• International body for assessing the science related to climate change.
• It was established by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in 1988.
• IPCC, a body of climate experts, is the United Nations body for assessing the science related to climate change.
• The IPCC does not undertake scientific assessments but only evaluates the state of scientific evidence on various aspects of climate change.
• It prepares comprehensive Assessment Reports.

Assessment Report of IPCC

• The Assessment Reports, the first of which had come out in 1990, are the most comprehensive evaluations of the state of the earth’s climate.
• Every few years (about 7 years), the IPCC produces assessment reports.
• Hundreds of experts go through every available piece of relevant, published scientific information to prepare a common understanding of the changing climate.
• The four subsequent assessment reports, each thousands of pages long, came out in 1995, 2001, 2007 and 2015.
• These have formed the basis of the global response to climate change.
• Over the years, each assessment report has built on the work of the previous ones, adding more evidence, information and data.
• So that most of the conclusions about climate change and its impacts have far greater clarity, certainty and wealth of new evidence now, than earlier.
• It is these negotiations that have produced the Paris Agreement, and previously the Kyoto Protocol.
• The Paris Agreement, negotiated on the basis of the Fifth Assessment Report.

Working Groups:

• The Assessment Reports – by three working groups of scientists.
• Working Group-I – Deals with the scientific basis for climate change.
• Working Group-II – Looks at the likely impacts, vulnerabilities and adaptation issues.
• Working Group-III – Deals with actions that can be taken to combat climate change.