A conversation with Prof.Dr. Heleen de Coninck (TU/e), one of the Netherlands’ IPCC authors, about the main results of the recently published IPCC Sixth Assessment Report on climate change mitigation.
2022 marks the completion of the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), which addresses the most up-to-date understanding of the climate system, impacts of climate change and climate change mitigation. The results of the first part of AR6 – on the physical science of climate change – were published in August 2021 and were a key contribution to the UNFCCC COP26 in Glasgow, providing input for climate negotiations and decision-making and shedding light on new commitments and measures to realize the Paris Agreement goals.
Prof.dr. Heleen de Coninck is a coordinating lead author of the AR6 part on mitigation of climate change, co-leading the chapter on innovation and technology development and transfer. In this interview, she will explain the main results of the Sixth Assessment Report and its implications for climate policies, and answer questions from the audience. Previously, she was coordinating lead author of the influential IPCC special report on limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. This report, published in 2018, provided the basis for more ambitious targets and policies in countries like the EU, the US and China.
Since 2020, Heleen de Coninck is a professor of Socio-Technical Innovation and Climate Change at TU/e. Her main research focus is on the role of innovation and technology in the international climate negotiations, on policy for making energy-intensive industry climate-neutral, and on the viability and societal dynamics of new technologies for 1.5 degree Celsius-mitigation pathways.