The IPCC Has No Date for AR7 and No Budget for 2027

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change spent the week of 12 to 16 October 2026 in Addis Ababa and left without deciding when its next assessment will be published or how to pay for it. Chair Jim Skea suspended the 65th Plenary Session on Friday evening, at 8:29 pm according to the Earth Negotiations Bulletin, after the meeting overran and delegations from least developed countries and small island developing states had left for flights home.

Two items remain open: the timelines for the three Working Group contributions to the Seventh Assessment Report, and the budget that funds the work. In a statement published on Monday 19 October, Skea wrote that "reaching consensus on the schedule for our upcoming IPCC reports is vital" and that he would reconvene the session "at the earliest opportunity so the Panel can effectively conclude its business". He gave no date. The same statement records what the panel did settle, including agreement on a new process governing the appropriate application and use of artificial intelligence in its work.

2028 or 2029, and four surviving options

The disagreement, which the panel has carried since early 2024, is whether all three volumes arrive before the second Global Stocktake under the Paris Agreement concludes in late 2028. A contact group cut seven timeline options to four on the Friday afternoon. Option B would approve Working Group I in May 2028, Working Group II in July 2028 and Working Group III in September 2028. Option F would approve Working Group I in May 2028 but hold Working Group II to April 2029 and Working Group III to July 2029. A fourth, proposed by Haiti, merged two others and would finish all three by October 2028.

The bulletin's record of the plenary lists more than 40 countries calling for delivery in 2028, among them France, Germany, Brazil, Canada, the Republic of Korea, Bangladesh, Barbados, Mali and Zambia, on the grounds that the elected Working Group co-chairs consider that schedule feasible. Saudi Arabia, India, the Russian Federation, Iran, Iraq, Algeria, Syria and Belarus preferred 2029 for the impacts and mitigation reports, arguing that earlier delivery would press government reviewers and experts and compromise scientific rigour and inclusivity. Climate Home News reported on 19 October that India and Saudi Arabia were the most vocal of that group, citing the bulletin and an unnamed developed-country diplomat.

With no timeline in sight, Skea asked the panel to approve a 2027 budget close to the indicative one it had considered in Lima a year earlier, which would have let the working groups carry on while the schedule was argued over. Some members objected. By then much of the developing-country contingent had gone, and he suspended the meeting rather than take decisions without them.

The inclusivity offer that was also the bargaining chip

One proposal to break the deadlock would have raised IPCC funding for developing-country delegates from one participant to two for some or all sessions. That would add up to a quarter to the cost of completing AR7, on an assessment the secretariat shared with delegates, and Climate Home News understands that European, Japanese and Australian donors signalled willingness to pay for it. Without a deal on the timeline or the budget, it was not adopted. Inclusivity was simultaneously the stated reason for suspending the session and, as Saudi Arabia, India and Iraq argued when they tried to strip it from the contact group's mandate, a lever in the timeline fight. That is the uncomfortable shape of this deadlock: both sides can claim the fairness argument, and neither can claim the budget.

What the authors published on Monday

On 19 October nearly 120 of the 664 AR7 authors posted an open letter, with signatories and a digital object identifier, saying they "stand committed to continue working to deliver the AR7 reports in a manner that is rigorous, timely and inclusive". The contact listed on the record is Carl-Friedrich Schleussner of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Climate Analytics and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. The signatories include scientists from countries that oppose aligning the reports with the stocktake.

The practical cost is already visible. Winston Chow of Singapore Management University, who co-chairs the Working Group II report on adaptation, wrote that he was "disappointed and worried" and that authors' invested "rigour, time and goodwill" were being put at risk by the stalemate. A meeting of 250 Working Group II experts is scheduled for January 2027, and the special report on climate change and cities is due for approval in Singapore in March 2027. Because the budget is unconfirmed, travel support for those researchers is in doubt.

A suspended session is not a failed one, and the drafting has not stopped: Working Groups I and II are revising first drafts, Working Group III is finishing its own, and Skea told the closing session that the panel's engine room is working and healthy, as Climate Home News reported. What nobody can say is when the plenary reconvenes, what the 2027 budget will be, or which of the four options survives it. The reports themselves are not late yet. The decision about whether they will be is the one that has now been postponed three times in a row.