Challenges and opportunities in implementing open and FAIR data in Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Seventh Assessment Report (AR7)

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) authors of assessment reports (ARs) and special reports (SRs) use a huge volume of input data, generate a great deal of intermediate data in the process, and produce a large amount of final data for figures and annexes in the published reports. In previous assessment cycles before the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), only a limited amount of IPCC data were archived and made publicly available. There was  great progress in the AR6, but many critical data sets were still not properly curated. This resulted in a data rescue effort during the transition from AR6 to AR7, supported by the IPCC and government fundings. The challenges encountered during the data rescue effort included missing or lost data after the report publication, missing data licensing agreements, version control issues, and missing data quality assurance/quality control (QA/QC) so that some data did not match the published figures. Addressing these issues demanded significantly more resources than the regular process to track, retrieve, archive, and resolve the legal and technical issues.

In the Seventh Assessment Report (AR7), IPCC progressively promotes the FAIR data principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) through the IPCC Task Group on Data Support for Climate Change Assessments (TG-Data) and the Data Distribution Centre (DDC) (1, 2). The Working Group Technical Support Units (TSUs) have also designated data specialists in the TG-Data (3). This provides opportunities to support authors in implementing open and FAIR data in IPCC AR7. For example, in Chapter 2 of the Special Report on Climate Change and Cities (SRCities), there is an area of focus on “Data, information, tools accessibility/availability/usability/transparency" (4). By collaborating the TSUs and DDC can provide a coordinated approach that supports authors with training and tools on data workflow, metadata schema, data provenance, licensing and citation, persistent identifiers, etc., to improve the data curation process and to avoid the issues encountered in previous cycles.

References:

• 1. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (2023). TG-Data Recommendations for AR7 (1.0). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10059282
• 2. Stockhause M, Huard D, Al Khourdajie A, Gutiérrez JM, Kawamiya M, Klutse NAB, Krey V, Milward D, Okem AE, Pirani A, Sitz LA, Solman SA, Spinuso A, Xing X. (2024).  Implementing FAIR data principles in the IPCC seventh assessment cycle: Lessons learned and future prospects. PLOS Climate 3(12): e0000533. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0000533
• 3. https://www.ipcc.ch/data/ (2025)
• 4. IPCC Special Report on Climate Change and Cities (SRCities) report outline. (2024). https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2024/08/IPCC-61_decisions-adopted-by-the-Panel.pdf