The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

In this episode we discuss the importance and functioning of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

• Assessing the scientific basis of climate change
• The role of experts and governments in the IPCC review process
• Climate change mitigation and adaptation in the face of social inequalities

Our guest Dr Thelma Krug is considered one of the world’s leading authorities on climate change and forests. She holds a PhD on spatial statistics from the University of Sheffield, UK. She was a Senior researcher at the National Institute for Space Research (INPE) in Brazil from 1982 and retired in 2019. For many years she has participated in the negotiating process under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change on issues related mainly to forestry and reporting guidelines. She has several publications related to climate and forests, and has participated in the development of innovative methodologies for reforestation under the Clean Development Mechanism. She has been a part of the IPCC for close to two decades. From 2002 to 2015 she co-chaired the Task Force on National Greenhouse Gas Inventories of the IPCC and in 2015 she was elected as one of the three vice-chairs of the IPCC.

Our interviewer for this episode is Dr Milena Ponczek. She is an atmospheric scientist working on the interaction of volatile organic compounds with atmospheric aerosols and air quality. She holds a degree in chemical engineering from the State University of Campinas (Brazil) where her research work was focused on the degradation of volatile organic compounds by photocatalysis. She got her PhD in Chemistry at the University of Lyon (France). She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Laboratory of Atmospheric Physics at the University of São Paulo working to better understand and characterize aerosol life cycle in the Amazon region. Find her on Twitter.

Episode notes and references:

• Synthesis Report of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (AR5)
• IPCC special report: Global warming of 1.5 ºC

Music by Ritesh Prasanna.

Podcast website: https://atmospherictales.com