Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) describe a set of alternative plausible trajectories of societal development, which are based on hypotheses about which societal elements are the most important determinants of challenges to climate change mitigation and adaptation. SPEED has been working with partners to develop UK versions of the SSPs through a participatory process involving stakeholder workshops, interviews and questionnaires to spatially, temporally and sectorally extend global and European versions of the SSPs.

The UK-SSP products are available to 2100 and comprise:

  1. narratives of socio-economic developments for the UK and four UK nations
  2. system diagrams that visualise the interrelationships between socio-economic drivers within each SSP
  3. tables of semi-quantitative trends in 50 key socio-economic variables
  4. spatially-explicit quantitative projections for key socio-economic variables.

The UK-SSPs products have been jointly developed with Cambridge Econometrics, University of Edinburgh and University of Exeter through co-funding from the Met Office as part of the UK Climate Resilience Programme (DN420214 – CR19-3).

Fact sheets

Scenario fact sheets containing a detailed narrative and system diagram for each of the five UK-SSPs can be viewed by clicking on them below:

Systems diagram videos

Video animations for each of the five scenarios of the UK-SSP project can be watched on YouTube below:

UK-SSP1 – Sustainability

 

UK-SSP2 – Middle of the Road

 

UK-SSP3 – Regional Rivalry

 

UK-SSP4 – Inequality

 

UK-SSP5 – Fossil-fuelled Development

 

Semi-quantitative trends

This document provides semi-quantitative trends for 50 socio-economic variables within each UK-SSP. Trends are categorised into seven categories (very strong increase, strong increase, slight increase, no change, slight decrease, strong decrease, very strong decrease) across three time periods up to 2100.

Download the data for UK-SSP Tables of Semi-quantitative Trends in 50 Socio-economic Variables (pdf).