SRCCL

The Special Report on Climate Change and Land (SRCCL) is a flagship assessment produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and approved by member governments in Geneva in August 2019. Its full title is Climate Change and Land: an IPCC special report on climate change, desertification, land degradation, sustainable land management, food security, and greenhouse gas fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems. It was prepared under the IPCC's Sixth Assessment cycle alongside the Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate (SROCC) and the earlier Global Warming of 1.5°C (SR1.5).

The report was authored by experts coordinated across IPCC Working Groups I, II, and III, together with the Task Force on National Greenhouse Gas Inventories. It synthesised peer-reviewed literature on topics including:

• emissions from agriculture, forestry and other land use (AFOLU), which the report assessed as roughly 23% of total net anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions during 2007–2016;
• desertification and land degradation, including risks to drylands;
• food security, with attention to supply chains, dietary patterns, and food loss and waste;
• response options such as sustainable land management, agroforestry, ecosystem restoration, and bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), along with their trade-offs for biodiversity and food prices.

The Summary for Policymakers (SPM) is the most widely cited component because it is approved line-by-line by governments and therefore carries political weight in negotiations under the UNFCCC, the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), and the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). SRCCL findings fed into discussions at COP25 in Madrid and have been routinely invoked in debates over Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), the Koronivia Joint Work on Agriculture, and national land-sector accounting.

For delegates, SRCCL is the standard reference for linking climate policy to land tenure, indigenous rights, and food systems, and it underpins much of the land-related material later integrated into the IPCC's AR6 Synthesis Report (2023).