Framing climate uncertainty: using socio-economic and climate scenarios in assessing climate vulnerability and adaptation

Scenarios have become a powerful tool in integrated assessment and policy analysis for climate change. Socio-economic and climate scenarios are often combined to assess climate change impacts and vulnerabilities across different sectors, and to inform risk management strategies. Such combinations of scenarios can also play an important role in shaping the interaction between experts and other stakeholders, framing issues, and providing a means for making explicit and dealing with uncertainties. Drawing on experience with the application of climate and socio-economic scenarios to a range of climate change assessments and stakeholder groups in the Dutch Climate Changes Spatial Planning programme, the paper argues that differentiated types of climate and socio-economic scenario approaches (top-down, guided and incident-driven) have been applied to different decision-making contexts of stakeholders. Frames and perspectives of stakeholders have become more important in the generation and use of scenarios. Future climate and socio-economic scenario development will continue to be shaped by the need to generate useful information for stakeholders. The paper sets out a research agenda for future scenario development.