64th Session of the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice (SBSTA64), 9 June 2026, Bonn, Germany.
Your
Excellencies, distinguished delegates and colleagues, ladies and gentlemen,
On behalf
of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, thank you for the
opportunity to address the 18
th
Research Dialogue.
Before
focusing on the themes of the Dialogue, allow me to provide a brief update on
the progress of the IPCC´s seventh assessment cycle.
Nearly
three years into the cycle, the scientific content of all our planned reports has
been agreed, and authors have been selected. We already have three reports scheduled
for release next year.
In
about nine months, the IPCC will hold an approval plenary for the 2027 Special
Report on Climate Change and Cities. As we meet here, the Government and Expert
Review of the Second Order Draft of the Special Report and the first draft of
its Summary for Policymakers is under way and will close in the first week of
July.
We
also have approval sessions for two methodology reports scheduled for the
second half of next year. Methodology reports provide guidance to governments
on reporting emissions and removals of greenhouse gases.
The Expert
Review of the First Order Draft of the Methodology Report on Short-Lived
Climate Forcers concluded in February. The report’s third Lead Author Meeting took
place in April, and the Government and Expert Review of the Second Order Draft
will begin in September.
The
authors of the 2027 Methodology Report on Carbon Dioxide Removal Technologies,
Carbon Capture Utilisation and Storage, held their first Lead Author Meeting in
mid-April and will meet again in August.
Meanwhile,
all three Working Groups are progressing their First Order Drafts for Expert Review.
Working Groups I and II held their second Lead Author meetings in April and May,
respectively. Due to the current travel restrictions in the Middle East, Working
Group III held a virtual pre-Lead Author Meeting three weeks ago and plans its
Second Lead Author meeting in September.
This
brings me to the Panel´s pending decision on the timelines for the three
Working Group contributions to the Seventh Assessment Report. I have started consultations
with the IPCC member governments, Bureau members, and the Secretariat on
criteria for assessing timeline options, with a view to reaching consensus at
the IPCC’s next Plenary in October.
As a
scientist myself and the Chair of the IPCC, I cannot overstate the importance
of this decision for the scientific community gathered around IPCC. We have more
than a thousand scientists from every continent and region who volunteer their
time and expertise to work on IPCC reports. They deserve clarity about the
duration of their voluntary commitment to the IPCC, allowing them to plan their
professional and private lives accordingly.
Now
let me turn to three aspects of the Seventh Assessment Cycle relevant to this
Research Dialogue: scenarios, adaptation and Indigenous knowledge systems.
First,
on scenarios. And let me stress from the start that there are no IPCC Scenarios.
There are only published scenarios assessed by IPCC. IPCC does not conduct
research and decided nearly 20 years ago not to engage in scenario development.
Three
years ago, we held a workshop on the
Use of Scenarios in the Sixth
Assessment Report and Subsequent Assessments
. This produced clear
recommendations, directed at both scientific communities engaged in scenario
development, and IPCC itself. These recommendations are now being acted upon
during the seventh cycle.
Importantly,
there will be no single IPCC-endorsed “scenarios database” to support the
Seventh Assessment. Instead, authors aim to assess multiple “community
databases”. Structured community databases, to which modelling teams may submit
scenarios, offer the advantage of common formats and comparability across
scenarios while enhancing diversity and inclusivity.
A
group of authors representing all three Working Groups has just published an
open letter encouraging scenario modelling communities to contribute to such
databases. A number of these databases already exist.
Integrated
Assessment Models and other related models link socio-economic background
assumptions, mitigation pathways and emission outcomes. We can expect hundreds,
if not thousands, of such scenarios to be available for the current IPCC assessment.
Earth
Systems Models, as I expect will be described shortly by Dr. Eleanor O’Rourke,
project climate outcomes at some geographical detail based on emissions
scenarios, or assumptions about radiative forcing. These models are
computationally demanding, and only a small number of scenarios can be run.
