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In 2018, the IPCC warned that emissions must be halved by 2030, compared with 2010 levels, to have a good chance of limiting temperature rises to 1.5C. As the reports have grown in size and urgency, so have global greenhouse gas emissions. This is the sixth IPCC report since the body was set up in 1988, with each comprehensive assessment taking roughly six to eight years to compile. It is certain to find that governments are well off track on their emissions-cutting goals. There, nations’ progress on cutting greenhouse gas emissions since the Paris climate agreement of 2015 will be assessed. The report is supposed to inform the next UN climate summit, Cop28, which will be hosted by the United Arab Emirates in Dubai from 30 November. It is written by scientists but haggled over by representatives of the UN’s nearly 200 governments, so some argue it is subject to watering down by regimes that do not like its messages. Its purpose is to reduce the thousands of pages of science to a shorter format, which is further condensed into a “summary for policymakers”, to provide scientific underpinning for global climate action. If the main findings have already been published, why is this report needed? Much of the synthesis report is likely to focus on the future, setting out the possible policies and actions that will stave off the worst ravages of climate breakdown and warning of the impacts of further heating.

Those include warnings that the world was approaching “irreversible” levels of global heating, with catastrophic impacts rapidly becoming inevitable and that it was “now or never” to take drastic action to avoid disaster. There is no new science in the synthesis report, just a recap of the main findings of the previous publications. The synthesis report also includes three other shorter IPCC reports published since 2018, on the impacts of global heating of more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, climate change and land, and climate change and the oceans and cryosphere (the ice caps and glaciers).

They were published in August 2021, February and April 2022 respectively.

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The first three sections covered the physical science of the climate crisis, including observations and projections of global heating, the impacts of the climate crisis and how to adapt to them, and ways of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

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