Modelling beyond growth perspectives for sustainable climate futures: The case for rethinking Shared Socioeconomic Pathways

Abstract

IPCC Assessment Reports narrate a particular story of possible futures within a climate constrained world. The Shared Socioeconomic Pathways that are used to model these futures afford economic growth a prominent place, with its absence indicating negative sustainability outcomes. Critical post- and beyond growth perspectives, however, have shown the incompatibility between socially just and environmentally sustainable climate outcomes and compound increases in material and energy use. This Perspective piece outlines the opportunities to rethink Shared Socioeconomic Pathways based on degrowth principles to trouble dominant ways of narrating climate breakdown. Our approach is rooted in the need for future approaches (such as CMIP7) to adopt new economic models that ground climate-changed futures beyond economic growth. We follow recent work by others that has argued for, sketched out, or formulated new approaches to understanding climatic processes using alternative post-growth and degrowth processes; and build on it by outlining what a degrowth-infused Shared Socioeconomic Pathway might look like and highlighting the transformative potential of such an approach.