USAID Adaptation Community Meeting: Overview of a New Scenario Framework for Climate Change Research
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Please join us to hear Kristie Ebi of ClimAdapt, LLC and Standford University on Thursday May 15th from 4:00-5:30pm at IRG/Engility, 4th floor conference room, 1211 Connecticut Ave, NW for our monthly USAID Adaptation Community meeting. Kris will speak about the new emissions scenarios that will be used in forthcoming climate work for the IPCC and beyond. The SRES scenarios, developed in The Special Report on Emissions Scenarios, have been used since the early 2000s. To add flexibility to analysis, Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) and Representative Concentration Pathways will be developed separately, enabling analysis of linkages among socioeconomic scenarios and emissions scenarios. Below is Kris’ bio and a longer presentation abstract.
Click here to watch the webinar recording from May 15, 2014.
Presentation abstract: Overview of a new scenario framework for climate change research
The scientific community is developing new integrated global, regional, and sectoral scenarios to facilitate interdisciplinary research and assessment to explore the range of possible future climates and related physical changes; the risks these could pose to human and natural systems, particularly how these changes could interact with social, economic, and environmental development pathways; the degree to which mitigation and adaptation policies can avoid and reduce the risks; the costs and benefits of various policy mixes; residual impacts under alternative pathways; and the relationship with sustainable development. Developing new scenarios for use in impacts, adaptation, and mitigation research requires more than emissions of greenhouse gases and resulting climate change. Scenarios also require assumptions about socioeconomic development, including a narrative, and qualitative and quantitative assumptions about development patterns. An insight recently gained is that the magnitude and extent of greenhouse gas emissions is relatively independent of demographic and socioeconomic development; that is, multiple demographic and socioeconomic development pathways can lead to any particular emission scenario. A relatively wealthy world with high population density could have low greenhouse gas emissions because of policies that encourage energy efficiency and sufficient low emission technology. The opposite also is possible. Therefore, demographic and socioeconomic development pathways can be described separately from the Representative Concentration Pathways and then combined using a matrix architecture into a broader range of scenarios than was possible with the SRES. Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) define the state of human and natural societies at a macro scale. To encompass a wide range of possible development pathways, five SSPs are defined along two axes describing worlds with increasing socioeconomic challenges to mitigation (y-axis) and adaptation (x-axis). They include a narrative storyline and a set of quantified measures that define the high-level state of society as it evolves over the 21st significant climate feedback. The reality that the development pathways may be affected by climate change will be taken into account when combining SSPs with climate change projections to generate a socioeconomic-climate scenario. The new scenario process, although complex, provides a flexible toolkit to facilitate research and assessment that can characterize the range of uncertainty in mitigation efforts required to achieve particular radiative forcing pathways, in adaptation efforts that could be undertaken to prepare for and respond to the climate change associated with those pathways, and in residual impacts.
Speaker bio
Kristie L. Ebi is an independent consultant (ClimAdapt, LLC), Guest Professor at Umea University, Sweden, and Consulting Professor at Stanford University and George Washington University. Effective 1 August, she will join the School of Public Health at the University of Washington. She conducts research on the impacts of and adaptation to climate change, including on extreme events, thermal stress, foodborne safety and security, and vector borne diseases. Her work focuses on understanding sources of vulnerability and designing adaptation policies and measures to reduce the risks of climate change in a multi-stressor environment. She has worked on assessing vulnerability and implementing adaptation measures in Central America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. She is co-chair with Tom Kram (PBL, The Netherlands) of the International Committee On New Integrated Climate change assessment Scenarios (ICONICS), facilitating development of new climate change scenarios. She was Executive Director of the IPCC Working Group II Technical Support Unit from 2009 -2012. She was a coordinating lead author or lead author for the human health assessment for two US national assessments, the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, and the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development. Dr. Ebi’s scientific training includes an M.S. in toxicology and a Ph.D. and a Masters of Public Health in epidemiology, and two years of postgraduate research at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She has edited fours books on aspects of climate change and has more than 140 publications.