Over the past few decades, scenarios and quantitative integrated assessment models (IAMs) have been used to influence climate policy and mitigation strategies. Scenarios contain reasonably plausible combinations of factors that reflect different possible future conditions, and IAMs incorporate mathematical representations of key elements and their connections within and across relevant sectors, environmental processes, resources, and markets to project alternative future outcomes and explore consequences of different policy responses. Together, model-based scenarios and IAMs can provide information to guide decision-making and development of intervention and mitigation strategies, political agendas, and policies to address complex political, social, economic, and environmental problems over various spatial and temporal scales. In practice, scenarios and IAMS often fail to reflect diverse stakeholder perspectives and incorporate many aspects of uncertainty. Further, while scenarios and IAMs may be more relevant when constructed with input from people with diverse perspectives and backgrounds, researchers often struggle to engage a variety of such stakeholders internal and external to the research efforts. Over time, scenarios and IAMs also tend to be applied beyond the intention, boundaries, and considerations underlying their original development, and they can get structurally and institutionally entrenched.

This Research Topic deepens and broadens our collective understanding of the role of stakeholder engagement in IAM and scenario development processes with the goal of raising their quality and their research and policy impact. It tackles the urgent need to improve upon well-established climate change IAM-scenario frameworks to incorporate new important issues and contexts, enhance stakeholder and policymaker relevance by considering factors and sectors other than those directly related to climate change, and better capture the role of uncertainty. There is a particular need to capture more diverse perspectives and voices, particularly from outside of academic and policy elite circles in Europe and the United States.

This Research Topic elevates analyses of both the development processes and the expansion of topical considerations in global scenarios and IAMs. We invite contributions for papers in this collection that:

• present models or case studies of the development, use, and evaluation of participatory stakeholder engagement methods and tools in the global scenarios and IAM development that generated productive, critical, and flexible dialog and decision-making;
• explore how the dynamics of those ‘in the room’ matter for transparent and constructive group processes that incorporate inputs from various stakeholders and include diverse perspectives in the scenario and IAM development;
• describe innovations in sectoral and topical considerations in IAMs and scenarios beyond climate mitigation, such as the development and use of simpler IAMs to complement larger IAMs, and considerations of deep uncertainty.

This Research Topic welcomes the following types of manuscripts: Brief Research Report, General Commentary, Hypothesis and Theory, Methods, Mini Review, Original Research, Perspective, Policy and Practice Reviews, Policy Brief, Review, Systematic Review, Community Case Study, and Conceptual Analysis.

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Frontiers in Environmental Science

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