Highlights and images for 27 July 2021

On the second day, delegates continued their consideration of the Summary for Policymakers (SPM) of the Working Group I (WG I) contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Two plenary sessions took place, focusing, respectively, on a subsection on the impacts of human-induced climate change and a subsection on ocean and land carbon sinks.

Two contact groups took place in parallel to the plenary. The first, co-facilitated by Canada and Venezuela, focused on a subsection on human influence on the climate system. The second, co-facilitated by France and Mexico, addressed a box on scenarios, climate models, and projections. Both sets of issues were first taken up on Monday, 26 July, in plenary and later in two authors’ meetings. In their meetings, authors discussed how to respond to comments received from delegates in plenary. Building on this, authors published documents outlining proposed changes to the respective sections of the draft SPM and explaining the rationale for these changes, as well as the reason certain comments could not be taken into account. These documents served as the basis for discussions in the contact groups.

Responding to inquiries from single-individual delegations, WG I Co-Chair Valérie Masson-Delmotte noted common practice is that participants in contact groups endorse the outcome of these discussions, but that delegations who cannot participate in a particular contact group session will have the opportunity to share their views when the item is taken up for final approval in plenary.