Interpreting the Shared Socio-economic Pathways under Climate Change for the ECOWAS region through a stakeholder and multi-model process

The IPCC community’s Shared Socio-economic Pathways (SSPs) are a set of alternative global development futures focused on drivers of challenges to mitigation of and adaptation to climate change. However, the impacts and drivers of plausible future development at any national or regional level have yet to be examined for consistency within the global narrative. In this paper, we present four globally-consistent regional scenarios on Western Africa’s development that have been used to test and develop a range of national and regional policies. The regional scenarios were outlined independently by regional stakeholders but built around the context of the SSPs. The scenarios were quantified using two agricultural models, GLOBIOM and IMPACT, in interaction with drivers outlined by the SSPs and guided by semi-quantitative information from the stakeholders. Our paper 1) demonstrates how linkages of global SSPs and regional multi-stakeholder scenarios can be achieved through a process of critical comparison, starting from regional priorities, to produce consistent scenarios for future regional development; 2) provides insights for Western Africa on the future of development, agriculture, food security and climate impacts in both qualitative and quantitative scenarios; 3) reports on a set of scalable scenarios for regional decision makers and the scientific community to use to build and test robust agriculture and climate policies.