SSP Database SSPs

The Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) and the related integrated assessment scenarios are part of a framework that the climate change research community has adopted to facilitate the integrated analysis of future climate impacts, vulnerabilities, adaptation, and mitigation. The framework is built around a matrix that combines climate forcing on one axis (as represented by the Representative Concentration Pathways) and socio-economic conditions on the other. Together, these two axes describe situations in which mitigation, adaptation and residual climate damage can be evaluated. The final SSPs have been documented in two Special Issues, published in 2014 and 2017, respectively. The “SSP Database” aims at the documentation of these scenario data.

The SSP quantifications build upon the collaborative effort between the Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerabilities (IAV) and IAM community, which have met in a series of meetings and identified a limited set of five SSP storylines/narratives. The narratives describe the main characteristics of the SSP future development pathways. They served as the starting point for the identification of internally consistent assumptions for the quantification of SSP elements. A range of different modeling tools were used to develop quantifications of these storylines, including factors like population, economic development, land use and energy use.