In the
Sixth Assessment cycle, IPCC Working Group I drew on five sets of model
simulations, deriving from the sixth Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, or
CMIP 6. The Seventh Cycle will similarly draw on, among other sources, the
CMIP
7 Assessment Fast Track
, driven by seven representative emission scenarios
developed under the Scenario Model Intercomparison Project (ScenarioMIP). My
apologies for all the acronyms!
Note
that the range of emissions covered by the
CMIP 7 Assessment Fast Track
will be narrower than in CMIP 6. The upper end of the range is no longer considered
plausible, partly due to progress in clean energy. At the lower end, due to a lack
of progress in reducing global emissions, many CMIP6 emission trajectories have
become inconsistent with recent trends. However, the range of temperature
responses may not narrow in the same way because of uncertainties in the
physical climate system. We must be very careful to distinguish between
emission scenarios and warming scenarios, a distinction not always evident in
recent commentaries.
Following
the “no single endorsed database” principle, other scenarios may be considered,
such as those covered in PolMIP, the Policy-aligned Model Intercomparison
Project.
Only
Earth System Models can generate output at sufficient detail to drive impact
assessments. At the boundary between Working Groups I and III, reduced
complexity climate models (or “emulators”) can be used to derive global climate
change indicators from the hundreds, or thousands, of published emissions
scenarios generated by Integrated Assessment Models.
All of
these approaches will be assessed in the Seventh Assessment Report.
Now
turning to adaptation. We will be hearing shortly from two of my colleagues
from IPCC’s Working Group II, so let me not steal their thunder. It is now
almost inevitable that we will soon exceed global warming of 1.5 degrees
Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the warming level beyond which risks start
to accelerate. The urgent need to enhance resilience and step up adaptation
efforts is obvious.
So,
what is IPCC planning for the current cycle? The word “adaptation” appears in
three chapter titles of the Working Group II report on impacts, adaptation and
vulnerability. This is three more times than in the sixth assessment cycle.
This signals clearly a new emphasis on climate action. We have chapters which
have not appeared in previous reports on “responses to losses and damages” and
finance.
And,
we are also updating Technical Guidelines, dating from 1994, on assessing
impacts and adaptation. Compared to mitigation, adaptation has lacked the means
to measure progress.
The
update will emphasise indicators, metrics and methodologies. These should
provide useful guidance on planning, including mainstreaming adaptation of a
more transformational character into existing policies and practices. The
guidelines will address learning, monitoring and evaluation, including
adaptation targets, as well as metrics and indicators to monitor and track
progress, uptake and performance.
Finally, let me touch on Indigenous Knowledge Systems. We
are running a side event launching the report of an IPCC
Workshop on
Engaging Diverse Knowledge Systems
in the Bonn Room at 12:00 on Thursday,
11 June. This Workshop, as the title suggests, addressed how IPCC could engage with
Indigenous knowledge alongside local knowledge holders and practitioners,
considering the effective and equitable engagement of Indigenous knowledge
holders and building on experience built up in other fora, such as IPBES.
The Workshop generated a set of recommendations, agreed by consensus among a very diverse group of participants. I won’t go into detail, but these cover
:
the nomination and selection of experts; the discovery and assessment of knowledge; internal mechanisms to promote engagement and participation; capacity building, outreach and partnerships; and, more ambitiously, mandate, structure and membership. I should emphasise that these recommendations belong to workshop participants and have not been endorsed or approved by the Panel itself. But many of the recommendations could be followed up by author teams, Bureau members or Technical Support Units without fundamental changes to IPCC’s modus operandi. If you want to hear more, I invite you to attend Thursday’s side event.
Chair,
I will bring my remarks to a close here.
But to
conclude, the IPCC Seventh Assessment cycle is now well under way and we look
forward to start delivering our reports from early 2027 onwards.
Thank
you.
— Source: IPCC (https://www.ipcc.ch/2026/06/09/ipcc-chair-jim-skea-18th-research-dialogue/)