IPCC Working Group Submits Climate Change Mitigation Report For Final Review

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Working Group III (WGIII) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has delivered the final draft of its contribution to the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) to the member governments of the organization. The report on the mitigation of climate change will be reviewed over the next two months. Governments can submit comments on the Summary for Policymakers until 11 February 2014. The WGIII contribution is scheduled for release in April 2014.


“The distribution of the final draft is a milestone in the assessment process,” said Ottmar Edenhofer, Co-Chair of WGIII. “We are looking forward to receiving the feedback from governments on the Summary as the most widely distributed part of our report.”

In the course of the fifth assessment cycle, two drafts of the contributions of each Working Group have already been submitted to review by Experts and Governments. For the third and final round of review, the full draft is sent to governments, who then submit comments on the Summary for Policymakers (SPM) – the résumé of each Working Group contribution. The SPM is approved in a concluding Plenary Session. The WGIII Plenary will take place in Berlin, Germany, in April 2014.

With an outline of 16 chapters, WGIII has assessed the options for mitigating climate change. About 16,000 comments were submitted by experts in the review of the first order draft. Close to 20,000 comments were received from experts and governments in the second round of review. “The reviews are an essential part of the IPCC’s assessment process,” said Edenhofer, “as they improve the quality of the report and ensure transparency over the full length of the process.”

The authors of the reports’ chapters and summaries consider each comment and provide a written response. All of these considerations will be published along with the final version of the full report.