Recently, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) announced their selection of lead authors for the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6). Professor Liu Junguo, from the School of Environmental Science and Engineering, will be the only Chinese lead author of Chapter 4: Water, Working Group II (Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability).
Professor Liu’s involvement in teaching and research of water resources and environmental restoration is substantial. He has contributed 122 academic papers in journals such as Science, