Future emission scenarios reveal diverse climate pathways impacting resource availability

Why It Matters

Designers and engineers must consider the long-term environmental context of their work. Understanding potential future climate states, driven by varying emission pathways, allows for more resilient and sustainable design decisions, from material selection to product lifecycle planning.

Key Finding

A comprehensive set of future emission scenarios has been created, offering a broad spectrum of potential climate futures and detailed data for researchers to explore the impacts of different emission levels.

Key Findings

• The developed scenarios span a wide range of end-of-century radiative forcing values, from 1.9 W m−2 to 8.5 W m−2.
• These scenarios are designed to produce statistically significant regional temperature outcomes, maximizing their utility for downstream climate impact studies.
• The dataset includes global, regional, and gridded emissions data products.

Research Evidence

Aim: To develop and provide a harmonized dataset of future anthropogenic emissions trajectories across a range of socioeconomic scenarios to support climate modeling and research.

Method: Data Harmonization and Scenario Development

Procedure: Integrated assessment models were used to generate emissions trajectories for 14 species and 13 sectors under nine distinct socioeconomic scenarios. These trajectories were harmonized with historical data and downscaled to provide higher spatial detail, covering the period through the end of the century.

Context: Climate Science and Global Environmental Modeling

Design Principle

Design for future environmental uncertainty by considering a range of plausible climate futures.

How to Apply

When undertaking long-term design projects, consult climate projection data derived from such emission scenarios to inform material choices, energy efficiency targets, and product end-of-life strategies.

Limitations

The accuracy of future emissions is dependent on the assumptions within the integrated assessment models and the chosen socioeconomic pathways, which are inherently uncertain.

Student Guide (IB Design Technology)

Simple Explanation: Scientists have created different possible futures for how much pollution the world might produce, showing how much the planet could warm up based on different choices people and societies make.

Why This Matters: Understanding potential future climate conditions is crucial for designing products and systems that will remain functional, relevant, and sustainable over their intended lifespan.

Critical Thinking: How might the inherent uncertainties in predicting future socioeconomic development impact the reliability of these emissions scenarios for long-term design planning?

IA-Ready Paragraph: The research by Gidden et al. (2019) provides a suite of harmonized global emissions trajectories across diverse socioeconomic scenarios, offering a critical dataset for understanding potential future climate states. This research is valuable for design projects aiming to assess long-term environmental impacts and resource availability, as it quantifies a range of radiative forcing outcomes that directly influence global temperature increases and associated environmental challenges.

Project Tips

• When researching future impacts on your design, consider how different global emission scenarios might affect the availability or cost of materials.
• Use the range of climate futures presented to test the robustness of your design's performance under various environmental conditions.

How to Use in IA

• Reference this dataset to justify the selection of specific future environmental conditions for testing the performance or impact of your design solution.

Examiner Tips

• Demonstrate an understanding of how global environmental trends, such as those outlined in emission scenarios, can influence design decisions and product viability.

Independent Variable: Socioeconomic Scenarios, Emissions Species, Emissions Sectors

Dependent Variable: Radiative Forcing, Global Temperature Increase, Regional Temperature Outcomes

Controlled Variables: Historical Emissions Data, Harmonization Methods, Downscaling Techniques

Strengths

• Provides a comprehensive and harmonized dataset for a wide range of future climate pathways.
• The scenarios are designed to be statistically robust for downstream climate modeling experiments.

Critical Questions

• To what extent do these scenarios account for potential technological breakthroughs or unforeseen global events that could alter emission trends?
• How can designers effectively translate the broad climate projections from these scenarios into specific, actionable design requirements?

Extended Essay Application

• An Extended Essay could investigate how specific design materials or manufacturing processes might be affected by the resource constraints or environmental regulations implied by different emissions scenarios.

Source

Global emissions pathways under different socioeconomic scenarios for use in CMIP6: a dataset of harmonized emissions trajectories through the end of the century · Geoscientific model development · 2019 · 10.5194/gmd-12-1443-2019