The Scenarios Forum 2019 will be taking place from 11 to 13 March 2019, at the University of Denver, Denver, CO and has now opened its call for abstracts for one of 40 compelling session topics revolving around the common theme of "Forum for Scenarios and Climate Change".

A rapidly expanding set of activities is extending and applying the new framework on integrated climate change scenarios. Researchers are using Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs), Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs), and other approaches to characterizing future societal and environmental conditions to investigate global change issues, including the Sustainable Development Goals. The Scenarios Forum aims to bring together a diverse set of communities working with the new framework to share their experiences, progress, and plans. 

Within the forum IMPRESSIONS is holding a session to present methods and findings from its case studies that have downscaled and integrated high-end climate (based on the Representative Concentration Pathways, RCPs) and socio-economic scenarios (based on the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways, SSPs) across multiple scales.

The session named "DOWNSCALING AND ENRICHING THE RCP-SSP SCENARIO FRAMEWORK AS A BASIS FOR CO-CREATING INTEGRATED AND TRANSFORMATIVE SOLUTIONS TO HIGH-END CLIMATE CHANGE" will be chaired by IMPRESSIONS co-ordinator Prof Paula Harrison, Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, UK and Prof Timothy Carter, Finnish Environment Institute (SYKE), Finland.

With two confirmed speakers from IMPRESSIONS, the session is now open to further abstract submissions from other projects or case studies that have downscaled and enriched the RCP-SSP scenario framework (both climate and socio-economic information) within the context of multi-scale and multi-sector impact and adaptation assessment for high-end climate change.

Hurry up and apply for session 26: https://www.scenariosforum2019.com/call-for-abstracts/

DEADLINE: 28 Septmber 2018

IMPRESSIONS Invited Speakers: 

Invited speaker 1: Kasper Kok, Wageningen University, The Netherlands & Mark Rounsevell, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany – Developing multi-scale RCP-SSP scenarios for modelling impacts and vulnerabilities to high-end climate change in Europe and Central Asia

Invited speaker 2: Laszlo Pinter, Central European University, Hungary/International Institute for Sustainable Development, Canada & Tiago Capela Lourenço, University of Lisbon, Portugal – Co-creation of adaptation, mitigation and transformation pathways in the context of multi-scale RCP-SSP scenarios

Adaptation Futures 2018, the fifth in the Adaptation Futures international conference series on global adaptation, was recently held in from 18 to 21 June in Cape Town, SA. The conference aimed to facilitate dialogues for solutions between key actors from diverse perspectives and regions and attracted over 1300 scientists, practitioners, business leaders and policymakers from around the world.  

During the event IMPRESSIONS partners held several sessions presenting important scientific results. IMPRESSIONS also had a stand at the event allowing the dissemination of key project results, including the demonstating and collecting feedback about the project's soon-to-be-launched Information Hub, distributing the collaborative High-End Climate Change policy booklet and the project's case study policy briefs.

Come visit us at our @IMPRESSIONS_EU stand with @Voegelvrij @AdaptFutures #AF2018 pic.twitter.com/KWdzGmK1cP

— Katharina Hölscher (@Kath_Hoelscher) June 19, 2018

In June 2018, IMPRESSIONS joined the 5th European Congress of Conservation Biology (ECCB 2018) held in Jyväskylä, Finland, to demonstrate its key deliverables and progress towards puzzling out high-end climate change scenarios and bringing them closer to policy makers and stakeholders.

Themed Planetary wellbeing, the fifth installment of the congress gathered hundreds of conservation biologists and ecologists from around the globe. With a strong presence were the early researchers eager to leave their own novel scientific mark in the improvement of Earth’s health.

Reaching out to young experts with IMPRESSIONS’ findings and know-how could be crucial in resolving knowledge into future-proof and environmentally friendly strategies and practices.

What will the future look like in a high-end #climatechange scenario
(involving temperature increases above 2°C)

Pop by stand C108, #ECCB2018 to pick up a High-end Climate Change booklet or one of our policy briefs to learn about our work!#climate #sustainability https://t.co/CmALlq6c7l

— IMPRESSIONS (@IMPRESSIONS_EU) June 14, 2018

• Compare and explore previously developed visions, scenarios, strategies and modelling across different scales (local, regional, national, European);
• Package innovative solutions by defining robust strategies and combine game changing approaches across scales & scenarios;
• Identify support needs and implications for EU level policy-making.

Careful planning of your weekly food shop, saving on your electricity bills and saying no to yet another straw in your cocktail could be the first steps towards preventing extreme climate change in the future.

