Biodiversity and climate need to be protected together – German IPCC report contributors

Climate action and the protection of biodiversity need be more closely linked, according to a German scientist contributing to the UN’s climate change report, which will be presented in Berlin on 28 February. At the start of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) virtual meeting co-hosted by the German ministry for education and research (BMBF), Hans-Otto Pörtner, of the Alfred-Wegener Institute for polar and ocean research, said efforts to protect the world from a heating climate had to be based on the understanding of the interdependence of climate and natural habitats. The upcoming IPCC report will focus on the effects of climate change on human and natural habitats and their ability to adapt and provide governments with information and options on how to respond. German research minister Bettina Stark-Watzinger said governments around the world depend on the IPCC’s independent input on how to deal with the “inevitable” consequences of climate change. She said the panel’s work has proven invaluable in recent years, adding: “I don’t want to begin to imagine where we’d be without it in international climate policy.” She stressed that knowledge about and data on global warming should be freely available in every part of the world and encouraged scientists to take part in the international effort to contain it.

At the two-week plenary session, held mostly online due to ongoing pandemic restrictions, representatives of almost all UN member states discuss parts of the IPCC’s 6th report. The panel does not conduct its own research on climate change, but evaluates thousands of studies and summarises the key findings. The core team of 270 scientists also includes 15 researchers from Germany.