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The upcoming assessment cycle of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will be authored by more experts from global south institutions than ever before, Carbon Brief analysis finds.
More than 660 scientists from 90 countries have been selected to write the three “working group” reports that will form the core of the IPCC’s seventh assessment cycle (AR7).
These three reports are scheduled to be published by 2029 and will summarise the latest research on climate change.
Carbon Brief analysis finds that a record 42% of authors of these upcoming reports are based at institutions in the global south.
Overall, the AR7 working groups will have an equal 50-50 representation of authors who are citizens of the global north and global south.
The analysis shows that the UK has the highest number of authors at 59, followed closely by the US with 55.
Furthermore, Carbon Brief finds that 46% of the report authors are listed as “female” – the second-highest percentage to date for any group of IPCC reports.
In a statement, IPCC chair Prof Jim Skea said the new author teams “reflect increased diversity, in terms of both gender balance and greater representation from developing countries and economies in transition”.
Countries
Earlier this year, Carbon Brief published an analysis of the gender and country of affiliation of the authors of all major IPCC reports, from the first assessment report in 1990 to the sixth assessment report (AR6) in 2023, including working group reports, special reports and methodology reports.
Carbon Brief has now expanded the analysis to include the authors of the AR7 working group reports, which are expected to be published by 2029.
For scientists to become IPCC authors, they must nominate themselves or be nominated by someone else to their country’s “national focal point”, which is often the country’s ministry of environment, climate change or meteorology. It is the focal point’s job to assess the applications and send a subset to the IPCC for their consideration.
The final decision on authors lies with the IPCC bureau – which consists of the chair and vice-chairs, as well as a pair of co-chairs for each working group.
The IPCC’s seventh assessment cycle will feature three working group reports:
- Working Group I (WG1): The physical science basis
- Working Group II (WG2): Impacts, adaptation and vulnerability
- Working Group III (WG3): Mitigation of climate change
Across the three working groups, Carbon Brief finds that 42% of the authors are affiliated with institutions in global south countries. This is a record high for any set of IPCC assessment reports.
The chart below shows the percentage of global south authors from every set of IPCC reports ever published.
Each IPCC assessment cycle is marked by the publication of three working group reports, which are summarised in a synthesis report. Carbon Brief has grouped these four reports under the headline “assessment reports” for every assessment cycle.
(“AR7” includes only the three working group reports, as the author list for the synthesis report has not yet been released.)
The first, second and third assessment reports are indicated by the acronyms FAR, SAR and TAR. Subsequent assessment reports are indicated by AR, followed by the name of the assessment cycle.
Most assessment cycles also saw the publication of “special reports”, focusing on specific areas of climate change, and “methodology reports” – technical documents that focus on specific areas of the IPCC’s methodology. Acronyms for these reports are given as SR and MR, respectively, followed by the name of the assessment cycle.
For example, the special reports on 1.5C, the ocean and cryosphere and climate change and land – published over 2018-19 – are part of the sixth assessment cycle and are referred to collectively as SR6.
(To assign each special and methodology report to an assessment cycle, Carbon Brief assumes that assessment reports are the last documents to be published in each assessment cycle. Carbon Brief has grouped the authors from special reports (“SR”) and methodology reports (“MR”) separately for each assessment cycle.)
Carbon Brief defines the global north as North America, Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. It defines the global south as Asia (excluding Japan), Africa, Oceania (excluding Australia and New Zealand), Latin America and the Caribbean.
While the three AR7 working group reports collectively have the highest percentage of global south authors compared to other similar groupings, there are individual reports with higher percentages, such as the 2019 special report on land and 2023 synthesis report.
Carbon Brief finds that, with 59 appointed authors, the UK is the most highly represented country in the upcoming IPCC working group reports.
This is closely followed by the US with 55. Rounding off the top five are Australia, Germany and China, with 34, 32 and 29 authors each, respectively.
