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Population from the UK Climate Resilience Programme UK-SSPs project. This dataset contains only SSP2, the 'Middle of the Road' scenario.
This data contains a field for each year. E.g. 'SSP2_2040' is the projection for 2040 within the SSP2 scenario.
There are a small number of features in this data with much higher population values than the majority of features. This can skew the styling, and so if you want to emphasise areas of high density population you may wish to adjust the style settings to account for this.
Data is on a 2km grid using transverse mercator projection, prj4string: “+proj=tmerc +lat_0=49 +lon_0=-2 +k=0.9996012717 +x_0=400000 +y_0=-100000 +a=6377563.396 +rf=299.324975315035 +units=m +no_defs”. Source data was 1km resolution, but for usability it has been converted to 2km resolution.
Indicator | Population |
Metric | Population |
Unit | Headcount |
Spatial Resolution | 2km grid (sourced from 1km grid) |
Temporal Resolution | Decadal |
Sectoral Categories | N/A |
Baseline Data Source | ONS 2019; LCM 2015, Worldpop 2020 |
Projection Trend Source | IIASA; UK SSP urbanisation |
What are Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs)?
The global SSPs, used in IPCC assessments, are five different storylines of future socioeconomic circumstances, explaining how the global economy and society might evolve over the next 80 years. Crucially, the global SSPs are independent of climate change and climate change policy, i.e. they do not consider the potential impact climate change has on societal and economic choices.
Instead, they are designed to be coupled with a set of future climate scenarios, the Representative Concentration Pathways or ‘RCPs’. When combined together within climate research (in any number of ways), the SSPs and RCPs can tell us how feasible it would be to achieve different levels of climate change mitigation, and what challenges to climate change mitigation and adaptation might exist.
Until recently, UK-specific versions of the global SSPs were not available combined with the RCP-based climate projections. The aim of the project was to fill this gap by developing a set of socioeconomic scenarios for the UK that is consistent with the global SSPs used by the IPCC community, and which will provide the basis for further UK research on climate risk and resilience.
More details can be found on the UK SSP project site and in this storymap exploring the UK SSP data.
This dataset forms part of the Met Office’s Climate Data Portal service.