2022 Forum on Scenarios for Climate and Societal Futures
Presentation
The Forum on Scenarios for Climate and Societal Futures emerged from the process in the scientific community to develop integrated global, regional, and sectoral scenarios to facilitate interdisciplinary research and assessment across future climates as well as societies. This Scenarios Process is an open, community-wide process that involves a broad range of scenario developers and users.
See full detailed Scenarios Forum 2022 programme
The 2022 edition will be taking place on June 20-21-22 as an in-person and partly online conference at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) and Laxenburg Conference Center in Laxenburg, Austria. The Forum is presented by the International Committee on New Integrated Climate Change Assessment Scenarios (ICONICS) and hosted by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in partnership with IAMC.
The forum brings together a diverse set of communities who are using or developing scenarios for use in climate change and sustainability analysis.
The main focus of the meeting will be the ongoing process of developing, updating and using the so-called “scenarios framework” for fostering integrated climate change and sustainability research. As part of that framework, a new set of societal futures, the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs), has been developed and used by integrated assessment models to produce global energy, land use, and emissions scenarios based on them. Climate models, mainly through CMIP6 ScenarioMIP, have simulated alternative climate outcomes driven by those emission – and derived concentration – scenarios, which add and in some cases update the CMIP5 simulations driven by the older Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs).
Further information on the conference can be found on the Forum on Scenarios for Climate and Societal Futures website.
Irene Monasterolo, Professor of Climate Finance, EDHEC-Risk Institute, has been invited to participate in the Exploring and expanding the cross-border dimensions of the SSPs session, together with Adrien Detges (adelphi), Stefan Fronzek (Finnish Environment Institute), Fanny Groundstroem (University of Helsinki), Nina Knittel (Wegener Center for Climate and Global Change, University of Graz), and Tom Wood (University of Sheffield).
Session Description:
Climate change impacts, adaptation and vulnerability studies tend to confine their attention to impacts and responses within the same geographical region. However, this approach ignores cross-border climate change impacts that occur remotely from the location of their initial impact and that may severely disrupt societies and livelihoods, e.g. through international trade, financial markets and issues related to migration and security. For example, the 2011 flood in Thailand destroyed industrial parks of the electronics sector with wide-ranging consequences for the economy globally through disruptions of supply chains. The potential impacts of a recurrence of a similar event in the future depend on the vulnerability of the region directly affected, but also on what kind of ties and connections with other parts of the world are in place – both aspects can vary greatly under alternative scenarios of the future.
This session attempts to explore how current scenario frameworks such as the Shared Socio-economic Pathways (SSPs) can be used and extended to explore the cross-border dimensions of climate change impacts. How may the connections between countries and regions evolve into the future, how might these affect the propagation of climate change risks across borders, and what are possible responses to these changing risks?
The session will address the following topics:
- A SSP perspective on cascading climate impacts on security and European foreign relations
- Assessing Financial Risks from Physical Climate Shocks: A Framework for Scenario Generation
- Characterizing international connectivity in the SSPs for assessing future cross-border climate change impacts and responses
- Implications of different global development pathways for adaptation to cross-border impacts of climate change in national low-carbon transitions
- The transmission of global climate change via international trade – Insights from a cross-sectoral impact assessment for Austria
- Cross border impacts of extreme climate change scenarios on urban infrastructure system
The session is organized by the EU-funded CASCADES project (CAScading Climate risks: towards ADaptive and resilient European Societies – www.cascades.eu).
