Adaptation pathways and scenarios for climate change research

It is increasingly urgent for human and natural systems to adapt to climate change. Yet, in global assessments of climate change impacts, there is limited understanding of the extent to which adaptation could take place and where, which actors need to adapt the most over what timeframe, and what are current and future limits and barriers to adaptation. These knowledge gaps affect the scope of modeling of climate change impacts and strategies to reduce them, as well as the policy-relevance of scientific model results.

The workshop “Adaptation pathways and scenarios for climate change research” will gather interdisciplinary and diverse experts to collaboratively design tools to help close these knowledge gaps. Specifically, we aim to develop outlines of adaptation pathways embedded in the into Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs). The bulk of the workshop will involve working within smaller thematic groups, to develop scenarios useful for global climate change assessments. These scenarios will span a range of adaptation archetypes to account for diversity in, for example, adaptive capacity, temporal and spatial scales and societal domains. Advancing these scenarios can facilitate comparing (quantitative) adaptation research across different modeling groups and can play a facilitate the synthesis of information for the 7th assessment cycle of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).