General Resources

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

Established in 1988, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the leading authority on climate change knowledge, and is dedicated to providing objective, scientific information relevant to understanding the scientific basis and risks of climate change. If you are looking for reliable summaries of published, peer-reviewed literature on climate change to inform your strategy and decision-making, this is an excellent place to start. The IPCC's newly released Synthesis Report is the fourth and final instalment of the Sixth Assessment Report (6AR). It summarises the first three sections of the 6AR, which explained the physical science of the climate crisis, including observations and projections of global heating; the impacts of the climate crisis and how to adapt to them; and ways of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The Synthesis Report makes it clear that time has run out for incremental action - humanity must respond with swift and significant action to avoid the worst impacts of increasingly extreme heatwaves, droughts, flooding, and other crisis conditions.

The IPCC also produces Special Reports, which assess specific issues, and Methodology Reports, which provide practical guidelines for the preparation of greenhouse gas (GHG) inventories.

Global Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet

If you are looking for a reliable and comprehensive starting point for building up your knowledge and understanding of climate change, NASA's repository on climate change is your one-stop shop. This platform provides a wealth of relevant and credible information that will support the learning of executives and boards, sustainability change agents, and managers, including the latest research, breaking news, and nuanced Q&A on climate change evidence, causes, effects, and solutions.

State of the Global Climate 2025

This annual report from the World Meteorological Organisation provides an update on trends in global climate indicators; explains global patterns of temperature and precipitation; explores recent high-impact weather and climate events; and more. This latest version highlights that the Earth's energy imbalance is at its highest level on record; that the past 11 years have been the warmest on record, with 2025 being among the top three warmest globally; and that climate extremes are posing growing risks to lives, food security, health, and economies.

Emissions Gap Report

The UNEP Emissions Gap Report provides a yearly review of emissions trends and explains where they should be to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. This report, the 15th edition, also analyses nationally determined contributions and long-term pledges; examines the emissions gap in 2030 and 2035; and summarises the scale and scope of actions required to bridge this gap, including sectoral transformation benchmarks and investment needs. This is a helpful resource for remaining abreast of the 'commitment' gap and for understanding how ambitious your climate change-related goals will need to be in order to do your part in slowing and reversing the global rise in GHG emissions.

Climate Action Tracker

The Climate Action Tracker (CAT) is an independent scientific research group that tracks climate action and measures it against the globally agreed Paris Agreement aim of "holding warming well below 2°C, and pursuing efforts to limit warming to 1.5°C." A collaboration of two organisations, Climate Analytics and NewClimate Institute, the CAT engages in a wide range of activities for the benefit of advancing climate change education and action, including quantifying and evaluating climate change mitigation targets, policies, pledges, and initiatives; determining likely temperature increases during the 21st century using the MAGICC climate model; developing sectoral analysis to illustrate required pathways for meeting the global temperature goals; and more. This is an excellent source of information on climate trajectories and the emissions gap, and for understanding climate governance at the national level.

State of Climate Action 2025

This report is a good resource for helping business leaders and sustainability professionals understand where global efforts to address climate change should be prioritised. It provides a comprehensive overview of the global gap in climate action across the world’s highest-emitting systems, highlighting where progress must accelerate over the next decade to keep the Paris Agreement’s goal to limit warming to 1.5°C within reach. It translates the Paris Agreement temperature goal of 1.5°C into actionable targets for 2030, 2035, and 20250 across the highest-emitting sectors - power, buildings, industry, transport, forests and land, and food and agriculture - and includes status updates, targets, and indicators to track progress made in scaling up carbon dioxide removal technologies and finance for climate action. It also explores the barriers to more ambitious action, as well as a key set of factors that can enable transformational change across each system.

Breaking Boundaries: The Science of our Planet

This film is among the first mainstreams efforts to explain environmental limits (such as the Paris Agreement's limits on greenhouse gasses) to the broader public. Hosted by David Attenborough and Johan Rockström, and based on the Planetary Boundaries Framework, the film provides a good summary of nine key earth system processes and explains how abrupt and irreversible changes are likely to occur when key “limits” or “boundaries” are trespassed. The film will help to acquaint you with the concept of thresholds, and will explain how close we are to exceeding them, or - in the case of climate, biodiversity, and other process - how far past we have already gone.

