ENTICE held its Scenario Design Workshop on 22 September, bringing together experts to help shape robust and forward-looking trade and climate pathways. The event combined keynote presentations with collaborative working sessions, providing valuable guidance for the project’s next steps.
In the first part of the workshop, keynote speakers shared advice with the ENTICE team based on their experience and previous works. They emphasized the need to combine modelling with foresight methods to test scenarios under deep uncertainty, including second- and third-best pathways. They also highlighted the importance of adopting a circular economy lens, integrating sufficiency policies while keeping environment and climate at the core of trade scenarios. Participants then underlined the necessity of representing multiple channels linking trade and climate, such as adaptation, mitigation, leakage, and technology diffusion. They noted that these links work in both directions, since trade influences climate outcomes while climate change and climate policies in turn reshape trade patterns. Finally, they stressed the importance of addressing both direct and indirect carbon leakage and carefully assessing CBAM effects, including reshuffling risks and competitiveness impacts.
The thematic discussions that followed identified four key domains to guide scenario development. In terms of trade, participants highlighted the importance of openness, regulation, standards, technology diffusion, global value chains, resilience, and diversification. For industry, they emphasized market structure, GVC integration, spatial configuration, innovation and technology adoption, with added focus on infrastructure, circularity, resources, and digitalization. The environment discussions focused on GHG emissions, land-use change, biodiversity, critical raw materials, regulation, with new additions such as marine impacts and mining. Last but not least, the socioeconomic drivers group noted as essential factors like technological development, resource endowment, geopolitical context, and cultural demand patterns, with explicit attention given to disruptions and uncertainty.
All working groups agreed that scenarios such as “climate clubs in a fragmented world” and “protectionism deepens, climate coordination collapses” should be prioritized for exploration. Moving forward, ENTICE will shift from a single baseline to families of baselines that capture trade and policy uncertainty. While the SSPs remain a solid structural backbone, participants stressed the need to complement them with trade-aware, regulation-anchored narratives.
This workshop marks an important milestone in ensuring ENTICE’s scenarios are both technically robust and policy relevant, setting the stage for the project’s future research and engagement activities.