Planning the future climate

Two Monash scientists were among the two hundred hand-picked world leading climate scientists who met from 13-17 April in Venice to start the planning process for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report.

Professor David Griggs, Director of the Monash Sustainability Institute, and Professor Christian Jakob, leader of the Monash Weather and Climate Group, were selected from many hundreds of nominated experts to participate in the meeting, which sets the agenda for the next five years of work in the IPCC. The role of the IPCC is to periodically assess the current state of knowledge on the science of climate change, the impacts of climate change and what we need to do to adapt to that change and how we mitigate climate change.

The Venice Scoping meeting is the first step in a process that will culminate in a set of comprehensive reports to be completed in 2013 and 2014. IPCCs previous assessments won them a share in the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change."

Christian Jakob says: "I was thrilled to be selected to attend this meeting. I participated in the discussions on the outline of the next IPCC report on the physical science basis of climate change, which will underpin many of the decisions world governments have to take in the future. Being a climate modeller specialising in clouds, I was particularly pleased to contribute to the design of a chapter dedicated to the important roles clouds and aerosols play in the climate system."

David Griggs says: "I spent my time in a group planning a document called the Synthesis Report. This important report gathers together all the information from all the other reports covering things like science, impacts, adaptation, mitigation and economics and packages it all up in a shorter document aimed at policymakers. It will be a real challenge to compress the key findings from literally thousands of pages of information to a short report written in a style that policymakers will understand. This will be the last report of the set and will not be completed until about April 2014."