Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) Literature Database, Version 2, 2020-2021 (Preliminary Release)

Long-term global scenarios have underpinned research and assessment of global environmental change for the past decades. The climate change research community has developed a scenario framework combining alternative futures of climate and society to facilitate integrated research and assessment to inform policy. The framework uses the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) and Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs), which together describe alternative visions of how society and climate may change over the coming decades, providing a framework for combining these pathways in integrated studies. Tracking the use of this framework in the literature allows for assessment of how it is being used, whether it is achieving its original goals, and what improvements to the framework would benefit future research. Researchers with the International Committee on New Integrated Climate Change Assessment Scenarios (ICONICS) tracked such literature, assessed analyzed results, and published the SSP Literature Database v1, which covered the articles from 2014 to 2019. The SSP Literature Database v2 contains citations, abstracts, and analyses of 1,134 articles published from 2020 to 2021 that used the SSPs. The articles were obtained from searches of Google Scholar, EBSCO, GeoRef, JSTOR, PAIS, ProQuest, Web of Science, and University of Helsinki’s library catalog. The articles include peer-reviewed publications (journal papers, book chapters) and other literature (working papers, reports, etc.). The database was generated by manual examination of the articles that made substantial use of the SSPs. Each article was then analyzed and coded according to different key tags, including categories of SSP application, the study type of publications, SSPs used in publications, and the societal and climate modeling combinations used. Some progress and specific changes have been made in v2 in light of the advances in the research community, such as the developments of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) to create climate scenarios under the SSPs. Assessments of timeframes, regions, geographies, climate modeling, and data availability are also coded in v2