The Junge Akademie's KlimaLectures event series focuses on global warming and human factors influencing the Earth's ecosystem. In the fifth event, geoecologist Dr. Sönke Zaehle (Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry) will give a keynote lecture in which he will report on the 6th cycle of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment Reports and shed light on the development of the current report of Working Group 1 (The Physical Science Basis).

Sönke Zaehle will then discuss with current and former members of Die Junge Akademie, Eva Buddeberg, Christian Hof, Linus Mattauch, Hermine Mitter, René Orth and Florian Ziel, and the participants of the event about current questions on climate change and in particular about the role and challenges of reporting cycles like those of the IPCC in advising politics and society.

Changes in the Earth's climate have far-reaching consequences for humans and the environment. In order to stop climate change, it is necessary to have a sound knowledge of its complex causes in order to develop climate targets and ultimately concrete options for action for politics and society. Advisory bodies have long been established to shape and accompany this information process. One of these is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It was founded in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organisation and the United Nations Environment Programme. The IPCC does not conduct its own research, but synthesises current research results. In this way, it documents what the scientific community agrees on, where there are differences of opinion and where further research is needed. The IPCC's assessment reports serve as information for the international climate protection negotiations and are therefore politically relevant but factually neutral. Since 1988, the IPCC has produced five comprehensive Assessment Reports and several Special Reports on specific topics. The reports of the current sixth cycle are expected in 2021 and 2022.

Dr. Sönke Zaehle is one of three directors of the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry since 2020 and co-author of the 6th Assessment Report of IPCC Working Group I, Chapter 5 (Carbon and other biogeochemical cycles). He studied geoecology at the Technical University of Braunschweig and environmental sciences at the University of East Anglia in the UK and did his PhD at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research/University of Potsdam. After a stopover at the Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l'Environnement in Gif-sur-Yvette, he has been working at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry since 2008. His work focuses on the interactions between climate and the global carbon cycle, and the development and evaluation of numerical global ecosystem models.