The International Energy Agency, the United Nations Environment Program, the World Meteorological Organization, the United Nations Children’s Fund, and Lancet’s Countdown on Health and Climate Change have adapted regularly scheduled reports for the special circumstances of COP26. With the start of COP26 less than a week away, when better to update the physical science? Working Groups 2 and 3 reports, dealing with climate impacts and potential mitigating strategies respectively, are to be issued in early 2022. It’s the first of three working group reports comprising the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report. The most weighty of these reports, literally and figuratively, is the nearly 4,000-page Working Group 1 report. In anticipation of the 26 th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP26), starting November 1, many governmental and non-governmental organizations have issued reports updating their accounts of climate change and its impacts.
