Advancing national Shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs): A novel procedure applied to develop current Swiss SSPs

• Combined composition- and derivation-based approach to create up-to-date SSPs. • Complied quality requirements result in legitimate, plausible, consistent scenarios. • Proposed procedure provides national SSPs on a new basis. • Up-to-date SSPs include new scenario variant covering new type of societal future. • Broad public and expert participation suitable for national scenarios. Socioeconomic scenarios have become an important instrument for addressing present and potential future environmental challenges. Some of the most widely used socioeconomic scenarios are the global Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs), which were published in 2015 and have been extended to several geographical scales and sectors. Nonetheless, there are several needs for more useful and relevant SSPs. This article presents a novel procedure for developing national SSPs that addresses some of these needs, showing how it applies to Switzerland. The novelty of our procedure is the application of a composition-based scenario development approach (composing new scenarios from scratch) and to combine it with a derivation-based approach (deriving scenarios from existing ones by enriching them with, for example, national specificities) to develop national SSPs. Furthermore, the procedure fulfils three quality requirements for qualitative scenario development—interdisciplinarity, participation, and iterative quality controls—and meets three recommendations for more useful and relevant SSPs—developing SSP variants that are not covered by global SSPs, getting SSPs up to date, and enriching SSPs with perspectives from different societal groups to improve the inclusiveness of scenarios. We develop national SSPs for Switzerland (SSPs-CH) from scratch, incorporating these requirements and recommendations. Our procedure results in a new SSP variant (SSP0-CH: Frugal Switzerland), an altered SSP5 (SSP5-CH: Resource-Intensive Switzerland), and three SSP-CH scenarios that can easily be compared with global scenarios (SSP1, SSP3, and SSP4). No SSP-CH correlates with global SSP2. The process we developed uniquely combines different approaches and methods, and it proves to be viable for providing comprehensive, up to date scenarios.