The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) opened a meeting to approve its next report on the physical science basis of climate change, the first part of the Sixth Assessment Report.
The report, prepared by IPCC Working Group I, will provide the most up-to-date physical understanding of the climate system and climate change, bringing together the latest advances in climate science and multiple lines of evidence. The meeting is being held remotely, the first time that an approval session has been conducted in this format because of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“This report has been prepared in exceptional circumstances, and this is an unprecedented IPCC approval session,” Hoesung Lee, chair at IPCC, said. “This work has required multiple series of virtual meetings across time zones, disrupting daily lives and work rhythms, especially in the most critical phase of the last 16 months as we shaped the final draft.”
The report, Climate Change 2021: the Physical Science Basis, will provide the latest knowledge on past warming and future warming projections, showing how and why the climate has changed to date, and including an improved understanding of the human influence on the climate including extreme events. There will be a greater focus on regional information that can be used for climate risk assessments.
