SBSTA 62,Bonn, Germany, 17 June 2025
Thank you SBSTA Chair (SBSTA Chair, Adonia Ayebare)
Your Excellencies, distinguished delegates, colleagues and friends, ladies and gentlemen,
First of all, thank you for the invitation to deliver the keynote address at this 17th Meeting of the Research Dialogue.
As the Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – the IPCC – I will also take this opportunity to bring you up to date on the Panel’s work since the seventh assessment cycle began almost two years ago.
It is somewhat ironical that recent IPCC reports have communicated the need for urgency in responding to the manifest risks posed by climate change. Because, as we move from one assessment cycle to another, there is an inevitable hiatus while we prepare our new reports. Where is our sense of urgency? It’s a fair question to ask. We indeed may appear to be the El Niňo of the scientific assessment world – appearing every two-to-seven years.
But unlike El Niňo, we know when our reports will start to appear. We also know their scope, and the key scientific issues and knowledge gaps that they will address. So, let me first of all set out where we are in terms of plans for the seventh cycle, then reflect more on scientific issues linked to attribution, different warming levels and aspects of temperature overshoot, the measurement of impacts and adaptation, and the treatment of sustainable development and equity issues. For a wider take on the Seventh Assessment Report – or AR7 – let me advertise tomorrow’s IPCC side event where representatives of the Working Groups and the Task Force on National Greenhouse Gas Inventories – the TFI – will be setting out their plans.
So, in terms of work under way [SLIDE 2] a Special Report on Climate Change and Cities and a Methodology Repot on Short Lived Climate Forcers have been scoped, the authors have been selected and the first Lead Authors meetings have been held. We plan our first and only special report of the cycle to be approved and released in less than two years, in early 2027 and the Methodology Report in late 2027.
The member governments have agreed upon the outlines of the three Working Group contributions to the AR7 at the Panel’s last plenary in Hangzhou China. We have yet to settle the precise timeline for their production, but they could start appearing in mid-2028, while the Synthesis Report that will conclude the entire cycle must be approved by late 2029.
Alongside the Working Group II report, revised and updated technical guidelines on the assessment of impacts and adaptation will be produced as a distinct product, with a special emphasis on metrics and indicators. And here’s another quick IPCC advert, this matter will be discussed in depth at the mandated event on Friday morning.
And finally, the Panel has yet to agree on the scope of two reports: a Methodology Report on Carbon Dioxide Removal and Carbon Capture and Storage, and the Synthesis Report. We have almost completed work on the Methodology Report in Hangzhou, but have some residual issues to resolve on carbon dioxide and water bodies. The Synthesis Report will be scoped later in the cycle.
Now, turning to the specific scientific topics I mentioned.
For each, I will first set out the state of knowledge from the Sixth Assessment Report, or AR6, then I will show how these issues and knowledge gaps will be treated in the forthcoming reports.
On attribution [SLIDE 3], the very first sentence of the Summary for Policymakers of the AR6 Synthesis Report is a relevant high-level statement: “Human activities, principally through emissions of greenhouse gases, have unequivocally caused global warming”. It couldn’t be clearer. We have high levels of confidence that some type of impacts can be attributed to human activities.
For example, we are highly confident [SLIDE 4] that human activities have caused observable increases in hot extremes. We have concluded that it is likely that human activities [SLIDE 5] are the main driver of the intensification of heavy precipitation. But we have lower confidence regarding human influence on agricultural and ecological drought [SLIDE 6]. And some of that lower confidence is due to lower levels of agreement in the assessed literature. The Seventh Assessment Report will address these lower confidence topics with a view, if it is supported by the evidence, to reaching robust conclusions.
But more work needs to be done to establish whether specific weather or climate events can be attributed to human activities. That’s why the forthcoming Working Group I report [SLIDE 7] will extend the attribution of large-scale changes in the climate system at the global and regional levels to the attribution of local changes and extremes such as tropical cyclones. Working Group I will explore cloud-resolving climate simulations down to the kilometre scale, the greater use of climate emulators and the use of artificial intelligence. Working Group II will extend the assessment of attribution to observed and projected impacts.
Turning to current and projected levels of warming [SLIDE 8], the World Meteorological Organisation, one of our parent organisations, has established that the annually averaged global mean near-surface temperature for the single year of 2024 was 1.55 °C above pre-industrial levels. This does not imply that the 1.5 °C warming level mentioned in the Paris long-term temperature goal has been breached. That is based on the mid-point of a 20-year long-run average. Estimates of current long-run warming averaged over multiple years vary between 1.34 and 1.41 ºC. But there is a 70% chance that average warming over the years 2025-2029 will exceed 1.5 ºC.
Looking forward, a communication challenge remains. There are plausible temperature pathways that can both “exceed” and “limit” warming to 1.5 °C [SLIDE 9]. This slide, based on work by Carbon Brief, shows that a pathway can exceed a given warming level in the short-medium term but still limit warming to that same level by the end of the century.
