Katrina Szetey , Enayat Moallemi, Sabrina Chakori, Brett A. Bryan

Sustainability science is a discipline which is strongly concerned with exploring the achievement of sustainable futures. One way in which this is done is through scenarios. The Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs), developed for climate science, have been widely adopted by modellers to analyse sustainable futures. We question whether the SSPs are fit-for-purpose for examining sustainable transformative futures. We have identified six challenges and propose aligned opportunities synthesised from existing research. These challenges are: the need for a sustainability context in the scenario space; better representation of sustainability challenges in the driving forces which form the scenarios; narrowed scope of storylines due to coupling the scenarios to modelling; constraint of economic futures to growth-only options; the scenarios are not goal-seeking, nor do they consider deep uncertainty; and the scenarios are insufficiently diverse. The inclusion of different driving forces, degrowth scenarios, and a different scenario space, are some of the proposed improvements suggested. Addressing these challenges and rethinking the use of climate-SSPs should be a priority for the sustainability science community, considering how critical scenario-based research is for policy and practice.