Shared socio-economic pathways used by the IPCC to project climate futures under different development assumptions.
SSP scenarios, shared socio-economic pathways, are the prospective framework used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its sixth assessment report. They describe different futures of human development, demography, growth, technology, inequality, governance, combined with radiative forcing levels, to project climate evolution to 2100. The nomenclature pairs a socio-economic pathway with a warming level, from the most optimistic, compatible with limiting warming to about 1.5 degrees, to the most pessimistic, leading to high warming. For insurance and reinsurance, the SSPs provide the physical basis on which climate-peril projections are built and, downstream, financial scenarios such as the NGFS ones. They embody the chain linking socio-economic assumptions, physical climate and insurance risk, while carrying the uncertainty inherent in any multi-decade projection of human behaviour and climate systems.
A cyclone frequency projection based on a high-warming SSP leads to far more severe forward-looking pricing than an SSP compatible with the Paris Agreement.
SSP, Shared Socioeconomic Pathways, scénarios SSP, IPCC AR6