Comparing the number of authors in each continent shows Europe with comfortably the largest representation, at more than 200 appointed authors. At the other end of the scale, South America and Africa have the fewest authors, with around 80 and 70 authors, respectively.
Of these three reports, WG2 has the highest percentage of global south authors for the IPCC’s seventh assessment cycle, while WG1 has the lowest.
Institutions
Carbon Brief has also ranked which institutions have the largest numbers of IPCC authors. The table below shows the top 15 institutions and their country.
| Institution | Country | Number of authors |
|---|---|---|
| Imperial College London | UK | 10 |
| University of Cape Town | South Africa | 9 |
| Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research | Germany | 8 |
| National Centre for Scientific Research | France | 8 |
| CGIAR | International | 6 |
| ETH Zurich | Switzerland | 6 |
| University of Oxford | UK | 5 |
| University of Melbourne | Australia | 5 |
| International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis | Austria | 5 |
| National Institute for Environmental Studies | Japan | 5 |
| CICERO Center for International Climate Research | Norway | 5 |
| International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) | International | 4 |
| Environment and Climate Change Canada | Canada | 4 |
| Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) | Australia | 4 |
| Independent/self employed | International | 4 |
With 10 authors, the UK’s Imperial College London – where IPCC chair Jim Skea worked for almost a decade – tops the list.
It is closely followed by South Africa’s University of Cape Town, which has nine authors. After this, with eight authors apiece are the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and the French National Centre for Scientific Research.
When Carbon Brief carried out similar analysis in 2018 for the IPCC’s sixth assessment cycle, the US led the pack with 74 out of the 721 authors and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) had eight authors in total.
This year, the most highly ranked US institutions are Cornell University and Rutgers University, which list three authors each.
Only one author from NOAA was listed. This expert’s listing for “institution” specifies “until April 30, 2025 – then retired”.
This comes after disruption to the usual US federal nomination process for selecting IPCC authors.
In February, Donald Trump pulled the US out of a meeting in China to discuss the seventh IPCC assessment cycle, according to Earth.org. The outlet adds that he also ordered federal scientists at the NOAA and the US Global Change Research Program to stop work on all other IPCC climate assessment-related activities.
Citizenship and institution
IPCC authors have two countries listed next to their names – “country” and “citizenship”. For this analysis, Carbon Brief uses the former, which indicates the country where the scientist works, because citizenship data is not available in earlier reports.
However, there are dozens of experts with different countries listed under “country” and “citizenship”.
For example, 59 authors have the UK listed as their “country”, meaning that they work at institutions in the UK. However, 28 of these experts are citizens of other countries, including Kenya, Chile and Spain.
Of the 29 authors with Indian citizenship, nine are registered with institutions in other countries, including Nepal, Malaysia and the UK.
Meanwhile, 13 authors are registered with institutions in Saudi Arabia – including an employee from the oil company Saudi Aramco – but only five have citizenship there.
Carbon Brief finds that a record-high 280 experts are affiliated with institutions in the global south, making up 42% of total authors.
(While half of all authors are citizens of global south countries, citizenship information is not provided with all IPCC reports and so a full comparison throughout IPCC history is not possible.)
IPCC scientists previously told Carbon Brief that experts from the global south often find it easier to apply to join the IPCC via institutions in the global north.
Gender
The IPCC provides binary gender data for all the AR7 authors.
Carbon Brief finds that 46% of the authors of the IPCC’s seventh assessment working group reports are listed as women.
The chart below shows the gender balance of the authors of all IPCC reports ever published.
Of the three AR7 reports, WG2 has the highest proportion of authors who are women.
Just shy of 52% of the authors of the impacts, adaptation and vulnerability report are women, making it the IPCC report with the second-highest proportion of women authors, after the IPCC’s upcoming special report on cities with 53%.
Methodology
Carbon Brief downloaded authorship data on the AR7 working group reports from the IPCC website, which lists data on each author’s gender, citizenship and the country where their institution was based. Carbon Brief also obtained data from the IPCC’s technical support unit.
