The seventeenth session of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was held from 4-6 April 2001, at the headquarters of the United Nations Environment Programme in Nairobi, Kenya. Over 200 delegates, experts and representatives of international and non-governmental organizations attended the session.

Participants met in plenary sessions throughout the three-day meeting. They accepted the actions of the three IPCC Working Groups with regard to adopting the three sections of the Third Assessment Report (TAR). They considered progress on the TAR Synthesis Report, and discussed the future of the IPCC in depth, focusing on key decisions, including:

• whether the IPCC should be continued;

• whether the IPCC should continue to prepare comprehensive assessments;

• whether the comprehensive reports should be supplemented by shorter, more focused special reports on specific issues that integrate science, impacts, economics and policy options, as in the Synthesis Report;

• whether the IPCC should continue to be responsive to the needs of the UNFCCC, or other environmental conventions (such as the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Convention to Combat Desertification) through the preparation of technical papers, special reports, or reports on methodological issues;

• what the appropriate working group structure should be; and

• what the appropriate size, structure and geographic representation of the IPCC Bureau might be.

Delegates also considered: activities related to land use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF); the budget; the future role of the Task Force on National Greenhouse Gas Inventories; a report by the Task Force on Climate Scenarios for Impact Assessment; and the IPCC Communication Strategy.

On the final day of the meeting, participants agreed on a strategy for further review of the key decisions relating to the future of the IPCC, and accepted proposals for "scoping" activities for a technical report on the links between biological diversity and climate change, and for a report on sustainable development and climate change. The next IPCC plenary session will be held from 24-29 September 2001 in London, UK.

Editor's Note: We are pleased to announce that the IPCC Plenary, on the unanimous recommendation of the IPCC Bureau, has decided to allow the Earth Negotiations Bulletin to publish from the Seventeenth Session of the IPCC Plenary, to be held 4-6 April 2001 in Nairobi. This decision was based on the agreement that the ENB would treat this meeting as we do other "informal" sessions and that we would not name the names of governments in order to protect the confidentiality of the discussions. This decision would not set a precedent for ENB involvement in future IPCC Sessions.

Jorge Ilueca (UNEP) and  Renate Christ (IPCC Secretariat)
	Dr. Robert Watson, Chair of the IPCC

Linkages Climate Change page
IPCC Secretariat web site with official documents
ENB's "Introduction to the climate change process"
Other links (NGOs, research institutes, etc)