Projected land-use changes in the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways: Insights and implications
- PDF / 1,722,179 Bytes
- 10 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 31 Downloads / 200 Views
PERSPECTIVE
Projected land-use changes in the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways: Insights and implications Ronald C. Estoque, Makoto Ooba, Takuya Togawa, Yasuaki Hijioka
Received: 11 November 2019 / Revised: 1 February 2020 / Accepted: 8 April 2020
Abstract The conceptualization of the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) framework represented a major leap in scenario development in the context of global environmental change and sustainability, providing significant advances from the previous scenario frameworks—especially the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report on Emissions Scenarios. It is highly likely that the SSP concept, along with its scenario narratives and their respective results, including land-use change projections, will play a substantial role in the forthcoming Sixth Assessment Report by the IPCC. Here, we offer some insights that could make the SSPs’ projected future changes in global land use more comprehensive and also help improve the interpretability of such projections. For example, instead of focusing on the quantity of each land-use class at various time points which results only in a net change when change is detected between time points, we recommend that the projected gross gains and gross losses in each land-use class across all scenarios should also be considered. Overall, the insights presented could also help pave the way for stronger collaboration between the SSP-climate science community and the land system science community; such collaboration is much needed in addressing the challenges of global environmental change towards a climate-resilient sustainable development pathway. Keywords Climate change Downscaling Land cover Land use Scenario Shared Socioeconomic Pathways
A NEW SCENARIO FRAMEWORK The Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) framework is a new generation of socioeconomic scenarios developed in
conjunction with the Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs), which account for levels of future radiative forcing. Its creation stemmed from a conceptual discussion, about a decade ago, of the next generation of scenarios for climate change research and assessment (Moss et al. 2010). The framework was developed (van Vuuren et al. 2012; O’Neill et al. 2014) and then fully introduced in a Special Section in Volume 42 of Global Environmental Change (2017) that included 15 research articles and one editorial (van Vuuren et al. 2017). The SSP framework considers five scenarios that portray different storylines and chart different roads of global development, taking into account uncertainty in climate change mitigation and adaptation challenges. The five SSPs are summarized in Fig. 1, but they range from SSP 1 (the sustainability/taking the green road scenario) to SSP 5 (the fossil-fueled development/taking the highway scenario) (O’Neill et al. 2017). Each SSP, whether coupled or uncoupled (the baseline) with a certain radiative forcing (i.e., a given RCP), projects future changes in various social-ecological variables from the baseline year of
Data Loading...