Points of No Return

This resource explains how climate change is threatening to push Earth's arctic, land, and oceanic systems towards and beyond "tipping points," the result of which may spell catastrophic regime shifts. The information here has been compiled by Grist - a nonprofit organisation dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. This resource will help you to quickly build an understanding of how climate-related change is manifesting in key systems and regions, such coral reefs, in Atlantic circulation, in Greenland and Antarctica, and in permafrost and forests.

ISIpedia: the open climate-impacts encyclopedia

ISIpedia provides public access to climate-impact science materials to improve understanding of climate related risks. These materials include simulations from Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project (ISIMIP), which offers a framework for consistently projecting the impacts of climate change across affected sectors and spatial scales; articles on extreme events, biodiversity, water, forests, fisheries, and other topics that intersect with climate change; and comprehensive glossary of climate- and climate change-related terms; and more. This is an excellent reference point for sustainability practitioners who want to learn more about national-level climate-impact projections.

En-ROADS Climate Solutions Simulator

This free climate simulator from Climate Interactive, the MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative, and Ventana Systems will allow you to explore the connections and impact of dozens of policies - such as adjusting subsidies on energy types, electrifying transport, and incentivising the electrification of buildings and transportation - on hundreds of factors, such as global temperature, air quality, energy prices, and sea level rise. This system dynamics model is carefully grounded in the best available science, and has been calibrated against a wide range of existing integrated assessment, climate, and energy models to help you visualise the effects of our actions on global warming.

WMO Global Annual to Decadal Climate Update (2025-2029)

This annual report from World Meteorological Organization (WMO) provides a synthesis of near-future predictions that can help sustainability change agents to educate leaders within their organisation and to inform the company's strategy and messaging. For example, this latest report suggests that there is an 80% chance that at least one of the next five years will exceed 2024 as the warmest on record; a 70% chance that 5-year average warming for 2025-2029 will be more than 1.5 °C; and that Arctic warming predicted to continue to outstrip global average.

Climate Watch

Climate Watch is an online platform that that can help you to better understand, visualise, and convey climate-related trends and progress. The platform provides a comprehensive array of open data on countries' climate plans and nationally determined contributions, emissions data, national economic and emission scenarios, and more.

Exceeding 1.5°C global warming could trigger multiple climate tipping points

Climate tipping points are 'points of no return,' or conditions beyond which changes in a part of the climate system become self-perpetuating. This comprehensive article explains how global warming of even just 1°C, a threshold that the planet has already passed, puts communities, environmental systems, and economies at risk by triggering some tipping points. It reassesses known climate tipping points, as well as their timescales and impacts, and highlights steps to further improve understanding on these tipping points. This resource for achieving a more up-to-date understanding of the actions required to prevent the worst outcomes from climate change.

Rescuing 1.5ºC: New evidence on the highest possible ambition to deliver the Paris Agreement

The world will very likely reach 1.5°C of warming by the early 2030s, meaning the world is headed towards a period of overshoot of the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C limit. This new study from Climate Analytics and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) explains how we can limit the overshoot of 1.5°C to the lowest possible level and return warming back well below 1.5°C by 2100 by looking at the highest possible ambition that can be undertaken by countries, starting in 2025. The Highest Possible Ambition scenario updates the 1.5°C-aligned pathways assessed in the most recent IPCC cycle (AR6), starting from today’s emission levels (2025) and energy market dynamics to achieve the safest possible temperature outcome within physical, technological and economic feasibility limits. Starting from where we find ourselves in 2025, the study provides an updated evidence base on how to achieve the Paris goal, featuring four key levers for transforming our energy and land-use systems: widespread electrification powered by renewables; a much faster phaseout of fossil fuels; carbon dioxide removal at commercial scale; and faster action on methane.

10 New Insights in Climate Science 2025/2026

This resource highlights the latest key findings and insights related to climate change. It is produced as a collaboration between Future Earth, The Earth League, the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP), and others, and is updated annually. This resource may be of particular benefit to change agents and other sustainability professionals who are interested in presenting crucial (and compelling) climate-related bullet points to senior leaders.

