Application of Nested Socioeconomic Storylines for IAV Studies using Biophysical Modeling

Socioeconomic scenarios are important for understanding future societal consequences of climate and weather. The global shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs) represent a new opportunity for coordinated development and application of such scenarios. To this end, we developed a set of qualitative national and sub-national socioeconomic storylines based on the SSPs for the United States and the southeastern United States respectively, to be used by the impact, adaptation and vulnerability (IAV) community to inform national or regional impact studies. In particular, the sub-national storylines can be integrated with future climate scenarios based on the Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs), to develop regional adaptation scenarios in order to explore interactions between disparate climatic and socioeconomic futures with respect to future climate change consequences. This paper demonstrates this process by integrating model-based climate scenarios and socioeconomic storylines within the DSSAT crop model to simulate the impact of climate change on future corn and cotton production in the southeastern United States. The adaptation parameters at the local level include alternative management practices such as irrigation, fertilization, and moving planting windows that may be employed to adapt to regional climate variability and change. The results demonstrate how climate and socioeconomic conditions interact to influence agricultural outcomes resulting in a larger uncertainty space than is generally assumed using climate scenarios alone. Our approach represents a useful framework for applying socioeconomic scenarios to a broad range of regional IAV studies that are internally consistent with the global SSPs.>