ONE-CLICK SCENARIO ANALYSIS

Climate scenario analysis provides actionable insights about potential future outcomes and is recommended by the TCFD for reporting purposes. A set of scenarios, Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs), focus on projecting socioeconomic changes and when used alongside the RCPs capture both physical and socioeconomic factors.

What are SSPs?

Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) are based on five distinct narratives for future socioeconomic development. The narratives provide a consistent logic for the qualitative projections of land use, energy use, population, emissions, and other factors, embedded within the scenario.

What are RCPs?

The Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) scenarios are driven primarily by projections of changes in factors such as greenhouse gas emissions and land use change, which directly impact radiative forcing, or the amount of excess energy in the Earth’s system. Since these scenarios center around radiative forcing, they were named for the amount of forcing (in the standard units of W/m2)projected for the year 2100 (RCP2.6, RCP4.5, RCP6.0, and RCP8.5).

Sabine Fuss et al., “Betting on Negative Emissions,” Nature Climate Change 4 (2014): 850–53, https://doi. org/10.1038/nclimate2392.