Who's Who
The Allianz Knowledge Site's Who's Who features people and organizations that make a difference in the areas of climate change, microfinance, and demographic change.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
Who are they?
The United Nation's foremost scientific body on climate change
What do they do?
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is famous for its periodic Climate Change Assessment Reports, the world's most influential reports on global climate change. In the report's fourth edition, published in installments during 2007, the IPCC draws a grim picture of climate change. It concludes that recent changes are almost certainly man-made and that a significant reduction of greenhouse gases is necessary to limit the impacts.
The IPCC, however, is not a research body. While it unites the world's leading experts on climate change, its assessments are based on already published scientific literature. Experts gather in four working groups, peer review each other's work,l and mold it into four independent reports that together form the Assessment Report.
The IPCC was founded in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). It is only open to member states of the WMO and UNEP. As an intergovernmental body, the IPCC is under pressure from national governments that try to influence the wording of the summary reports. These summaries draw the most media attention and their editing involves a complicated procedure.
