Socioeconomic Futures Frameworks for Motivating Actions for Sustainability

CALL FOR PAPERS

Socioeconomic Futures Frameworks for Motivating Actions for Sustainability

Journal: Futures

Publisher: Elsevier

Submission Deadline: 3 January 2027

Introduction

Periodic scientific assessments of climate change have been ongoing since 1988 when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was founded. Over nearly 40 years, scenarios underpinning climate change research have evolved from purely quantitative projections to incorporating narratives about key socioeconomic drivers that shape higher or lower emissions trajectories.

The current socioeconomic scenario framework — the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) — expanded the scenario scope to include drivers and indicators for socio-economic challenges to both climate adaptation and mitigation. However, the SSPs predate major global developments reshaping expectations about the future — including the Paris Agreement, net-zero commitments by nearly 145 countries, and significant private-sector investments in the low-carbon transition. These developments suggest that the assumptions embedded in existing scenario frameworks may require updating as the climate community prepares for future scientific assessments anticipated for 2035.

Scope & Significance

Other communities working on sustainable socioeconomic futures have developed influential but distinct approaches — including the Nature Futures Framework from the biodiversity conservation community and the Sustainable Development Goals from international development processes. While all three frameworks address aspects of sustainable futures, their specific foci — climate, nature, and development — are rarely examined together.

This Special Issue seeks specific proposals for how frameworks — or components of frameworks — for creating socioeconomic futures might be changed or evolved. Contributions will also inform a multi-year Scenario Evolution Process connected to the SSPs, which is now underway.

The editors particularly welcome contributions from authors who have not previously engaged with existing scenario frameworks — and especially scholars from the Global South and Indigenous communities whose perspectives are underrepresented.

Key Research Questions

Contributions may address illustrative questions including:

• Whether politicization of environmental challenges and their overlap with human development metrics — such as inequality — suggests reframing socioeconomic futures to center human development outcomes with environmental co-benefits

• Whether increasing geopolitical fragmentation suggests that regional rather than global socioeconomic scenarios may become more useful

• How emerging overlaps between human development, biodiversity loss, and responses to climate change — such as widespread carbon dioxide removal — open opportunities for collaboration across science-policy communities

• How existing frameworks for thinking about sustainable socioeconomic futures might be evolved to better resonate with creative or spiritual anticipatory practices, given that societies hold diverse relationships with the future

List of Topic Areas

Manuscripts are invited on themes including, but not limited to:

1. Evolution and updating of Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) for post-Paris world futures

2. Linking climate, biodiversity, and development in integrated socioeconomic scenario frameworks

3. Nature Futures Framework and its integration with climate and development scenarios

4. SDGs and their relationship to socioeconomic futures and scenario frameworks

5. Regional socioeconomic scenarios — beyond global pathways in a fragmented world

6. Human development-centered futures with environmental co-benefits

7. Nature-based solutions and their implications for socioeconomic scenario design

8. Geopolitical fragmentation and its effects on global sustainability futures

9. Biodiversity-climate-development nexus in future scenario construction

10. Global South and Indigenous perspectives on socioeconomic futures

11. Spiritual, cultural, and creative anticipatory practices in futures research

12. Scenario evolution — minor adjustments to revolutionary reframings

13. Science-policy linkages in socioeconomic futures for sustainability assessments

14. Net-zero transitions and their implications for scenario framework assumptions

15. Interdisciplinary and humanities perspectives on sustainable futures

Guest Editors

Dr. Vanessa Schweizer University of Waterloo, School of Environment, Resources and Sustainability, Canada

Prof. Kristie Ebi University of Washington, Department of Global Health, USA

Dr. Bas van Ruijven International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Austria

Prof. Paula Harrison UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, Lancaster, UK

Dr. Kasper Kok Wageningen University & Research, Earth Systems and Global Change, Netherlands

Key Deadlines

Manuscript Submission Deadline: 3 January 2027
(Authors may submit at any time before the deadline)

Submission Guidelines

Select Article Type:

"VSI: Socioeconomic futures"

in the journal's submission system to ensure submissions are grouped under this Special Issue for the review process.

Contributions may take the form of full-length articles or short communications — and should further develop the intellectual, ethical, or empirical foundations of futures inquiry in either interdisciplinary studies, humanities and social sciences, or in practice and policy settings.

Authors are encouraged to share their submission as preprints on SSRN — a free service connected to Futures — to encourage rapid dialogue across different fields and knowledge traditions.

All submissions must be original and must not be under review elsewhere at the time of submission.

For author guidelines, visit the official Futures journal page on the Elsevier ScienceDirect website.

About the Journal

Futures, published by Elsevier, is a leading international peer-reviewed journal with a CiteScore of 6.8 and Impact Factor of 3.8. It supports open access publishing and is dedicated to advancing research on futures studies, foresight, and long-range planning — providing a global platform for interdisciplinary scholarship exploring how societies, institutions, and communities imagine, anticipate, and shape alternative futures across diverse social, environmental, and technological domains.

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