The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has agreed on the outlines of the three Working Group contributions to the Seventh Assessment Report (AR7) during its 62nd Plenary session, which concluded on Saturday, February 1, 2025, in Hangzhou, China.
The Panel also approved IPCC’s overall budget for 2025.
“Despite the heavy agenda, thanks to the Panel’s ability to build and achieve multilateral consensus, and the tireless work of the IPCC’s scientific Bureau, we now have clarity on the scope of the scientific content. This allows us to put together author teams and kick start our work on the Seventh Assessment Report.” said IPCC Chair, Jim Skea.
From here, governments, observer organisations and IPCC Bureau members will nominate experts to serve as authors.
The Panel’s agreement concludes the initial phase of defining critically important scientific content for the Seventh Assessment Report.
The three Working Group contributions assess the physical science basis of climate change; impacts, adaptation and vulnerability; and mitigation of climate change.
The Panel will consider the outline of the Synthesis Report – the fourth and final instalment of the Seventh Assessment Report – at a later date. The Synthesis Report will integrate the contributions of the three Working Groups and the Special Report produced during the seventh cycle.
It will be released in the second half of 2029 in line with the Panel’s decision from January 2024.
Comprehensive scientific assessment reports are published every five to seven years. The IPCC is currently in its seventh assessment cycle, which formally began in July 2023 with the elections of the new IPCC and Task Force Bureaus at the IPCC’s Plenary Session in Nairobi.
At its first Plenary Session in the seventh assessment cycle – the 60th Plenary Session in Istanbul, Türkiye, in January 2024 – the Panel agreed to produce in this cycle the three Working Group contributions to the Seventh Assessment Report (AR7), namely the Working Group I report on the Physical Science Basis, the Working Group II report on Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability and the Working Group III report on Mitigation of Climate Change.
The Synthesis Report of the Seventh Assessment Report will be produced after the completion of the Working Group reports and released by late 2029.