SSPs from an impact and adaptation perspective

The Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) offer benefits for communities concerned with climate change adaptation research and actions (IAV), but some challenges need to be overcome in order to facilitate active IAV involvement in SSP use. This essay summarizes potential benefits, challenges, and possible strategies for enhancing the value of the SSP approach for IAV communities. Uses of the Shared Socioeconomics Pathways (SSPs) and the new climate scenarios by the climate change impact, adaptation, and vulnerability (IAV) research communities have been very limited because of a combination of the characteristics of most IAV research and the framing of SSPs at the outset. Recent refinements of the SSP framework should improve IAV receptivity to the SSP perspectives and tools and encourage engagement in the scenario development process, and ways can be suggested to accelerate this process; but a number of challenges remain to be addressed, many of them by the IAV communities themselves rather than by the SSP development process per se.