Pardee Institute’s Director Presents New Climate Scenarios at IAMC Conference

Jonathan Moyer, the director of the Pardee Institute, recently traveled to Seoul, South Korea, to present a paper at the Integrated Assessment Modeling Consortium (IAMC) conference. The paper, titled “Quantifying the roads ahead broadly: forecasts of the SSPs across demographics, conflict, economics, education, health, infrastructure, and governance for 188 countries to 2200,” introduces new Shared Socioeconomic Pathway (SSP) scenarios developed using the International Futures (IFs) model. 

The IAMC is an international consortium of research institutions developing and using integrated assessment models to study global environmental change and socioeconomic development. Its annual meeting is a major forum for exchanging ideas and research on integrated assessment modeling. 

The SSPs are a scenario framework used in various sustainability-related research efforts, including as inputs into the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment. The scenarios show five standard pathways of human and social development in the absence of climate policy or climate change impacts to frame worlds with different challenges to climate mitigation and adaptation.

This new SSP series introduced by Moyer and colleagues at the Pardee Institute represents a broader set of issue areas than the current SSP framework, including dynamically interconnected forecasts of economics, demographics, education, health, infrastructure, and governance. This series is also projected to reach 2150, allowing climate models to forecast granular change in development further into the future compared with existing SSPs that end in 2100.

"The new SSP elements provide a more comprehensive and integrated view of the future," said Moyer. "This will be valuable for researchers studying the impacts of climate change and other global challenges." Future plans include submitting this work for peer review and publication and making the new scenario results available via the IIASA website.