Archetyping shared socioeconomic pathways across scales: an application to central Asia and European case studies

Abstract

The complex interactions of drivers represented in scenarios and climate change impacts across scales have led to thedevelopment of multiscale scenarios. Since the recent development of global shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs), which have startedbeing downscaled to lower scales, the potential of scenarios to be relevant for decision making and facilitate appreciation and inclusionof different perspectives has been increasing, compared with a single-scale global scenario set. However, in practice, quantitativedownscaling of global scenarios results in narratives that are compressed from the global level to fit the local context to enhanceconsistency between global and local scales. We brought forward the concept of scenario archetypes to analyze multiscale SSP scenarionarratives and highlight important diverging assumptions within the same archetype. Our methodology applied scenario archetypesboth as typologies, to allocate specific cases of scenarios into existing scenario archetypes, and building blocks, conceptualized withworldviews from cultural theory. Although global SSPs generally match existing archetypes and tend to be well defined, the sociallyunequal SSPs at subglobal scales are more nuanced, and dominant worldviews are much less straighforward to interpret than in globalscenarios. The closest match was the great transition–sustainability (SSP1) archetype, whereas the most divergent was the market forces–fossil fuel development (SSP5) archetype. Overall, our results highlight the need to improve uptake of bottom-up approaches in globalscenarios to improve appreciation of different perspectives as sought after in multiscale scenarios.