Thirty young scientists and practitioners got together for a five-day summer school in Sofia, Bulgaria to work out what are the different ways to prevent and adapt to the possibility of a 7-degrees warmer future.

Placing climate change in the Bulgarian context through EU FP7 project IMPRESSIONS modelling tool, it became evident that a future with extreme climate change might mean that the country will end up deprived of key sectors such as agriculture and tourism.

Climate change is not just about nature and the environment but also about how society is affected and responds and there is a range of actions we can take to go away from extreme climate change.

"When running the model in our group, Bulgaria turned out as the country with the lowest food production in Europe, in contrast to a rather developed sector at the moment," explains Bramka, TU DELFT, the Netherlands.

Steps could be individual for each national and local context and while working out what could be the pathways to a common positive vision, it became evident that in the case of Bulgaria a key strategy would be to work toward more politically engaged and corrective society.

For example, when looking at a scenario featuring destruction of the the Pirin mountain national park , while the government took private investor interests into account and is promising more employment, in the long term for locals, other solutions such as eco-tourism are actually more likely to achieve such goals.

How do the scenarios relate to the situation in Bulgaria? Is it a "Mission impossible", "Artificial happiness" or something else? pic.twitter.com/UKTBG3WEhC

— IMPRESSIONS (@IMPRESSIONS_EU) May 24, 2018

"Destroying the national park could mean a more climate change prone future, which could ultimately destroy winter tourism in the area, currently a main income source there," says local Iliyana Kuzmova.

"We’ve explored both worst-case and very positive scenarios, but we always worked towards a positive vision that would guide us to identify the necessary steps towards getting to a better future," says Prof Paula Harrison, CEH, UK.

"But what also became evident is that the later we take action the more likely we are to end up with unwanted consequences in the future".

The fifth IMPRESSIONS General Assembly took place from 23 to 25 January 2018 at the Parthenope University of Naples in Italy, marking the long-awaited final stage of the project.

Looking back at four years of building, testing and implementing frameworks, methods and models combined with extensive stakeholder engagement, IMPRESSIONS is now entering the last year of its lifetime.

Through knowledge co-creation with decision-makers, IMPRESSIONS aims to improve understanding and assessment of potential impacts from high-end climate and socio-economic scenarios and the need for transformative solutions to reduce risks and vulnerabilities. The project has created pathways of adaptation and mitigation strategies for reducing vulnerability and moving towards a vision of a sustainable future. The pathways explore complex interactions across scales (global, European and regional) and sectors (agriculture, forestry, biodiversity, water, health, urban) in effectively adapting or mitigating potential impacts due to high-end climate and socio-economic change.

Moving towards its finalisation, IMPRESSIONS is now providing an overview of the sensitivities of different sector models across Europe to changes in climate and socio-economic drivers. Additionally, the team is creating quantitative and qualitative comparisons and syntheses, regarding methods and results throughout the project.

What is next?

• A special IMPRESSIONS issue in the journal Regional Environmental Change will feature key project methods, results and conclusions.

• The final results will be available within the exclusive IMPRESSIONS Information Hub in October 2018, right after the end of the project in a range of formats (videos, infographics, practitioner guides).

• A series of policy briefs will provide policy recommendations based on project results.

• A final stakeholder workshop will bring together key actors from all case studies.

• IMPRESSIONS will be part of the 2018 Adaptation Futures Conference with a number of sessions and a dedicated stand.

• A series of videos and infographics will introduce results and findings to a broader audience.

The fifth and last General Assembly took place to gather the IMPRESSIONS team and gave participants the opportunity for a fruitful discussion about the project’s final steps.

Identifying the opportunities and constraints for fundamental transformations in global systems dynamics is key for meeting the UNFCCC CoP21 goal of keeping global warming ‘well below 2 °C and to pursue efforts towards 1.5 °C’ (‘the 2–1.5 °C target’). 

While those systems currently seem to be driving the unsustainable and inequitable use of the Earth's resources, a new IMPRESSIONS- and GREEN-WIN-supported research reviews and introduces the quite opposite notion of positive tipping points as emergent properties of systems, which would allow the fast deployment of evolutionary-like transformative solutions to successfully tackle the present socio-climate quandary.

The new research provides a simple procedural synthesis to help identify and coordinate the required agents’ capacities to implement transformative solutions aligned with such climate goal in different contexts.It also shows how to identify the required capacities, conditions and potential policy interventions which could eventually lead to the emergence of positive tipping points in various social–ecological systems to address the 2–1.5 °C policy target. 

Original source:

Tabara J D, et al. (2018) Positive tipping points in a rapidly warming world. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability.31:120-129. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2018.01.012