The forum brings together a diverse set of communities who are using or developing scenarios for use in climate change and sustainability analysis to:
- exchange experiences, ideas, and lessons learned;
- identify opportunities for synergies and collaboration;
- reflect on the use of scenarios; and
- identify knowledge gaps for future research.
By taking stock of recent progress, reflecting on the use of scenarios in environmental assessments and policy-making, and facilitating further scenario-related research, this meeting will inform the use of scenarios in the preparation for the next cycle of IPCC Assessment Reports (AR7) and help ensure a research base sufficient to inform future national and international assessments as well as policy initiatives, including the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
An important, but not exclusive, 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).
Abstract submission deadline
14 February 2022