(The “methodology” section of Carbon Brief’s earlier 2025 and 2023 on IPCC authorship contains more details on how Carbon Brief collected authorship data from the main working group reports and recent special reports.)
Carbon Brief recognises that gender is not best categorised using a binary “male” or “female” label and appreciates that the methods used of determining author gender could result in inaccuracies. However, for the purpose of this analysis, this method was deemed suitable.
The post Analysis: IPCC’s seventh assessment has record-high representation from global south appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Analysis: IPCC’s seventh assessment has record-high representation from global south
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An older teaching about land acknowledgement
As I have come to understand the spirit and intention of land acknowledgement, I often return to fond memories of my grandmother and her words of wisdom. She taught that the health of the places we call home comes first, because the wellbeing of the people depends on it.
In her teaching, land acknowledgement began with the land. Long before it became a paragraph read at the start of a meeting, it was a way of recognizing a homeland: its waters, its species, its seasons, and the spirit that revealed whether the place was well.
Her teaching echoes a practice found across many Indigenous Nations. Haudenosaunee gatherings, for example, have long opened with the Ohén:ton Karihwatéhkwen, the Thanksgiving Address, often translated as “the words that come before all else.” The speaker greets and gives thanks to the people, the earth, the waters, the plants, the animals, the winds, the sun, the moon and the stars. Only after everything that sustains life has been acknowledged does the gathering turn to its own business.
That order changes what an acknowledgement is for. Its purpose was to share the story of a place with neighbours and to draw them into the work of tending it. People entered the story second, as the ones responsible for what had just been named.
Understood this way, an acknowledgement does more than open a meeting. It asks us to reconsider where we stand, and what we owe the ground beneath us.
Nations among nations
In her teaching, people are one nation among many. The salmon are a nation. So are the cedars, the bison, the medicine plants, and the pollinators. Each belongs to a place, carries its own responsibilities, and offers gifts no other nation can give.
This idea of kinship runs through many Indigenous philosophies. The phrase “all my relations,” heard in ceremonies and gatherings across Turtle Island, is a reminder that family extends beyond people to the animals, plants, waters and lands that make life possible. Some Indigenous languages carry the same understanding in their grammar, speaking of many plants, animals and natural forces as living beings rather than objects.
Sovereignty, understood through this relationship, is a kind of standing more than a form of control. Each nation belongs fully to its place and carries its share of that place’s life. No nation thrives alone, and none thrives by taking over the whole.
The land is also the source of instruction. Over generations, people watched how a river valley or a stretch of prairie kept itself well: who arrived when, who fed whom, and how much could be taken before the giving stopped. In my grandmother’s telling, those observations became instructions, and those instructions helped shape law and protocol. They guided when to harvest, where to camp, how to enter a neighbour’s territory, and what was owed in return.
Indigenous legal scholars today often describe this as law that comes from the land itself, learned by watching how living systems sustain one another. A plainer name for it is knowing how to live somewhere.
The host and the guest
One of the clearest teachings in this understanding of the world is the relationship between host and guest. My grandmother invited us to recognize that relationship in the lives of plants and animals.
A host prepares the place before anyone arrives. A beaver family dams a stream, and the pond becomes a home for fish, frogs, birds and plants. A fallen tree becomes a nurse log, feeding the next generation of seedlings as it returns to the soil.
A host offers first. A flowering plant sets out nectar. A berry bush ripens fruit. These provisions come in their own season, not whenever a visitor happens to want them.
A host also makes its presence known. Birdsong, scent and the marks left along a trail tell newcomers that a place is already inhabited. The visitor does not arrive in an empty world.
The guest has responsibilities too. A guest attends to the season and to what the place can offer. A guest does not assume that everything within reach is theirs to take. A guest leaves something that helps sustain the relationship.
