Socio-economic scenarios for climate change impact assessment : a guide to their use in the UK Climate Impacts Programme

Enormous challenges are faced in devising socio-economic scenarios for the assessment of future impacts and there is very little experience to draw upon. Socio-economic scenarios have not been widely used within impacts studies, but this report will serve to encourage their use more widely within the UK Climate Impacts Programme (UKCIP). The aim has been to develop a scenarios framework through which stakeholders are able to reflect upon possible alternative futures and to make sense of what this means for them in the context of climate change impacts. This report presents a toolkit, so that studies can select and develop socio-economic scenarios and apply them within climate impact assessments. The report contains: 1) An explanation of why socio-economic scenarios are required for climate change impact assessment; 2) A presentation of the national level scenarios commissioned by the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR) and developed for the Programme by a team led by SPRU (Science and Technology Policy Research) at the University of Sussex, and comprising the Centre for Social and Economic Research on the Global Environment (CSERGE), the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) and the Policy Studies Institute (PSI). They are linked to scenarios developed for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES) and the scenarios used in the Department of Trade and Industry’s (DTI’s) Natural Resources and Environment Panel of the UK Foresight Programme; and 3) Guidance on the use of socio-economic scenarios at a regional level, drawing on the consultation process during the development of the national level scenarios, along with commissioned papers which review initial experience of their use in some first stage regional studies within UKCIP