Adaptation Actions for a Changing Arctic: Perspectives from the Barents Area

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Adaptation Actions for a Changing Arctic: Perspectives from the Barents Area

5.2 Scenarios as tools for understanding possible futures

Box 5.1 Global futures: SharedSocioeconomicPathways The new global scenario framework for assessing challenges related to adaptation and mitigation of climate change includes a set of Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) with different assumptions of global development pathways (O’Neill et al., 2014, 2017). The purpose of the SSPs is to highlight the uncertainty space of adaptation and mitigation challenges and to provide a framework for regional, local and sectoral analysis of impacts and response strategies (see Figure 5.1). SSPs are based on different trajectories of change within six broad categories: policies and institutions, human development, demography, technology, and environment and natural resources. Table 5.1 provides some examples of key assumptions for four SSPs. A fifth SSP (not shown in the table) is amiddle-of-the road development path in relation to these four.The assumptions have been used as a basis for developing the storylines of different global futures,which served as boundary conditions for the discussion during the scenario workshops conducted for this assessment (see Section 5.4).

5.2.1 What are scenarios? Scenarios can be defined as “… plausible and often simplified descriptions of how the future may develop based on a coherent and internally consistent set of assumptions about key driving forces and relationships ” (Ash et al., 2010). Scenarios are extensively used as tools for defining potential futures that need to be taken into account in decision-making in, for example, long-term business planning, defense planning, and in many other public policy areas, including environmental assessments. Scenarios come in many different forms and the literature contains a large number of different definitions and frameworks aimed at organizing the plethora of methodologies. One useful way to conceptualize the field is based on the principal questions an actor may want to pose about the future: What will happen? What can happen? How can a specific target be reached? (Börjeson et al., 2006). These three questions can be linked to three different types of scenario: predictive scenarios (sometimes referred to as forecasting or trend analysis), explorative scenarios, and normative scenarios. When working with longer time-horizons, predictive scenarios are not of much use; system dynamics are usually so complex that predictions are unviable at those time-scales. Normative scenarios, which can be used for both shorter and longer time- scales, are targeted towards a desirable future and investigate possible pathways to such futures. Policy scenarios are often normative. Exploratory scenarios usually cover longer time- frames, sometimes up to 100 years. They are constructed for exploring plausible alternative development pathways that allow for assessment over a range of future conditions, and are thus found to be particularly relevant for the purpose of the Arctic Council assessment Adaptation Actions for a Changing Arctic (AACA). Scenarios may be targeted towards a vast range of drivers of change, including economic, ecological, geopolitical, and cultural factors. Since climate change in the Arctic is expected to be rapid and cascading, scenarios that include attention to climate change are seen as particularly salient for this assessment. 5.2.2 Global scenario framework Within the climate change research community, global explorative scenarios have been developed to provide plausible information about how the climate might change based on different assumptions of global socio-economic developments and corresponding scenarios for emissions and concentrations of greenhouse gases (e.g., the ‘SRES report’, IPCC, 2000). Moreover, local scenarios have been used for assessing impacts of future climate change (Berkhout et al., 2002) as well as for climate adaptation planning (Kok et al., 2007; Baard et al., 2012; Carlsen et al., 2012). The climate change community recently developed a new global scenario framework (Moss et al., 2010; O’Neill et al., 2014 and references therein). This includes attention to socio-economic development independent of climate change, which is illustrated by a set of shared socio-economic

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Fossil-fueled Development: Taking the Highway

Regional Rivalry: A Rocky Road

Inequality Energy Use

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Sustainability: The Green Road

Inequality: A Road Divided

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Figure 5.1 The SSPs were developed to cover different challenges in relation to adaptation and mitigation (based on O’Neill et al., 2017).

pathways, the so-called SSPs (see Box 5.1). Climate change as such is captured by another component of the framework: global forcing projections, the so-called Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) (van Vuuren et al., 2011), as described in more detail in Chapter 4.The third component of this framework is Shared Policy Assumptions (SPAs) (Kriegler et al., 2014). The new scenario framework is aimed at facilitating analyses of the pros and cons of impacts and adaptation strategies under common assumptions about future socio-economic development.The initial SSP narratives focus on developments at the global scale, which cannot be translated directly to the regional or local scale, as discussed further in Section 5.4. However, they are useful as common boundary conditions for creating ‘extended SSPs’ for regional or local scales. If used consistently, they can also facilitate comparability between different studies across regions and across sectors.

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