings of earlier global environmental scenarios for IAV analyses. Second, the
paper elaborates on two aspects of the SSPs that need to be improved in order to
enhance their usefulness for IAV studies: the ability to work coherently across spatial
scales and adding additional indicators that are of importance to projections of
vulnerability and adaptive capacity. In addition to standard scenario indicators of
population and gross domestic product, this paper presents a research agenda to add
income distribution, spatial population, health projections and governance indicators to
the SSPs.