Abstract Population development is expected to be one of the main drivers of exposure to climate hazards in the future. However, projecting population development is hindered by large uncertainties in how our socioeconomic future may evolve. The common framework of the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSP) was developed to describe different pathways of socioeconomic development. SSP quantifications have been developed for different socioeconomic components, including population. These have been updated in 2024 (Release 3.1) and are provided by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), but only exist at a national scale. However, population projections at a higher spatial level, are vital for spatially explicit exposure and impact assessments and informed adaptation planning. Here, we downscale the new national population projections, for the EU and the United Kingdom (UK), to a resolution of 30 arc s (∼1 km) by extending an existing gravity‐model, which offers an enhanced approach to distribute population for mobility studies, and provides new insights for exposure assessments. Our spatial projections reflect the trends of the national SSP projections. We observe a widespread rural abandonment across the EU and the UK for most of the SSP in our population projections, revealing the socioeconomic inequalities between urban and rural areas spatially. This finding points toward uneven challenges for climate adaptation and the necessity for fair, equitable policies across countries. Further, our projections suggest that the population development is more dynamic at the coast than inland, potentially resulting in larger uncertainties, which need to be considered when planning adaptation.
Bonatz et al. (Sun,) studied this question.