SSP update and standardized country names for modeling and scenario analysis

[Daniel Huppmann]

Hi openmods,

# Update of the SSP scenarios

As you may know, the modeling community is currently preparing an update of the Shared Socio-economic Pathways (SSP).

As a first step, we are conducting a review process of the basic drivers of the SSPs: projections of GDP and population (including education by age cohort and gender). You can access the first review phase of the SSP update data at https://data.ece.iiasa.ac.at/ssp. The data is currently provided at national as well as at global, R5, R9, and R10 resolution (see the disclaimer on regional resolution), and you also find the basic drivers of the initial SSP scenarios (from 2013) in this Scenario Explorer for easier reference. You will have to create an account at https://manager.ece.iiasa.ac.at if you do not have an account for the IIASA Scenario Explorer infrastructure yet.

You find more information about the review process on the About page of the Scenario Explorer. You can also see the recording and download the slides of a recent IAMC-ICONICS webinar on that page.

Review comments are due by September 8, 2023. You can submit your comments via the Feedback feature in the Scenario Explorer – click on your user name in the top-right corner (after login) to select the context menu.

When giving feedback, please provide the following information:

- Your name and institution

- The source and of projections (the “model” name and scenario)

- The specific region/variable/year where your comment applies

- A detailed description of your comment/remark/question

Please be as precise as possible, e.g.

-> Projections x for country y after year z should be higher, because …

-> Projections x are not consistent with source y …

We are looking forward to your comments and feedback on the first phase of the SSP-update review process.

# Standardization of country names

 

It is a frequent problem in calibration, data preparation and scenario analysis that many modeling teams or sources like the IEA, EIA and Eurostat use inconsistent conventions for country names. As a step towards harmonization, we have added a „countries“-module to our Python package nomenclature-iamc, in the hope of establishing an agreed convention within our community. The implementation builds on the Python package pycountry, which in turn is based directly on ISO-3166 country names.

 

In line with established practice in the IAM community, we added some simplifications and alterations to the ISO standard, like “Bolivia” instead of “Bolivia, Plurinational State of”. The rules for simplications are such that we mainly removed comma from country names (because these can cause headache in csv or yaml formats). We also added Kosovo, which is not recognized by all countries and therefore not included in ISO-3166 (and does not have an ISO3-code).

 

The package also enables simple translation between country-names and ISO2/ISO3 codes - and we also added the special ISO2-codes that the European Commission is using for the UK and Greece...

 

Our hope is that this can be useful and help to harmonize data processing and analysis within the integrated-assessment and energy-modeling community.

 

See https://nomenclature-iamc.readthedocs.io/en/stable/api/countries.html for more information.

Best regards,

Daniel