Soil Organic Carbon shock (SSP5-8.5)
This layer is a forward-looking scenario variant showing the projected change in soil organic carbon under the SSP5-8.5 pathway — a high-emissions, fossil-fuel-intensive…
Category: Scenario Coverage: Global Format: Raster grid Used in risk analysis: No (contextual layer; not used in materiality scoring)
What it shows
This layer is a forward-looking scenario variant showing the projected change in soil organic carbon under the SSP5-8.5 pathway — a high-emissions, fossil-fuel-intensive development scenario. Soil organic carbon underpins soil fertility, water retention and carbon storage, so projected losses signal places where soil condition and the natural services it supports may be eroded most severely under a high-warming future.
How it is built
This is a scenario projection rather than a present-day observation. Values represent the projected relative change in soil carbon content, expressed as a percentage shift relative to a baseline. The SSP5-8.5 pathway represents a high-emissions, fossil-fuelled future and therefore typically the most severe end of the projected range. The result is delivered as a global grid showing the modelled change in soil carbon stocks.
How to read it
Values express how much soil carbon is projected to gain or lose relative to today under this scenario. More negative values indicate larger projected losses of soil carbon — a greater shock to soil condition — while values near zero or positive indicate stability or gain. Because this is the high-emissions pathway, projected shocks are generally larger than under the sustainable SSP1-2.6 variant, making it useful as a worst-case stress test.
Source
Projected relative change in soil organic carbon under the SSP5-8.5 (fossil-fuelled development) scenario, expressed relative to a baseline. (Formal source attribution pending.)
Comparison with the WWF Risk Filter Suite
The WWF Risk Filter Suite publishes present-day indicators only and does not include forward-looking soil-carbon scenario projections, so this layer has no direct equivalent. It is a temporal/scenario variant of the underlying soil-condition theme that WWF covers (Biodiversity Risk Filter S2_1 Soil Condition) for the present day, extended here to a future high-emissions pathway.
Legend
Symbolised field: SOC shock (%)
Generated from darwin/layers/layer-soc-shock-ssp5.toml and risk_indicator_pairs.toml (develop).