Scenario Compass · Guided Exploration
Navigating Climate Futures
Understanding the feasibility and sustainability of global climate mitigation benchmarks
Primer — What you will explore
- Why we model climate futures
- What the current scenario landscape looks like
- How feasibility and sustainability considerations reshape what 1.5°C requires
Why do we model climate futures?
To limit the negative impacts and consequences of climate change, countries committed in the Paris Agreement to limit climate change to well below 2°C, aiming for 1.5°C.
To understand how to get there – which technologies to scale, how fast emissions must fall, what trade-offs could arise – scientists build climate mitigation scenarios.
A scenario is not a prediction. It is a self-consistent, plausible description of how the world could evolve if certain choices were made and certain conditions hold. Think of scenarios as maps of possible futures.
The current scenario landscape
The Scenario Compass database is what scientists call an 'ensemble of opportunity'. It contains the scenarios that modelling teams chose to submit – not a systematically representative sample of all possible futures.
Figure 1 · The Scenario Map
Scenario count reflects modelling conventions, not real-world likelihood — more is not more probable.
Feasibility and sustainability
Not every path on a map is equally passable. A route that crosses a lake may be geometrically direct but physically impassable.
asks: can this happen? It examines whether a scenario's requirement, for example the pace of technology development, fall within the bounds of what is plausible given current knowledge.
asks: should this happen, given planetary and social limits? It examines whether a scenario stays within ecological boundaries and respects basic social thresholds.
Figure 2 · Feasibility and Sustainability criteria
Checkpoint
What is the difference between a feasibility flag and a sustainability flag?
Reshaping 1.5°C requirements
When you filter the ensemble for both climate targets and sustainability thresholds, the waypoints change significantly.
Figure 3 · Benchmark explorer
Three findings emerge consistently:
- Considering sustainability and feasibility increases short-term ambition.
- Speculative carbon removal (CDR) reliance is significantly reduced.
- Demand-side transformations become essential for 1.5°C compatibility.