On April 16, scientists, academics, and other experts will convene in Riga, Latvia, for the scoping meeting for the Special Report on Climate Change and Cities, to be included in the Seventh Assessment Report (AR7) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The Special Report on Climate Change and Cities will be the only special report in AR7, and the scoping meeting will set out its structure, focus, and frame.
Scoping meeting participants, including some of the world’s leading climate scientists and city experts, will draw on a huge body of knowledge produced by scholars, city networks, and IPCC authors, including the Summary for Urban Policymakers, a city-focused distillation of the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report. Even with this deep body of work, the run-up to the Riga meeting presents an important window for experts to broaden their knowledge, widen their imagination, and test the narratives that will inform the outcome.
Join the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace for a special discussion that will bring together IPCC authors (including some who will participate in Riga), climate policy experts, and writers using fiction and narrative to push the boundaries of science and policy. The conversation will include an overview of the upcoming Special Report; readings from Indivisible Cities, in which authors from the French literary collective Oulipo collaborate with members of the international science and policy communities to develop new fictional representations of cities under climate pressure; and a wider discussion of the role of narratives in advancing climate action.