Review of Socio-Economic Development Pathway Scenarios for Climate Change Adaptation in Indonesia: Disaster Risk Reduction Perspective

Abstract

The work of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on a Special Report on Emission Scenarios has pioneered the methods for greenhouse gas emission scenario associated with socio-economic development pathways in the coming century, followed by other models such as the Shared Socio-economic Pathways (SSPs) in climate change and disaster risk. This scenario is useful to understand how human society develops the future assessment of climate change and to provide possible mitigation and response strategies. This chapter is aimed to review the current status of socio-economic scenario on climate change and disaster and risk reduction effort in scholarly literatures and to identify gaps and opportunities for future research and decision-making based on the reflection of existing Climate Change Adaptation (CCA) and Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) theories and emblematic case studies. We have conducted a semi-structured literature review and content analysis. The result of our analysis revealed that there is still a dearth of study on the application of different models of socio-economic forecasting scenarios to understand how would each pathway affect the vulnerability of certain type of disaster and its potential as a decision-making tool in Indonesia. However, there are opportunities to expand the methods and define socio-economic variables that go beyond the economic indicators (i.e. GDP), such as of welfare, health, education, social capital human development, participation and technology. Challenges are also identified, including the limitation of methodology, availability of data, lack of synergy between CCA and DRR, lack of interdisciplinarity, space for science–policy interface and political support. Future research on SSPs should pay attention to the aspect of multi-hazard approaches to climate change impact, emerging technology and its adverse impacts. We argued that projection is a highly important tool; however, largely reliable at the global scale rather than regional or national scale. To understand that climate variability and change is high, it is important to raise self-awareness on adaptation to future disasters.