Enriching the European shared socio-economic pathways with considerations of biodiversity and nature using a nexus approach

The global climate and biodiversity crises are deeply interconnected, yet current research
and policy frameworks often treat them in isolation. The widely used Shared Socio-economic
Pathways (SSPs), which underpin climate change assessments and guide policy, exemplify this gap:
they neglect biodiversity and nature, overlooking critical feedbacks between socio-economic and
environmental systems. This omission constrains options for addressing both crises simultaneously
and obscures cascading risks. We address this gap through a co-creation process at the European
scale, enriching the European-SSPs with considerations of biodiversity and nature using a nexus
approach (spanning biodiversity, energy, food, health, water, and transport). We compare the
original and enriched narratives through a systems analysis, revealing a substantial increase in
system complexity that shifts the relative significance of indirect drivers across SSPs due to novel
feedbacks with biodiversity and other sectors. For example, across several scenarios economic and
technological development reinforce unsustainable resource extraction, even if partially oriented
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toward sustainability. In contrast, governance, environmental respect and social cohesion prove
critical to enabling positive outcomes for biodiversity but can also perpetuate biodiversity loss if not
fully aligned with environmental goals. These findings highlight the need for adaptive approaches
that respond to emergent socio-economic conditions and systemic policymaking that accompanies
technical interventions with improvements in governance. They also demonstrate how ‘biodiversity-
centric’ scenarios can strengthen the IPCC scenario framework by capturing critical feedbacks
between biodiversity and socio-economic drivers of climate change, enabling more integrated
research and policy.