REPORTS - SPECIAL REPORTS
IPCC Special Report on Emissions Scenarios

Emissions Scenarios


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Preface

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established jointly by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to assess periodically the science, impacts, and socio-economics of climate change and of adaptation and mitigation options. The IPCC provides, on request, scientific and technical advice to the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and its bodies. In response to a 1994 evaluation of the earlier IPCC IS92 emissions scenarios, the 1996 Plenary of the IPCC requested this Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES) (see Appendix I for the Terms of Reference). This report was accepted by the Working Group III (WGIII) plenary session in March 2000. The long-term nature and uncertainty of climate change and its driving forces require scenarios that extend to the end of the 21st century. This report describes the new scenarios and how they were developed.

The SRES scenarios cover a wide range of the main driving forces of future emissions, from demographic to technological and economic developments. As required by the Terms of Reference, none of the scenarios in the set includes any future policies that explicitly address climate change, although all scenarios necessarily encompass various policies of other types. The set of SRES emissions scenarios is based on an extensive assessment of the literature, six alternative modelling approaches, and an "open process" that solicited wide participation and feedback from many groups and individuals. The SRES scenarios include the range of emissions of all relevant species of greenhouse gases (GHGs) and sulfur and their driving forces.

The SRES writing team included more than 50 members from 18 countries who represent a broad range of scientific disciplines, regional backgrounds, and non-governmental organizations (see Appendix II). The team, led by Nebojsa Nakicenovic of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Austria, included representatives of six scenario modeling groups and lead authors from all three earlier IPCC scenario activities - the 1990 and 1992 scenarios and the 1994 scenario evaluation. The SRES preparation included six major steps:

  • analysis of existing scenarios in the literature;
  • analysis of major scenario characteristics, driving forces, and their relationships;
  • formulation of four narrative scenario "storylines" to describe alternative futures;
  • quantification of each storyline using a variety of modelling approaches;
  • an "open" review process of the resultant emission scenarios and their assumptions; and
  • three revisions of the scenarios and the report subsequent to the open review process, i.e., the formal IPCC Expert Review and the final combined IPCC Expert and Government Review.

As required by the Terms of Reference, the SRES preparation process was open with no single "official" model and no exclusive "expert teams." To this end, in 1997 the IPCC advertised in relevant scientific journals and other publications to solicit wide participation in the process. A web site documenting the SRES process and intermediate results was created to facilitate outside input. Members of the writing team also published much of their background research in the peer-reviewed literature and on web sites.

In June 1998, the IPCC Bureau agreed to make the unapproved, preliminary scenarios available to climate modelers, who could use the scenarios as a basis for the assessment of climatic changes in time for consideration in the IPCC's Third Assessment Report. We recommend that the new scenarios be used not only in the IPCC's future assessments of climate change, its impacts, and adaptation and mitigation options, but also as the basis for analyses by the wider research and policy community of climate change and other environmental problems.

 

Ogunlade Davidson and Bert Metz
Co-chairs of IPCC WGIII


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