Key role for BRACED in ‘new era’ for IPCC global climate assessment

Earlier this month in Ethiopia, experts in climate science, impacts and adaptation, and mitigation came together to outline the sixth iteration of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report – the global scientific consensus on climate change and its impacts.

As the world steps up to implement the Paris Agreement, the next IPCC assessment report (AR6) will need to shift its focus from world leaders to a new audience made up of city planners, development practitioners, state and local governments, humanitarian organisations, and many others charged with implementing climate change adaptation and resilience strategies.

These voices were heard at an earlier ‘pre-scoping’ meeting on climate risk management, supported by BRACED and other partners, in which 70 practitioners, scientists and policymakers from 32 different countries gathered in Nairobi, Kenya, to inform the scoping process for the IPCC AR6 – particularly Working Group II on impacts and adaptation.

The interactive three-day meeting was co-hosted by the Kenya Red Cross and included a side event with students and future civil society leaders at the University of Nairobi. Participants reflected on the knowledge base on climate risk management, the gaps therein, and generated ideas for how the assessment can address the needs of the most vulnerable.

These included recommendations to continue using the ‘hazard, vulnerability, exposure’ risk framing – a way of separating risk into its determinants – while also more explicitly reflecting the role of governance and capacities of the actors who manage risk.

Another priority was research: It will be critical for scientists to work with practitioners and policymakers to co-produce literature that tackles questions on climate change adaptation coming from the ground.

Programmes like BRACED are already at the forefront of producing this type of research on what works to build resilience – answering the question of how the world will implement the Paris agreement’s adaptation pillar, which includes the global goal of “enhancing adaptive capacity, strengthening resilience and reducing vulnerability to climate change.”

Climate change is already here, and it is impacting communities. Participants emphasised the urgency to integrate past, current and near-term risks along the timescales when decisions are being made instead of focusing on projections 50 to 100 years in the future.

Climate risk management practitioners, like those working on BRACED, can engage in the IPCC process, including as authors and expert reviewers, as sources of research on what works to build resilience, and as an interface between the IPCC assessment process and policy and practice.

Debra Roberts, chief resilience officer for the South African city of Durban and co-chair of Working Group II, called this a “new era for the IPCC” with a focus on “solutions that will help us improve people’s lives and protect critical ecosystems.”

The outcomes of the pre-scoping meeting were published in a report distributed to attendees of the scoping meeting in Addis Ababa in which the suggested outline for the AR6 report was developed. This outline has been forwarded to the respective country focal points and will be finalised by September, when it will be shared publicly.