Periodic scientific assessments of climate change have been ongoing since 1988 when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was founded. Over nearly 40 years, scenarios underpinning climate change research have evolved from being purely quantitative projections to incorporating narratives about key socioeconomic drivers that shape higher or lower emissions trajectories. The current socioeconomic scenario framework for climate change research—the SSPs—expanded the scenario scope to include drivers and indicators for socio-economic challenges to both climate adaptation and mitigation. However, the SSPs predate major global developments that are reshaping expectations about the future. For example, the Paris Agreement aims to keep global surface temperatures to well below 2℃, and subsequent climate policies adopted by governments have helped avert the highest emissions pathways included in the SSP framework (Riahi et al., 2017). By late 2025, nearly 145 countries had announced or were considering “net-zero” emissions targets by 2050 or 2070 (Climate Action Tracker, 2025), and private actors were making significant investments in technological shifts consistent with a lower carbon future (United Nations Environment Programme, 2025). These developments suggest that the assumptions embedded in existing scenario frameworks, such as the SSPs, may require updating as the climate community prepares for future scientific assessments, such as anticipated for 2035.
At the same time, other communities working on sustainable socioeconomic futures have developed influential but distinct approaches to imagining long-term futures. The Nature Futures Framework (Pereira et al. 2020), which emerged from the biodiversity conservation community offers a value-based approach to exploring desirable relationships between humans and nature. The Sustainable Development Goals, in contrast, originated in international development processes and provide a globally recognized set of targets for improving wellbeing, equity, and environmental integrity. While all three frameworks address aspects of sustainable futures, the specific foci of each (climate, nature, and development) are rarely examined together. Their bureaucratic and epistemic siloing shapes which futures are imagined and how actors respond to sustainability challenges.
The SSPs demonstrated one promising way to link climate change and sustainable development by incorporating human development outcomes across societies, technology choices, and political priorities between competition and cooperation. These contrasts map onto different Sustainable Development Goal outcomes, strengthening the conceptual connections between climate and development. However, comparable linkages to biodiversity-rich futures and to frameworks such as the Nature Futures Framework have not yet developed. This may become increasingly important as societies expand their reliance on nature-based solutions for carbon dioxide removal. While such solutions offer benefits, industrial-scale deployment risks exacerbating biodiversity pressures if not designed carefully. These and other nexus issues raise critical questions about what is needed from the next generation of socioeconomic futures frameworks to support sustainable actions by public and private actors.
This Special Issue, therefore, seeks specific proposals for how frameworks (or components of frameworks) for creating socioeconomic futures might be changed or evolved. Contributions may take the form of full-length articles or short communications and should further develop the intellectual, ethical or empirical foundations of futures inquiry in either interdisciplinary studies, humanities and social sciences, or in practice and policy settings. Contributions will also inform a multi-year Scenario Evolution Process connected to the SSPs, which is now underway (see the website Scenario Evolution Process). ‘Scenario evolution’ is interpreted broadly to include recommendations for adjustments that may be minor or revolutionary.
Illustrative questions that contributions might address include:
- Whether politicization of environmental challenges—and their overlap with human development metrics such as inequality—suggests reframing socioeconomic futures to center human development outcomes with environmental co-benefits
- Whether increasing geopolitical fragmentation suggests that regional rather than global socioeconomic scenarios may become more useful
- How might emerging overlaps between human development, biodiversity loss, and responses to climate change (such as widespread carbon dioxide removal) open opportunities for collaboration across science-policy communities on the use or development of socioeconomic futures?
- How might existing frameworks for thinking about sustainable socioeconomic futures be evolved to better resonate with creative or spiritual anticipatory practices, given that societies hold diverse relationships with the future?
To encourage rapid dialogue across different fields and knowledge traditions in futures studies, authors are invited to share their submission as preprints on SSRN (a free service connected to Futures). We especially welcome contributions from authors who have not previously engaged with existing scenario frameworks or whose perspectives are underrepresented—particularly scholars from the Global South and Indigenous communities.
Guest Editors
Dr Vanessa Schweizer
University of Waterloo; School of Environment, Resources and Sustainability; Waterloo, ON; Canada
Professor Kristie Ebi
University of Washington, Department of Global Health, Seattle, Washington, USA
Dr Bas van Ruijven
International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Sustainable Service Systems Research Group, Laxenburg, Austria
Professor Paula Harrison
UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, Lancaster, UK
Dr Kasper Kok
Wageningen University & Research, Earth Systems and Global Change, Wageningen, the Netherlands
Manuscript Submission Information
Authors are advised to select the article type of ‘VSI: Socioeconomic futures‘ in the submission system of the journal. This makes sure the submissions are grouped under this special issue for the review process.