Tuesday 21 April 2020, 2.30–3.30 (AEST)
Overview
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the United Nations body tasked with providing the world with a clear scientific assessment on the current state of knowledge on climate change and its potential environmental and socio-economic impacts. The IPCC assessment process has resulted in the most rigorous assessments of climate change in the world. Thousands of experts from around the world participate in the IPCC assessment process by synthesising the most recent developments in climate science, adaptation, vulnerability and mitigation. IPCC assessments and special reports have a strong influence in global negotiations and agreements, such as the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement. 195 countries, including Australia, are members of the IPCC.
In September 2019 the IPCC released its latest special report, the Special Report on the Oceans and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate (SROCC). This report assesses the physical processes and impacts of climate change on ocean, coastal, polar and mountain ecosystems. It also assesses the consequences for human communities, and the options for people to adapt to climate-related changes for a more sustainable future.
Earth Systems and Climate Change Hub researchers are making significant contributions to recent and future IPCC reports as authors and reviewers and in the development of the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report, which will be released from 2021. Contributing to the IPCC assessment and reporting process, both through our science and supporting our researchers as report authors, is one way the ESCC Hub fulfils its role to ensure that Australia’s policies and management decisions are effectively informed by Earth systems and climate change science, now and into the future.
In this webinar, Professor Nathan Bindoff from the University of Tasmania summarises and highlights the significance of key findings from the IPCC Special Report on the Oceans and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate for the oceans and polar regions, and for Australia. Professor Bindoff was a coordinating lead author for the oceans chapter of the report, and a drafting author on the report’s Summary for Policy Makers.
Watch the webinar video
About the presenter
Professor Nathan Bindoff has had an extraordinary career in ocean and climate change science beginning with some of the first papers and methods for analysing the changed and changing state of the oceans. With students he discovered the acceleration of the water cycle from ocean salinity measurements due to climate change, made the first estimates of the high melt rates of the Antarctic ice sheet by the oceans, and wrote some of the first papers on human influence in the oceans. Nathan has had important leadership roles in the three rounds of the IPCC assessment reports, and contributes to Hub Project 5.7: Tracking ocean change – ocean observations and models.