64th Session of the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice (SBSTA64), 9 June 2026, Bonn, Germany. Your Excellencies, distinguished delegates and colleagues, ladies and gentlemen, On behalf of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, thank you for the opportunity to address the 18th Research Dialogue. Before focusing on the themes of the Dialogue, allow me to provide a brief update on the progress of the IPCC´s seventh assessment cycle. Nearly three years into the cycle, the scientific content of all our planned reports has been agreed, and authors have been selected. We already have three reports scheduled for release next year. In about nine months, the IPCC will hold an approval plenary for the 2027 Special Report on Climate Change and Cities. As we meet here, the Government and Expert Review of the Second Order Draft of the Special Report and the first draft of its Summary for Policymakers is under way and will close in the first week of July. We also have approval sessions for two methodology reports scheduled for the second half of next year. Methodology reports provide guidance to governments on reporting emissions and removals of greenhouse gases. The Expert Review of the First Order Draft of the Methodology Report on Short-Lived Climate Forcers concluded in February. The report’s third Lead Author Meeting took place in April, and the Government and Expert Review of the Second Order Draft will begin in September. The authors of the 2027 Methodology Report on Carbon Dioxide Removal Technologies, Carbon Capture Utilisation and Storage, held their first Lead Author Meeting in mid-April and will meet again in August. Meanwhile, all three Working Groups are progressing their First Order Drafts for Expert Review. Working Groups I and II held their second Lead Author meetings in April and May, respectively. Due to the current travel restrictions in the Middle East, Working Group III held a virtual pre-Lead Author Meeting three weeks ago and plans its Second Lead Author meeting in September. This brings me to the Panel´s pending decision on the timelines for the three Working Group contributions to the Seventh Assessment Report. I have started consultations with the IPCC member governments, Bureau members, and the Secretariat on criteria for assessing timeline options, with a view to reaching consensus at the IPCC’s next Plenary in October. As a scientist myself and the Chair of the IPCC, I cannot overstate the importance of this decision for the scientific community gathered around IPCC. We have more than a thousand scientists from every continent and region who volunteer their time and expertise to work on IPCC reports. They deserve clarity about the duration of their voluntary commitment to the IPCC, allowing them to plan their professional and private lives accordingly. Now let me turn to three aspects of the Seventh Assessment Cycle relevant to this Research Dialogue: scenarios, adaptation and Indigenous knowledge systems. First, on scenarios. And let me stress from the start that there are no IPCC Scenarios. There are only published scenarios assessed by IPCC. IPCC does not conduct research and decided nearly 20 years ago not to engage in scenario development. Three years ago, we held a workshop on the Use of Scenarios in the Sixth Assessment Report and Subsequent Assessments. This produced clear recommendations, directed at both scientific communities engaged in scenario development, and IPCC itself. These recommendations are now being acted upon during the seventh cycle. Importantly, there will be no single IPCC-endorsed ‘scenarios database’ to support the Seventh Assessment. Instead, authors aim to assess multiple ‘community databases’. Structured community databases, to which modelling teams may submit scenarios, offer the advantage of common formats and comparability across scenarios while enhancing diversity and inclusivity. A group of authors representing all three Working Groups has just published an open letter encouraging scenario modelling communities to contribute to such databases. A number of these databases already exist. Integrated Assessment Models and other related models link socio-economic background assumptions, mitigation pathways and emission outcomes. We can expect hundreds, if not thousands, of such scenarios to be available for the current IPCC assessment. Earth Systems Models, as I expect will be described shortly by Dr. Eleanor O’Rourke, project climate outcomes at some geographical detail based on emissions scenarios, or assumptions about radiative forcing. These models are computationally demanding, and only a small number of scenarios can be run. In the Sixth Assessment cycle, IPCC Working Group I drew on five sets of model simulations, deriving from the sixth Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, or CMIP 6. The Seventh Cycle will similarly draw on, among other sources, the CMIP 7 Assessment Fast Track, driven by seven representative emission scenarios developed under the Scenario Model Intercomparison Project (ScenarioMIP). My apologies for all the acronyms! Note that the range of emissions covered by the CMIP 7 Assessment Fast Track will be narrower than in CMIP 6. The upper end of the range is no longer considered plausible, partly due to progress in clean energy. At the lower end, due to a lack of progress in reducing global emissions, many CMIP6 emission trajectories have become inconsistent with recent trends. However, the range of temperature responses may not narrow in the same way because of uncertainties in the physical climate system. We must be very careful to distinguish between emission scenarios and warming scenarios, a distinction not always evident in recent commentaries. Following the ‘no single endorsed database’ principle, other scenarios may be considered, such as those covered in PolMIP, the Policy-aligned Model Intercomparison Project. Only Earth System Models can generate output at sufficient detail to drive impact assessments. At the boundary between Working Groups I and III, reduced complexity climate models (or ‘emulators’) can be used to derive global climate change indicators from the hundreds, or thousands, of published emissions scenarios generated by Integrated Assessment Models. All of these approaches will be assessed in the Seventh Assessment Report. Now turning to adaptation. We will be hearing shortly from two of my colleagues from IPCC’s Working Group II, so let me not steal their thunder. It is now almost inevitable that we will soon exceed global warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the warming level beyond which risks start to accelerate. The urgent need to enhance resilience and step up adaptation efforts is obvious. So, what is IPCC planning for the current cycle? The word ‘adaptation’ appears in three chapter titles of the Working Group II report on impacts, adaptation and vulnerability. This is three more times than in the sixth assessment cycle. This signals clearly a new emphasis on climate action. We have chapters which have not appeared in previous reports on ‘responses to losses and damages’ and finance. And, we are also updating Technical Guidelines, dating from 1994, on assessing impacts and adaptation. Compared to mitigation, adaptation has lacked the means to measure progress. The update will emphasise indicators, metrics and methodologies. These should provide useful guidance on planning, including mainstreaming adaptation of a more transformational character into existing policies and practices. The guidelines will address learning, monitoring and evaluation, including adaptation targets, as well as metrics and indicators to monitor and track progress, uptake and performance. Finally, let me touch on Indigenous Knowledge Systems. We are running a side event launching the report of an IPCC Workshop on Engaging Diverse Knowledge Systems in the Bonn Room at 12:00 on Thursday, 11 June. This Workshop, as the title suggests, addressed how IPCC could engage with Indigenous knowledge alongside local knowledge holders and practitioners, considering the effective and equitable engagement of Indigenous knowledge holders and building on experience built up in other fora, such as IPBES. The Workshop generated a set of recommendations, agreed by consensus among a very diverse group of participants. I won’t go into detail, but these cover: the nomination and selection of experts; the discovery and assessment of knowledge; internal mechanisms to promote engagement and participation; capacity building, outreach and partnerships; and, more ambitiously, mandate, structure and membership. I should emphasise that these recommendations belong to workshop participants and have not been endorsed or approved by the Panel itself. But many of the recommendations could be followed up by author teams, Bureau members or Technical Support Units without fundamental changes to IPCC’s modus operandi. If you want to hear more, I invite you to attend Thursday’s side event. Chair, I will bring my remarks to a close here. But to conclude, the IPCC Seventh Assessment cycle is now well under way and we look forward to start delivering our reports from early 2027 onwards. Thank you.