The UK Climate Resilience Programme ran from 2019 to 2023

UK-SSPs: socioeconomic trajectories for climate resilience research (webinar)

UK Climate Resilience Webinars 2021

Date: 13 January 2021

Speaker:  Jon Stenning (Cambridge Econometrics);  stakeholder response from Paul Sayers  (Sayers & Partners)

See links to videos of webinar and presenter slides below

Abstract

At the international level, several scenario exercises have emerged from the climate change and biodiversity/ecosystem service communities, including the IPCC SRES scenarios and the IPCC community RCP-SSP framework. Many of these global scale scenarios have been interpreted and downscaled to regions, including Europe, and to a lesser extent the UK. A set of downscaled climate projections for the UK has been released based on the RCPs, the UK Climate Projections 2018 (UKCP18). However, no regionally enriched versions of the global SSPs are publicly available for the UK to combine with the RCP-based climate projections. This severely restricts analysis of the impacts and risks associated with multiple drivers relevant to climate change, as well as assessment of the effectiveness or robustness of climate change policy for both adaptation and mitigation. The UK-SSPs project seeks to address this gap, through detailing UK-specific versions of the global SSPs, and further extending these to include nation-level narratives, alongside spatially detailed semi-quantitative trends and quantitative data for a range of indicators.

Biographies

Jon Stenning is an associate director at Cambridge Econometrics, where he leads the Environment team, with overall responsibility for work on energy and climate. He specialises in distilling complex economic and econometric analysis into policy-relevant messages. He is the principal investigator on the ­UK-SSPs project. He in involved in a number of Horizon2020 research projects, and his day-to-day work focusses on the socio-economic impacts of climate change mitigation and adaptation at the local, national and global scale.

Paul Sayers is a recognised expert on climate, its impact on flood and coastal risks (at a community, city and regional scale) and the development of resilience and adaptation policies and strategies.   Paul has over 25 years of experience in all aspects of flood, water and  coastal management, including the leading the flood projections for the latest UK climate Change Risk Assessment.  Paul is currently leading exploration of spatially coherent events within the UK Climate Resilience Programme and contributing to the development of UKRC funded OpenClim.

View video links and slide presentations for the webinar: