A new scenario framework for climate change research: background, process, and future directions

The scientific community is developing new global, regional, and sectoral scenarios to facilitate interdisciplinary research and assessment to explore the range of possible future climates and related physical changes that could pose risks to human and natural systems; how these changes could interact with social, economic, and environmental development pathways; the degree to which mitigation and adaptation policies can avoid and reduce risks; the costs and benefits of various policy mixes; and the relationship of future climate change adaptation and mitigation policy responses with sustainable development. This paper provides the background to and process of developing the conceptual framework for these scenarios, as described in the three subsequent papers in this Special Issue (Van Vuuren et al., 2013; O’Neill et al., 2013; Kriegler et al., Submitted for publication in Climatic Change (2014) 122:363–372 DOI 10.1007/s10584-013-0912-3 This article is part of the Special Issue on “A Framework for the Development of New Socio-economic Scenarios for Climate Change Research” edited by Nebojsa Nakicenovic, Robert Lempert, and Anthony Janetos. K. L. Ebi (*) ClimAdapt, LLC, 424 Tyndall Street, Los Altos, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] S. Hallegatte The World Bank, Washington, DC, USA T. Kram : D. P. Van Vuuren Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL), Bilthoven, The Netherlands N. W. Arnell Walker Institute for Climate System Research, Reading, UK T. R. Carter Finnish Environment Institute (SYKE), Climate Change Programme, Helsinki, Finland J. Edmonds Joint Global Change Research Institute, Baltimore, USA E. Kriegler : T. Zwickel Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Potsdam, Germany this special issue). The paper also discusses research needs to further develop, apply, and revise this framework in an iterative and open-ended process. A key goal of the framework design and its future development is to facilitate the collaboration of climate change researchers from a broad range of perspectives and disciplines to develop policyand decision-relevant scenarios and explore the challenges and opportunities human and natural systems could face with additional climate change.