Bridging biodiversity and climate change scenarios for the future ocean

The shared socio-economic pathways (SSPs) define five scenarios that span a range of socioeconomic development and sustainability. Developed for use by the climate change modelling community and featured in United Nations (UN) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment reports, they provide projections of country level human population and gross domestic product (GDP). The Nature Futures Framework (NFF) was developed by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) and characterizes three biodiversity positive scenarios that prioritize nature for: people, culture or nature. Neither of these scenario frameworks provides storylines or quantitative drivers about fisheries and marine spatial planning for the oceans. To address this gap, the Fisheries and Marine Ecosystem Model Intercomparison Project (FishMIP) developed the ocean system pathways (OSPs) that extend the shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs) to include oceans. Within the sustainability focussed SSP1, we include the three Nature Futures Framework (NFF) scenarios. The ocean system pathways (OSPs) detail qualitative storylines for the shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs) and the Nature Futures Framework (NFF) about the future of fisheries, marine conservation, and fish consumption and provide quantitative drivers for use in climate change and biodiversity modelling projections using marine ecosystem models. The drivers include projections of globally gridded fishing effort by fleet and marine protected area coverage. They also include country level demand for wild and farmed fish. FishMIP is designing ocean system pathway (OSP) biodiversity scenarios for alignment with terrestrial projections of biodiversity through the Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services Scenario-based Inter-Model comparison (BES-SIM). The ocean system pathways (OSPs) have also been designed to address the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) blue transformation initiative for sustainable fisheries management and food security. Finally, FishMIP ocean system pathways (OSPs) allow for comparison across sectors represented in the Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project (ISIMIP), including agriculture, terrestrial biodiversity, and water.