Implementation of the IPCC FAIR Guidelines into the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6): benefit, challenges and recommendations for AR7

A new paradigm for data result traceability has been implemented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group I (WGI) in the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6). IPCC Data Distribution Centre (DDC) Partners at the German Climate Computing Centre (DKRZ), the Centre for Environmental Data Analysis (CEDA), and the Spanish Research Council (CSIC) have worked with the WGI Technical Support Unit (TSU) to document the figure creation process and publish analysis scripts, input, intermediate, and final data. The work was guided by the IPCC Task Group on Data Support for Climate Change Assessments (TG-Data) recommendations regarding Open Science, FAIR data principles, and TRUST principles for repositories. The joint effort of the integration of these principles into the established IPCC procedures aimed at enhancing the transparency and accessibility of AR6 outcomes. We highlight the achievements of AR6, discuss the lessons learned and the derived recommendations for the upcoming Seventh Assessment Report (AR7) cycle.

The concept development for the IPCC FAIR Guidelines started early in the AR6 cycle based on experiences from the previous cycles. The concept was presented at the International Data Week 2018 in Gaborone, Botswana (Stockhause et al., 2019). The implementation at the different partners was carried out during AR6 (Pirani et al., 2022a). The challenges faced included the overall increased workload for all partners, the novelty of the approach, particularly since it was implemented once the assessment had started. This came with an unprecedented need for coordination across chapters, TSU and DDC Partners, where difficulties included assembling and quality checking (correcting) the information received from the chapters. The benefits include the long-term preservation of the new data types, intermediate and final data, created during the assessment, made accessible and curated for reuse on the long-term, and authors receiving credit for their datasets. Referencing between the report and the data at the different DDC Partners enables data users and report readers to navigate between the different AR6 outcomes. Supplementary material for each WGI report chapter documents the report figures development with all  sources of data and software used for figure generation.

These challenges and benefits are guiding the formulation of TG-Data's recommendations for AR7 aiming at streamlining the IPCC FAIR Guidelines' implementation, their improved integration into the overall IPCC process and enhanced tool support streamlining the process outlined in the FAIR Guidelines and lowering the burden for authors, TSU and DDC Partners (Pirani et al., 2022b).  The existing IPCC Figure Manager and provenance records documenting the final data creation in a standardized format will play a key role for the AR7 implementation. However, the continuation and enhancement of this joint effort in AR7 is subject to finding a new funding model for the DDC Partners required to ensure the sustainability required to support these efforts.