Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Chair Hoesung Lee. PHOTO/IISD
By PATRICK MAYOYO
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) opened a week-long virtual meeting of experts on Monday to advance preparations of the Synthesis Report, the final product of its current assessment.
Members of the Synthesis Report Core Writing Team will meet virtually from 16 to 20 August 2021 to continue drafting the Synthesis Report, which brings together the key findings of the three Working Group contributions to the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) and the Special Reports prepared by the IPCC in this assessment cycle.
The meeting follows the release of the first part of the Sixth Assessment Report, Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis, by IPCC Working Group I, on 9 August.
With the Synthesis Report, to be finalized in September 2022, the Sixth Assessment Report will provide policymakers with the most up-to-date scientific information related to climate change since the publication of the last IPCC assessment in 2014.
“We saw the enormous public interest in climate change with last week’s release of our latest report. And we also noticed a great deal of demand for an integrated view of climate change issues,” said IPCC Chair Hoesung Lee.
Lee said the meeting to prepare the Synthesis Report will help provide the integrated picture of the latest scientific knowledge of climate change at the end of their assessment.
The meeting is the second official gathering of the AR6 Core Writing Team, although the authors have been meeting virtually on a continuous basis over hundreds of hours since their last official meeting, which also took place virtually at the end of January 2021 because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Since then, the Synthesis Report authors have completed the development of the pre-draft of the Synthesis Report Longer Report, which underwent an internal review from 31 May to 25 July 2021.
In this second official virtual meeting, the authors will consider the 1905 comments received on the pre-draft from 52 internal reviewers. They will consider the development of the report’s Summary for Policy Makers in a focused workshop in October.
The Synthesis Report will integrate the three most recent IPCC Special Reports on Global Warming of 1.5°C, Climate Change and Land, and The Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate, as well as the contents of the three Working Group contributions to AR6: Working Group I – The Physical Science Basis, Working Group II – Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, and Working Group III– Mitigation of Climate Change.
