Scenario Development Science Theme
This science theme addresses needs for building informed and combined scenarios and new interdisciplinary projects.
There are two purposes of scenario design:
- Exploring how the physical and natural system responds to single and combined climate intervention strategies
- Creating policy and impact-relevant scenarios to directly inform stakeholders and policy makers
Focus should be therefore given to both purposes, while exploring effects of a set of independent variables, which may include ecosystem and societal well-being metrics rather than global climate metrics. Reframing scenarios to more explicitly target informing decisions is necessary, with more specific emphasis on near-term and rapid response scenarios.
The process of developing policy and impact relevant scenarios, requires convergence between policy - what decisions are there to be made and when and what information is needed to support those - and modeling - what information can be provided, what are the opportunities, limitations and risks of different climate intervention strategies. This science theme needs the involvement of a wide range of disciplines represented to provide a scenario framework that can be used by the community for each of the scenario processes.