But to be clear, GHG emissions are still rising, and we are not on track to limit warming to 1.5 °C. This slide [SLIDE 10], from our other parent organisation, UNEP, is based on methods used in the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report combined with updated information. It shows that, even if all the current National Determined Contributions and net zero pledges were to be met in full, warming would at best be just below 2 °C by the end of the century.
The consequences and means of managing so-called overshoot – which means exceeding a specified global warming level, before returning to or below that level through net removals of CO2 from the atmosphere – will be covered in the Seventh Assessment Report. Here, there are significant knowledge gaps. What irreversible impacts, such as species loss, may we suffer if we surpass a given threshold? How will the Earth system, including the biosphere, respond to lower CO2 concentrations and a cooling climate? How well do adaptation options planned today function under conditions at higher levels of global warming?
What techniques and approaches can plausibly result in removals of CO2 from the atmosphere at scale? [SLIDE 11] What might be the wider social, economic and ecological consequences of deploying these options? In the sixth cycle, Working Group III, developed a taxonomy of carbon dioxide removal options, but more exploration is needed.
The scientific challenges cut across all of the IPCC Working Groups. In the seventh cycle, the Working Group I report will be assessing Earth system responses to overshoot [SLIDE 12]. Working Group III will assess a wide range of carbon dioxide removal methods [SLIDE 13]. Working Group II will assess the implications for human and natural systems of deploying these options. And the TFI will be developing methods for estimating emissions and removals associated with Carbon Dioxide Removal.
The seventh cycle will have an enhanced emphasis on impacts and adaptation [SLIDE 14]– though we will certainly not neglect mitigation. Compared to mitigation, adaptation to climate change has lacked the means to measure progress. Adaptation actions are more difficult to separate from wider infrastructure investment and patterns of development. We will shortly start work on revising and updating Technical Guidelines on assessing impacts and adaptation to help to fill that gap, and support the Global Goal on Adaptation. The guidelines will encompass goal setting, risk assessment, planning, implementation, and learning, monitoring and evaluation. And the Working Group II report will, for the first time include a chapter on finance, an indispensable precondition for successful adaptation.
And, overall, we will be paying much more attention to the role that climate action plays in advancing and promoting sustainable development, including and beyond the Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs. In the sixth cycle [SLIDE 15], we showed that those who are most vulnerable to climate change have generally contributed the least of GHG emissions. We also showed [SLIDE 16] that across a range of human and natural systems, options for climate action, both adaptation and mitigation, have more synergies than trade-offs with the SDGs.
In the seventh assessment cycle, there will be a substantial treatment of equity, just transition and the distributional consequences of climate action across the Working Group contributions. Working Group II has a bullet point that is common to all regional and thematic chapters concerning the distributional nature of effects, covering human rights, equity and justice, and impacts on various vulnerable groups. There will also be a chapter devoted to responses to losses and damages disproportionately experienced by vulnerable communities and groups. It will also include ways of categorising and measuring losses and damages.
Working Group III [SLIDE 17] has an entire chapter devoted to sustainable development and mitigation. This comprehensive chapter will include distributional consequences for mitigation actions, synergies and trade-offs with sustainable development objectives, and implications for biodiversity and ecosystems, conservation, and restoration. In addition, the chapter addressing “futures”, which will contain the assessment of published scenarios at different temporal and geographical scales, will focus on both sustainable development and mitigation.
Ladies and gentlemen,
The relevant scientific communities are already working on these topics, and more. So, what does IPCC add? [SLIDE 18] Let me emphasise our unique capacity to assess and synthesise the vast and exponentially growing body of knowledge on climate change, its impacts, and available responses. Every individual scientific paper matters, but it’s only when individual papers are placed in the context of the overall body of evolving knowledge that the entire picture becomes clear. We know how to establish the level of confidence in key findings, draw out different perspectives and strands of thinking, and identify knowledge gaps. The findings in our existing reports are durable, and can be updated by others using methods from approved IPCC reports in light of new and emerging data. And, let me underline that the IPCC findings that are most durable actually concern climate action. I recall our message that every fraction of a degree of warming matters. The many adaptation and mitigation response options we have identified, explored and laid out for policymakers can be implemented now, and in the future, at any level of warming.
And, finally, and very importantly, we forge consensus between representatives of the scientific world and policymakers, the prerequisite for informed and effective policy-making.
It’s a unique and highly successful model – our rigorous assessment methods have paid off in terms of scientific credibility and user acceptance. Indeed, IPCC methods have been used as a model by other bodies, including IPBES. The IPCC – as well as our colleagues in the policy world – faces unprecedented and complex challenges in a turbulent world. But we are confident that our tried and tested ways of working will allow us to rise to these challenges and deliver clear, authoritative, timely and actionable findings for policymakers and other decision-makers over the next few years.
Thank you.