Navigating the unexpected: The impact of disruptive events on mitigation scenarios

Climate change mitigation strategies face disruption from multiple sources: extreme climate events, socioeconomic crises, geopolitical conflicts, technological breakthroughs, as well as the abrupt transitions and disruptive actions entailed by achieving the stringent Paris Agreement goals. While these disruptive events can fundamentally alter long-term mitigation scenarios, the current literature does not sufficiently assess their implications. Existing long-term mitigation scenario narratives and modelling frameworks, using Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs), lack systematic approaches to analyse their impacts. To address this gap, we introduce the Disruptive Events-Resilient Pathways (DERPs) framework, which provides structured narratives to systematically explore and assess the resilience of climate actions to the impacts of external disruptions and entailed abrupt transitions. To operationalise this framework, we employ multiple IAMs to analyse case studies of distinct disruptions: intensifying heatwaves and droughts affecting energy systems, and the rapid uptake of Direct Air Carbon Capture and Storage (DACCS) technology. Our analysis highlights the inherent limitations of IAMs in capturing the full complexity of disruptive events. We offer novel methodological approaches to overcome them. Our results provide insights into the interplay between the impacts of disruptive events and mitigation scenarios.

We introduce a conceptual framework, alongside qualitative narratives and use cases for validation, to guide the development of Disruptive Events-Resilient Pathways (DERPs). This framework systematically explores the impacts of disruptive events on mitigation and adaptation strategies, allowing to evaluate their resilience to such disruptions. Similar to the widely-adopted SSP scenario framework, which maps socioeconomic developments onto the extent of challenges to mitigation and adaptation (O’Neill et al., 2017), the DERPs framework comprises two dimensions, thereby enabling breaking the developed spectrum into four blocks of narratives, plus an intermediate narrative that reflects current trends. We further reflect on the connection between the DERP and SSP frameworks in the discussion section below. 

The DERP dimensions and underlying narratives draw on concrete examples, to make the framework more comprehensive and comprehensible, but remain sufficiently generalisable to allow the framework to serve as a blueprint for conducting similar types of mitigation and adaptation analyses in the future. In determining the two dimensions of the DERP framework, we benefit from van Ginkel et al. (2020), who had proposed two dimensions for exploring how climate change tipping points can cause socioeconomic tipping points (SETPs). In the DERP framework, the focus shifts from climate change tipping points to disruptive events as the drivers of socioeconomic impacts, and on assessing societal resilience to these impacts. Accordingly, the two dimensions are defined as follows:

• climate action effectiveness: this refers to significant and deliberate change in the way societies and systems transition towards mitigating, or preparing for (i.e. adapting to), climate change
• resilience to socioeconomic impacts: this refers to the capacity to withstand unintended shifts in socioeconomic structures that may occur due to abrupt transitions or insufficient mitigation or adaptation failure, and the resulting climate change impacts.