Who is working on Climate Change?

When the United Nations Environment Programme and the World Meteorological Organization launched the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change(IPCC) in 1988, few people anticipated just how effective and influential its work would become.

The IPCC has shown the way, developing a process which engages hundreds of the world's leading experts in reviewing the most up-to-date, peer-reviewed literature on the scientific and technical aspects of climate change. The IPCC integrates its assessments into a policy-relevant format universally accepted as a basis for decision-making by the 185 member governments of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

The international community is working together to minmize these risks through the 1992 Convention and its 1997 Kyoto Protocol. Undoubtedly the most complex and ambitious agreements on environment and sustainable development ever adopted, the climate change treaties set out the principles, institutions, and rules for addressing global warming. (Convention and Protocol timeline)

They establish a regime that is dynamic and action-oriented. At the same time, it is flexible enough to evolve over the coming decades in response to change in the political lanscape and in scientific understanding.