Abstract. Climate policy analysis needs reference scenarios to assess emissions targets and current trends. When presenting their national climate policies, countries often showcase their target trajectories against fictitious so-called baselines. These counterfactual scenarios are meant to present future Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions in the absence of climate policy. These so-called baselines presented by countries are often of limited use as they can be exaggerated and the methodology used to derive them is usually not transparent. Scenarios created by independent modeling groups using integrated assessment models (IAMs) can provide different interpretations of several socio-economic storylines and can provide a more realistic backdrop against which the projected target emission trajectory can be assessed. However, the IAMs are limited in regional resolution. This resolution is further reduced in intercomparison studies as data for a common set of regions are produced by aggregating the underlying smaller regions. Thus, the data are not readily available for country-specific policy analysis. This gap is closed by downscaling regional IAM scenarios to country-level. The last of such efforts has been performed for the SRES scenarios (Special Report on Emissions Scenarios), which are over a decade old by now. CMIP6 scenarios have been downscaled to a grid, however they cover only a few combinations of forcing levels and SSP storylines with only a single model per combination. Here, we provide up to date country scenarios, downscaled from the full RCP (Representative Concentration Pathways) and SSP (Shared Socio-Economic Pathways) scenario databases, using results from the SSP GDP (Gross Domestic Product) country model results as drivers for the downscaling process. The data is available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3638137 (Gütschow et al., 2020).
Austrian climate policies and GHG-emissions since 1990: What is the role of climate policy integration?
