Explainer: The CMIP7 emissions scenarios – and how they explore future climate change
Carbon Brief explains the new CMIP7 emissions scenarios, which replace the previous SSPs used in climate modeling. These scenarios update projections based on current policy trajectories and reflect a shift in expectations regarding future coal use and global warming targets.
Why it matters
These models are the foundation for IPCC reports, which guide global climate policy and international agreements.
Share Every six to seven years, climate modelling groups around the world run a coordinated set of simulations that explore how the climate could change in the future.
These simulations form a key line of evidence for future projections used in Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment reports.
They are built around a set of common scenarios – or “pathways” – of future greenhouse gas emissions.
A new set of scenarios has now been published for the seventh phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP7).
These replace the “ shared socioeconomic pathways ” (SSPs) that drove the previous generation of climate models and featured heavily in the IPCC’s sixth assessment report (AR6).
The new scenarios are quite different from their predecessors in a number of notable ways.
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