The UK lacks coordinated projections of how environmental drivers and their impacts will change simultaneously over the next decades. SPEED has produced spatially-explicit projections of drivers under different scenarios.
More accurate projections of the future will enable researchers and others to manage the environment better and to avoid unintended consequences.
The research
The SPEED project has driven forward the field of scenario development. For the first time, it provides a set of spatially explicit scenarios for the UK covering multiple drivers of environmental change – social, economic, climate change, land use change, and pollution – that are internally consistent, and aligned with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) community global scenario framework.
In order to provide historically consistent UK climate change data that have high temporal and spatial resolution, and demonstrate a range of possible climate change scenarios, our scientists have developed the CHESS-SCAPE future climate data set. This is derived directly from UK Climate Projections 2018 (UKCP18) and includes a number of SPEED-specific add-ons such as downscaling to 1km resolution. Climate data is daily and provides five different scenarios.
The Shared Socioeconomic Pathways describe a set of alternative plausible trajectories of societal development which are based on hypotheses of which societal elements are the most important in terms of mitigation and adaptation. Outputs produced include storylines, system maps, trends and datasets at 10-yearly time steps for five different scenarios.
Together the climate and socio-economic datasets were used to create six plausible scenario combinations for which projections of land use change were produced. These were created by integrating statistical and process-based models within an agent-based modelling framework. Other models were then used to simulate the impacts of climate, socio-economics and land use on pollution and biodiversity.
The architecture of SPEED lends itself to integration with other complementary datasets such as those describing pesticide and fertilizer use, as well as with data that UKCEH curates on areas such as water resources, water quality and air quality.
The outcomes
SPEED delivers more accurate spatially explicit projections of how environmental drivers are predicted to change under a combination of plausible scenarios. The outputs empower researchers, consultants, agencies, and governments to better manage the environment of the future, and to reduce the risk of unintended consequences of interventions.
An example of the early adoption of outputs from SPEED is Reading University’s study of pollinator futures and the fate of bees. The SPEED scenarios were presented to stakeholders who enriched them with information on pollinator dependent crops and agri-environment schemes. The enriched scenarios helped to improve understanding of how pressures on the environment could change in the future and how this might influence and inform what can be done now and in the years to come.
UKCEH also worked with the former Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy to envisage possible futures that help to frame activities such as achieving net zero, conserving the environment, and developing agriculture.
Comments
“The breakdown of socioeconomic variables and the semi-quantified projections of what these would look like under the five different scenarios were extremely helpful in the development of our land use change scenario narratives, and I particularly liked the animated system maps as a way of telling the narrative of each scenario." Land-Use Systems Scientist, Defra
Customers
Defra, former Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, the UK devolved administrations, University of Reading
Deliverable
A set of spatially explicit scenarios for the UK covering multiple drivers of environmental change – social, economic, climate change, land use change, and pollution – that are internally consistent, and aligned with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) community global scenario framework.
Outcomes
More accurate spatially explicit projections of how environmental drivers are predicted to change under a combination of plausible scenarios. The outputs empower researchers, consultants, agencies, and governments to better manage the environment of the future, and to reduce the risk of unintended consequences of interventions