A bee takes nectar and carries pollen. Read through this teaching, that exchange offers an image of visiting well: receiving a gift while helping the host continue its life.
Many Indigenous harvesting protocols carry the same ethic into daily practice: ask before taking, take only what is needed, offer thanks, and leave enough for others and for the plant or animal to recover.
None of this suggests that every relationship in nature is peaceful or generous. These are ways of seeing responsibilities that people can learn to carry.
Everyone is both
No being is only a host or only a guest.
A tree makes room for other life while depending on soil, water, sunlight, fungi, and relationships beyond itself. People, too, may welcome others into their homes while remaining dependent on the larger homeland that sustains them.
The distinction between host and guest is therefore about roles, not ranks. Everyone receives. Everyone has something to give.
The question is whether the exchange sustains the place.
A visitor who takes without restraint leaves less for those who come next. A host who neglects the place has less to offer. Both have responsibilities, and neither can fulfil them alone.
This is the heart of reciprocity, a principle found across Indigenous philosophies: relationships stay healthy when gifts move in both directions. The Haudenosaunee teaching of the seventh generation extends that exchange across time, asking that decisions made today leave the place well for those not yet born.
Mutual benefit begins here, with the recognition that different beings carry different gifts and obligations.
What people carry forward
My grandmother’s teaching connects these relationships to the ways people meet their neighbours.
The host prepares a place, offers food and rest, and explains where the visitor has arrived. The guest makes themselves known, explains why they have come, listens to the terms of the visit, and brings something in return. The gift may be material. It may also be labour, knowledge, news, or a commitment to help.
Nations around the Great Lakes carried this ethic into treaty. The Dish with One Spoon, an agreement among the Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe and allied Nations, describes shared hunting grounds as a single dish. Everyone eats from it with one spoon, takes only what they need, leaves enough for others, and keeps the dish clean. The Two Row Wampum, between the Haudenosaunee and European newcomers, shows two vessels travelling side by side on the same river, each keeping its own ways and neither steering the other.
In this understanding, acknowledgement is more than naming the people associated with a territory. It is learning enough about a homeland to behave responsibly within it.
Whose home is this? What sustains it? What laws and agreements guide our presence? What can we receive, and what must we return?
These questions make acknowledgement a relationship rather than a recital.
They also make it diplomatic. A guest who recognizes the host’s homeland recognizes that they have entered a place with its own relationships and responsibilities. A host who welcomes the guest makes room for an encounter governed by those relationships.
Neither arrives without standing. Neither arrives without obligations.
Beginning with place
I write from the shores of the Bay of Quinte. Here, the teaching asks me to begin with the water, the shoreline, and the life they sustain. Before I describe myself, I must attend to where I am.
That does not make people or history less important. It places them within the homeland that gives them meaning. The people, their laws, their agreements, and their responsibilities all belong to the place.
In a time of longer fire seasons, troubled waters, and uncertainty about what the next season will bring, this teaching asks something difficult and useful of us: pay attention before you speak.
An acknowledgement cannot tell the story of a place if the speaker has stopped noticing it.
The land came first. Beginning there again means learning to name what sustains us, and accepting that what sustains us also asks something of us.
By Rye Karonhiowanen Barberstock
Photo by Andrik Langfield on Unsplash
The post The Land Came First appeared first on Indigenous Climate Hub.
Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuels and cement are projected to fall by around 0.4% in 2026 to 38.2bn tonnes of CO2 (GtCO2), according to new figures from the Global Carbon Project.
This guest post is by:
- Dr Zeke Hausfather, Carbon Brief’s climate science contributor
- Prof Pierre Friedlingstein, chair of mathematical modelling of climate systems at the University of Exeter and part of the Global Carbon Project team.
Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuels and cement are projected to fall by around 0.4% in 2026 to 38.2bn tonnes of CO2 (GtCO2), according to new figures from the Global Carbon Project.
The 21st edition of the annual “global carbon budget” report, published today, says that this small decline is largely due to a