London scoping - ukcip

Final Report
97
What is less certain is what will happen to the ‘softer’ emblems of London: double-decker
buses, local markets, carnivals and festivals, local parks and heaths, to name but a few. What
changes and what ‘stays the same’ is determined not simply by inexorable exogenous forces,
therefore, but by social and political consensus on what represents London as a city and is
important in formulating its internal and external identity.
As described in Section 4, the UKCIP02 climate change scenarios are based on a methodology
for thinking forward 50 years developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC, 2000), the Foresight scenarios and their UKCIP derivatives. These provide conceptual
and coherent descriptions of future social, economic and political-policy issues. The UKCIP
scenarios framework has taken social and political values, and the nature of governance to be
fundamental and independent determinants of future change. By examining a continuum scale
between ‘Autonomy’ and ‘Interdependence’ and between ‘Consumerism’ and ‘Community’ the
worldview and subsequent actions of future societies can be constructed. A version of the
typology is shown in Figure 6.1 below (UKCIP 2001). The precise definition of the scenarios is
tailored to the regional character of this study; this is possible because there is no single
‘correct’ definition (they are in the end social constructions which can be formulated in infinite
ways).
Figure 6.1 The Adapted UKCIP Socio-Economic Scenarios
The IPCC has explicitly linked greenhouse gas emissions associated with similar socioeconomic
scenarios to climate change, providing an ‘integrated’ picture of how climate, society
and economy may change (IPCC, 2000; 2001). Although these relate to the global scale, the
links between the IPCC and the UK-based Foresight scenarios allow some interpretation at
regional scales. The Global Markets (GM) and Regional Sustainability (RS) scenarios are
worlds in which greenhouse gas emissions are equivalent to the UKCIP02 Medium-High and