An assessment of the performance of scenarios against historical global emissions for IPCC reports
Graphical abstract
Section snippets
Introduction and background
Emissions scenarios form a key tool in the scenario-based literature, informing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) assessments (IPCC, 1990, Moss et al., 2010). The history of IPCC assessment reports now covers several generations of emissions scenarios. These include the “1990 IPCC First Scientific Assessment” (SA90), (IPCC, 1990), the “1992 IPCC Scenarios” (IS92) (Leggett et al., 1992), and the 2000 “Special Report on Emissions Scenarios” (SRES) (Nakicenovic and Swart, 2000
Material and methods
We performed a detailed comparison of CO2 emissions and socioeconomic variables for all emission scenario sets used for assessments for IPCC Assessment Reports (from now on, emission scenarios will be mainly referred to as scenarios). We selected five key variables, i.e., CO2 from fossil fuel and industry, population, GDP, total, and fossil primary energy. The variables were chosen because they are key scenario results in all four sets. Developments in population, economic growth, and
Categorizing emissions scenarios: Assumptions underlying the sets
Storylines were developed for the SRES and additionally for the SSPs. The SA90 and IS92 assumptions and quantifications can effectively be related to specific, more extensive narrative descriptions of the later sets. Despite the two earliest sets having more simplified assumptions, we categorize all emission scenarios in five scenario-families based on storylines to compare scenarios across all four sets (Table 2).
The general storylines of the scenario-families do not necessarily reflect the
Discussion
Climate change extends far into the future, making emissions scenarios and associated development in emissions and drivers essential for a broad range of analyses of climatic change mitigation, impacts, and adaptation. Regular evaluations of these scenarios are crucial, as new information about technological and socioeconomic developments becomes available over time, and scenario methods and tools change (Allen, 2003, O’Neill and Schweizer, 2013, van Vuuren et al., 2010). This paper compares
Conclusions
Due to the high relevance of emission scenarios as input for future climate change analyses that informed and shaped IPCC assessments for 30 years, it is relevant to regularly reassess the scenarios to inform future scenario development and the policy debate. Focusing on key variables (CO2 from energy and industry, population, GDP, energy system characteristics), we have compared long-term historical developments of key socioeconomic drivers and greenhouse gas emissions and compared historical
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Jiesper Tristan Strandsbjerg Pedersen: Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Methodology, Writing - original draft, Software, Visualization, Project administration, Validation. Filipe Duarte Santos: Conceptualization, Resources, Supervision, Validation. Detlef Vuuren: Conceptualization, Methodology, Validation. Joyeeta Gupta: Supervision. Ricardo Encarnação Coelho: Investigation, Validation. Bruno A. Aparício: Software, Visualization. Rob Swart: Conceptualization, Methodology, Formal analysis,
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgments
A special thanks to William Pepper (involved in IS92 and SRES developments) for a proof-reading paper review (including a valuable and low-cost language revision), and additionally, for scanning and putting a long lost IS92 report into circulation in the scientific community (available at ResearchGate). The authors would like to thank Paul Chakroff (University of Lisbon) for valuable language review and terminology support, and Andre Oliveira (Climate Change Impacts, Adaptation, and Modelling -
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