. "7 Reports from Breakout Groups." Describing Socioeconomic Futures for Climate Change Research and Assessment: Report of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2010.
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Describing Socioeconomic Futures for Climate Change Research and Assessment: Report of a Workshop
ecosystem services, urbanization, and globalization and trade, and they should take a livelihoods approach to development pathways in certain regions and sectors.
There is a need for a few narratives as a framework onto which additional narratives can be added for particular sectors and regions. It is possible to analyze regions and sectors individually only for low degrees of climate change.
There is a need for baseline and policy narratives: no-regrets options, options with regrets, and overshoot situations.
There is a need to identify desired end points for this time frame (i.e., where societies would like to be) and develop scenarios by working backward from those states.
One group member added the need to distinguish global from local scenarios.
IMPACT, ADAPTATION, AND VULNERABILITY ISSUES TO 2100
Ferenc Toth, Rapporteur
Ferenc Toth identified the following themes from the discussion:
It is important in this time frame to examine factors with large inertia, which change mainly in the long term, such as education levels, income distributions, urbanization, resource availability, and expertise. There is a need to encourage research on linkages involving factors about which less is known. It is important to define the core elements of scenarios and add other elements later.
A large number of factors could be included in scenarios. Key foci should be on the driving forces that make a large difference and on combinations of driving forces that would create results that would be difficult to cope with. Many of these relate to the Millennium Development Goals, which could serve as an initial list of forces to consider. Toth noted that, in some cases, efforts to achieve these goals would increase vulnerability (e.g., increased access to constrained drinking water supplies). Many key drivers of impact, adaptation, and vulnerability (IAV) cannot be examined well with current models. Toth noted that the IAV assessments in the Fourth Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) were not linked to reasonable socioeconomic scenarios.
The group raised several concerns with existing scenarios: the lack of a baseline on which to superimpose impacts, the need to incorporate interannual variability in IAV analyses, the difficulty of
