The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is an intergovernmental body of the United Nations (UN) that functions as a scientific assessment institution. It was established in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), with its creation endorsed by the UN General Assembly. The IPCC was created to solve the problem of providing policymakers with regular, objective, and comprehensive scientific assessments on the state of knowledge about climate change.
The IPCC does not conduct its own original research but instead assesses and synthesizes existing peer-reviewed scientific literature. Its work is structured around producing comprehensive Assessment Reports approximately every six to seven years, along with Special Reports and Methodology Reports. This work is carried out by three Working Groups: Working Group I (Physical Science Basis), Working Group II (Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability), and Working Group III (Mitigation of Climate Change), plus a Task Force on National Greenhouse Gas Inventories. Reports undergo a rigorous, multi-stage review by thousands of experts and government representatives from its 195 member states.
The IPCC's reports are a key scientific input for the annual climate negotiations held under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). For instance, the First Assessment Report (1990) was decisive in the creation of the UNFCCC, and the Fifth Assessment Report influenced the Paris Agreement (2015). The core structure and mechanism have remained consistent, but the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) cycle concluded recently in March 2023 with the Synthesis Report, and the seventh assessment cycle began in July 2023 with the election of a new Bureau. A recent change in the scientific community that will affect the upcoming AR7 is the elimination of the most extreme climate scenarios, such as RCP8.5, from the framework used for future projections.