The State of Climate Action: Major Course Correction Needed from +1.5% to −7% Annual Emissions

This white paper from the World Economic Forum can help you understand the insufficiency of climate action to date and the dramatic change of course required to limit global warming to below 1.5°C. It explains the insufficiency of national commitments and policies, the lack of corporate climate action, the lag in scaling up green technologies, and the massive climate funding gap. It also explains the need to radically ramp up emissions mitigation and reduction efforts even if the 1.5°C goal slips out of reach. These insights will be most useful sustainability practitioners and decision-makers, such as senior managers and boards of directors.

Climate TRACE

Climate TRACE has created a sophisticated and accessible inventory of greenhouse gas emission sites from around the world to help you pinpoint decarbonisation opportunities. This mapping platform uses machine learning, satellites, and other technology to detect and track more than 350 million sources of greenhouse gas pollution from around the globe.

The Climate Dictionary

This dictionary from the UNDP can help you to better understand and communicate the issue of climate change. It uses compelling visuals, concise explanations, and engaging storytelling to make climate terms and concepts widely accessible and relatable, and without scientific jargon. This resource will be most useful to sustainability change agents and other communicators seeking to engage with those less familiar with climate topics.

Climate Change and Climate Risks: What Corporate Directors Need to Know

Climate change threatens both the future success of businesses and the wellbeing of society. Corporate directors have the opportunity and responsibility to steer their businesses towards supporting climate resilience. To do so, directors must understand climate science, the risks and opportunities for businesses, and the actions needed to respond to them.

Five ways the climate crisis impacts human security

This short article from the UN is a good primer on some of the key ways climate change is impacting human security, including greater competition over land and water and increased security risks for women and girls.

Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Tagged by Source

This visualisation from NASA shows atmospheric carbon emissions and sequestration across the globe over a one year period. It includes emission sources from fossil fuel combustion, biomass burning, land ecosystems, and the ocean. It also shows the areas of land and ocean that are sequestering carbon. This resource provides compelling visuals that can be shared with business leaders and anyone else who would benefit from better understanding the scale of our human impact on the carbon cycle.

10 Years Post-Paris: A decade that defied predictions

This report from the Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit provides a ten-year retrospective on climate change-related actions since the 2015 Paris Agreement. Drawing on original ECIU analysis alongside third-party data, the report assesses progress across clean energy deployment and investment, growth in clean energy jobs, emissions trends, electric vehicle (EV) uptake, integration of climate policy and standards into the global economy, and more. It makes the argument that the clean-energy transition is more advanced than analysts projected a decade ago, and suggests that the challenge now is to turn this momentum into a decisive structural bend in the global emissions curve, all while scaling finance and technology flows and ensuring the benefits are felt by communities and people everywhere.

Carbon in Context

This free tool from Project Drawdown can help you to better understand and communicate climate change-related outcomes by converting greenhouse gas emissions into familiar terms. This tool will benefit a broad range of professionals, from junior sustainability practitioners to senior leaders.

Is global warming tipping key Atlantic ocean currents towards ‘collapse’?

This article from Carbon Brief can help you to understand what the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) is and how it is being impacted climate change. It explains the essential role AMOC plays in transporting heat and nutrients, as well as how it supports the carbon cycle by transporting carbon-rich surface waters to the deep ocean, and how a warming climate could cause a slowdown of the AMOC, resulting in far-reaching consequences for global weather patterns, humans, biodiversity, and the carbon cycle. It also highlights what the latest research says about the possibility and consequences of a collapse of the ocean currents.

Climate Risk Oversight for Directors

This 4-part video series will help corporate directors and leaders understand the risks of climate change and their role and fiduciary responsibilities to oversee these risks. We have also created videos specific to the Canadian and South African context.

The right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment

In August 2022, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution recognising the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment as a human right. States, international organisations, businesses, and other stakeholders have a responsibility to “scale up efforts” to ensure a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment for all.

Business Guide to Advancing Climate Justice