Enriching the European Shared Socio-economic Pathways with considerations of biodiversity and nature using a nexus approach

Abstract

The global climate and biodiversity crises are deeply interconnected, yet current research and policy frameworks often treat them in isolation. The widely used Shared Socio-economic Pathways (SSPs), which underpin climate change assessments and guide policy, exemplify this gap: they neglect biodiversity and nature, overlooking critical feedbacks between socio-economic and environmental systems. This omission constrains options for addressing both crises simultaneously and obscures cascading risks. We address this gap through a co-creation process at the European scale, enriching the European-SSPs with considerations of biodiversity and nature using a nexus approach (spanning biodiversity, energy, food, health, water, and transport). We compare the original and enriched narratives through a systems analysis, revealing a substantial increase in system complexity that shifts the relative significance of indirect drivers across SSPs due to novel feedbacks with biodiversity and other sectors. For example, across several scenarios economic and technological development reinforce unsustainable resource extraction, even if partially oriented toward sustainability. In contrast, governance, environmental respect and social cohesion prove critical to enabling positive outcomes for biodiversity but can also perpetuate biodiversity loss if not fully aligned with environmental goals. These findings highlight the need for adaptive approaches that respond to emergent socio-economic conditions and systemic policymaking that accompanies technical interventions with improvements in governance. They also demonstrate how ‘biodiversity-centric’ scenarios can strengthen the IPCC scenario framework by capturing critical feedbacks between biodiversity and socio-economic drivers of climate change, enabling more integrated research and policy.