Current Affairs 2022: Sixth IPCC Report

The vulnerability of exposed human and natural systems has emerged as a significant topic of discussion.

IPCC Report

What is IPCC?

The Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change IPCC is the body of the United Nations for assessing the science related to climate change. International climate change negotiations rely heavily on the information provided by IPCC reports. The IPCC is a group of governments that are members of the United Nations or the World Meteorological Organisation. The IPCC has 195 members at present. There are thousands of people who contribute to the IPCC's work from across the globe. Thousands of scientific papers published each year are assessed by experts who volunteer as IPCC authors in order to provide a comprehensive summary of what is currently known about the drivers of climate change, its impacts and future risks, as well as how adaptation and mitigation can help to mitigate those risks. For the IPCC process to be effective, experts and governments from all over the world must engage in an open and transparent review process in order to guarantee that the report is objective and thorough and that it reflects a varied range of viewpoints and information. The IPCC uses its assessments to determine the depth of scientific agreement in various areas and to identify areas in which additional research is needed to address those concerns. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change does not undertake its own research.

Risk Framing

In all three AR6 Working Groups, the concept of risk is central to their work. Risk framing and the concepts of adaptation, vulnerability, exposure, resilience (including equity and justice), transformation (including resiliency), and transformation (including resiliency) provide an alternative, overlapping, complementary and widely used entry points to the literature assessed in IPCC WGII report.

All three AR6 working groups use risk to understand the increasingly severe, interconnected, and often irreversible impacts of climate change on ecosystems and biodiversity, as well as the differences in impacts across regions, sectors, and communities; and how to best mitigate adverse consequences for current and future generations. In the context of climate change, risk can arise as a result of the dynamic interactions among climate-related hazards, as well as the exposure and vulnerability of affected human and ecological systems, among other factors. 

In addition to being a component of risk, the vulnerability of exposed human and natural systems has emerged as a significant topic of discussion. After previous IPCC assessments, approaches to analysing and assessing vulnerability have progressed significantly. Vulnerability is widely recognised to vary within and across communities, societies, regions, and countries, as well as over time. 

Takeaways from IPCC report 

Changes in global surface temperature are measured in Celsius relative to 1850–1900. In order to obtain these changes, researchers combined CMIP6 model simulations with observational constraints based on past simulated warming, in addition to an updated assessment of equilibrium climate sensitivity.

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