The IPCC at a crossroads: leaving policy relevance behind?

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been a crucial facilitator of climate change research and governance. A special collection of npj Climate Action have published a range of research articles, reviews and perspectives that discuss the achievements of the IPCC, the challenges it faces when it enters its 7th assessment cycle, and suggestions for solutions. In this piece we assess all the contributions on the IPCC in the npj Climate Action journal, see these in relation to resource constraints of the IPCC and the decisions already made that will constrain and facilitate the work of the IPCC in the coming assessment cycle. On this backdrop, we develop answers to the question: How can IPCC processes and outcomes be reformed to produce knowledge that is more relevant for climate action? In this outro, we pay specific attention to the four possible reform agendas for the IPCC in the form of ideal types that we presented in the introduction to the special collection: Back to Basics, Orchestrating, Broad Knowledge Generation and Reflexive Learning. We show that all of these have their advantages and disadvantages, but the IPCC cannot achieve everything all ant once.