Global Climate Scenarios

The NE-RESM considers four (4) scenarios of global climate change known as Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) that were developed for the 5th Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change:

  1. RCP 2.6 is representative of scenarios in the literature that lead to very low greenhouse gas concentration levels. It is a “peak-and-decline” scenario; its radiative forcing level first reaches a value of around 3.1 W/m2 by mid-century, and returns to 2.6 W/m2 by 2100. In order to reach such radiative forcing levels, greenhouse gas emissions (and indirectly emissions of air pollutants) are reduced substantially over time (Van Vuuren et al. 2007a).
  2. RCP 4.5 is a stabilization scenario in which total radiative forcing is stabilized shortly after 2100, without overshooting the long-run radiative forcing target level (Clarke et al. 2007; Smith and Wigley 2006; Wise et al. 2009).
  3. RCP 6.0 is a stabilization scenario in which total radiative forcing is stabilized shortly after 2100, without overshoot, by the application of a range of technologies and strategies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions (Fujino et al. 2006; Hijioka et al. 2008).
  4. RCP 8.5 is characterized by increasing greenhouse gas emissions over time, representative of scenarios in the literature that lead to high greenhouse gas concentration levels (Riahi et al. 2007).

 

Each RCP is associated with global datasets of land use change as well as emissions and concentrations of greenhouse gases, aerosols and chemically active gases.

The RCPs differ from previous generations of global climate change scenarios (such as those described in the IPCC’s Special Report on Emission Scenarios [SRES]) in that they are not limited to a single prescribed socioeconomic storyline. Instead, Socio-economic options are flexible and can be altered at will, allowing considerably more realism by incorporating political and economic flexibility at regional scales. This allows us to test various socio-economic measures for the Northeast Region against the fixed rates of warming built into the RCPs, to see which combinations of mitigation or adaptation produce the most timely return on investment and the most cost-effective response.