Evaluation of existing climate and socio-economic scenarios including a detailed description of the final selection

This deliverable documents the assessment of existing climate and socio-economic scenarios at multiple scales and the selection procedure for the starting set of scenarios. The new global scenarios consisting of Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) and Shared Socio-economic Pathways (SSPs) were selected as a starting point for scenario development. Although using a very recent set of scenarios comes with the risk of using products that might not live up to expectations, the RCP x SSP set is the only sufficiently recent set of global scenarios that extend until 2100, that are directly related to climate change, and that offer socio-economic scenarios of sufficient detail.

The integration of the climate and socio-economic scenarios is in its early stages. Integration of SSPs and RCPs has been discussed with IMPRESSIONS partners. Because there is a strong link between a particular RCP and SSP, it was decided to confront stakeholders in the IMPRESSIONS workshops with climate change (impacts) early in the participatory process and to include their views in the integration process.