IPCC Climate Assessment Reports and SLR Projections

Abstract

Since its creation, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) produces comprehensive Assessment Reports (AR) of scientific, technical and socio-economic knowledge on climate changes, its impacts, risks and the respective mitigation solutions, based on Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) climate projections. Such RCPs are climate change scenarios that allowed to project future greenhouse gas concentrations, from which ensembles of physical-mathematic models are applied and future climate change projections are derived. Since 1990, six AR and fourteen Special Reports were produced and published. Alongside of Global Climate Change Models (GCCM), future sea level rise (SLR) scenarios are also generated from the respective RCPs. This article presents a synthesis for climate change and SLR of the last AR6, of 2023, and its new approach which has included the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) in combination with the earlier RCPs. Here some conclusions of SLR and its coastal impacts are highlighted, focussing the need of medium- to long-term land management and planning, as well as the reinforcement of the international laws of the sea, for long-term coastal adaptation and global socioeconomic resilience. Examples of possible scenarios and respective impacts on coastal populations and global economy are given, rising the future challenges in terms of mitigation and adaptation measures.