Representative Concentration Pathway
concentration of emissions scenarios
Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP) are climate change scenarios to project future greenhouse gas concentrations. These pathways (or trajectories) describe future greenhouse gas concentrations (not emissions) and have been formally adopted by the IPCC. The pathways describe different climate change scenarios, all of which were considered possible depending on the amount of greenhouse gases (GHG) emitted in the years to come. The four RCPs – originally RCP2.6, RCP4.5, RCP6, and RCP8.5 – are labelled after the expected changes in radiative forcing values from the year 1750 to the year 2100 (2.6, 4.5, 6, and 8.5 W/m2, respectively). The IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) began to use these four pathways for climate modeling and research in 2014. The higher values mean higher greenhouse gas emissions and therefore higher global surface temperatures and more pronounced effects of climate change. The lower RCP values, on the other hand, are more desirable for humans but would require more stringent climate change mitigation efforts to achieve them.
In the IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report the original pathways are now being considered together with Shared Socioeconomic Pathways. There are three new RCPs, namely RCP1.9, RCP3.4 and RCP7. A short description of the RCPs is as follows: RCP 1.9 is a pathway that limits global warming to below 1.5 °C, the aspirational goal of the Paris Agreement. RCP 2.6 is a very stringent pathway.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Representative Concentration Pathway” as concentration of emissions scenarios. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7314241. The first chronological checks are 1750 and 2014.
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This entry incorporates text from “Representative Concentration Pathway” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.