2024/04/18 by Henrk Carlsen, Sara Talebian, Simona Pedde +1 · 1 voice
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Environmental Science · #Climate Change Policy and Economics #Climate Change and Geoengineering #Sustainability and Climate Change Governance
paper · doi:10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2024.102839
openalex publication_date 2024/04/18 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/26
Scenario development and analysis is an important methodological approach in the assessment of global environmental change. Scenarios are used to assess climate change and its impacts on societies, economies, and ecosystems, and identify, test, and improve policy responses to manage the negative consequences of a changing environment. Evaluation of scenarios, especially global scenarios widely used in the climate research and policy community, is therefore urgently needed. While the quality and usefulness of individual scenarios have been extensively examined through a wide array of criteria, standards for systematic evaluation of scenario sets are only emerging. Scenario diversity (i.e., diversity between individual scenarios in a set) has been advanced as a measure to assess the quality of global scenario sets. In this paper, we use scenario diversity analysis, a systematic and transparent quantitative method, to examine six major global scenario sets with regards to scenario set diversity. Results show that the assessed scenario sets show relatively good performance with regards to scenario set diversity. However, the use of classic methods for building scenario architectures and the number of scenarios included in a set raise important questions about the potential trade-offs between covering a bigger space of futures possibilities and adding redundancy to the scenario set.