Climate Change Scenarios and Socioeconomic Impacts

Climate change scenarios provide structured pathways that combine projected greenhouse-gas emissions with alternative socioeconomic developments to explore potential futures. Such scenarios underpin integrated assessments of global warming, enabling evaluation of physical changes, societal vulnerabilities and adaptation needs. They span a spectrum from ambitious mitigation trajectories to high-emission pathways, each linked to distinct challenges and opportunities for economies and communities worldwide. Socioeconomic impacts manifest through disrupted supply chains, infrastructure stresses, shifts in labour productivity and emerging inequality. Middle-income regions often face acute vulnerabilities due to dependency on climate-sensitive sectors and less diversified trade, whereas high-income consumers may experience sharper cost increases under extreme weather. Conversely, low-income populations may bear disproportionate risks from resource scarcity and health impacts. Scenario frameworks, notably those combining Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) with Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs), facilitate cross-sectoral analysis of mitigation costs, adaptation strategies and policy trade-offs. By integrating climate science with macroeconomic modelling and regional case studies, researchers are increasingly able to quantify both direct and indirect effects of future warming on consumption, inequality and sustainable development targets.

Research from Nature Portfolio

Recent studies have used complex economic models to quantify how weather variability and extremes propagate through global supply chains to affect final-consumer welfare. Simulations indicate that, under future warming, the greatest consumption risks will shift towards high-income countries, driven by elevated trade dependencies and increased seasonality in production. Middle-income nations remain most exposed overall, owing to combined climate and economic characteristics, but targeted resilience building at both local and international scales can mitigate these disparities. Another major contribution employed an ensemble of over ten million radiative forcing trajectories coupled with a reduced-complexity climate model, offering probabilistic bounds on future forcing thresholds. Median projections by 2100 centre around 5.1 W/m2, with low probability tails extending below 2.6 W/m2 or above 8.5 W/m2. Despite their low likelihood, high-forcing scenarios remain instrumental for calibrating damage functions and stress-testing long-term adaptation policies, especially when assessing low-probability, high-impact outcomes beyond the 22nd century.

Climate Change Scenarios and Socioeconomic Impacts publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in climate change scenarios and socioeconomic impacts across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs): Plausible global development trajectories capturing socioeconomic factors such as population, GDP and technological change that shape future greenhouse-gas emissions, adaptation and mitigation challenges.

Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs): Greenhouse-gas concentration trajectories that characterise different levels of radiative forcing by 2100, used to drive climate models.

Radiative forcing: The net change in Earth’s energy balance due to greenhouse gases and aerosols, measured in watts per square metre, indicating the intensity of climate change.

Internal variability: Natural fluctuations in climate arising from interactions within the climate system, affecting the interpretation of forced climate projections.

References

1. Global economic impact of weather variability on the rich and the poor. Nature Sustainability (2024).
2. High radiative forcing climate scenario relevance analyzed with a ten-million-member ensemble. Nature Communications (2024).
3. Halving of the uncertainty in projected warming over the past decade. npj Climate and Atmospheric Science (2024).
4. Quantifying future sanitation scenarios and progress towards SDG targets in the shared socioeconomic pathways. Journal of Environmental Management (2023).
5. The Shared Socioeconomic Pathways and their energy, land use, and greenhouse gas emissions implications: An overview. Global Environmental Change (2017).