IPCC Scenarios Data Explorer

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What are the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs)?
The Shared Socioeconomic Pathways are a set of scenarios which are central to the work of the UN climate reports produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Why are these scenarios so important for the IPCC report?

How much greenhouse gas emissions the world emits in the coming decades is unknown. It is up to us. It will depend on what people around the world will do now and in the future.

In this situation, it’s helpful to create scenarios that cover a range of possible futures. This is what the ‘Shared Socioeconomic Pathways’ (SSPs) are. SSPs are the possible futures that climate researchers in the IPCC consider in their models.

SSPs do not tell us what the world will look like. Instead, they tell us what the world could look like.

The key aspect of these scenarios is the emissions of greenhouse gases that result. This is the key aspect because that what will determine the future of the climate.

To understand how our emissions might evolve we need to know how the world might change from a socioeconomic and technological perspective. These scenarios therefore differ in their assumptions about socioeconomic and technological development in the coming decades.

The socioeconomic and technological factors that the SSPs include are: population growth, economic growth, urbanization, trade, energy, and agricultural systems. You find all them in the Data Explorer above.

For more details on how SSPs are constructed, Zeke Hausfather has written an excellent explainer for Carbon Brief on this topic.

Summaries of the five Shared Socioeconomic Pathways
There are five key SSPs that are used in the research, and adopted by the IPCC.

Below we provide the full description – as given by the IPCC – of these futures.

In summary, SSP1 provides the most positive scenario for both human development and environmental action. We continue to see improvements in education and health across the world; large reductions in poverty; and a shrinking in global inequalities. This is a scenario in which the researchers at the same time envision that the world is moving into a much more sustainable direction.

SSP5 is similarly optimistic in terms of human development, but achieves this through a large growth in fossil fuels. This is therefore leading to continued large negative effects on the environment.

SSP3 and SSP4 are pessimistic about development: they envision a divided future with high levels of nationalism and large persistent global inequalities as a result. SSP2 sits in the middle of these scenarios: development is not as slow or divided as in SSP3 and SSP4, but progress is slow and unequal.