Working Group III (WGIII) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) regularly assesses collections of emission scenarios submitted by the scientific community, linking long-term projections about socio-economic conditions and technology rollout with the changing climate. Current protocols for assembling and evaluating submitted scenarios have been shaped by the IPCC's institutional position at the science-policy interface, particularly its commitment to delivering a policy-neutral scientific assessment. While these protocols allow WGIII experts to address an important array of questions about climate change mitigation, they limit opportunities for drawing policy-relevant information from scenarios in other ways. In preparation to future IPCC reports, this paper considers alternative approaches to the construction and evaluation of WGIII's ensemble. A framework is proposed for clarifying and evaluating the available options, based on three dimensions: ownership , logic , and purpose .
Francesco Nappo (Fri,) studied this question.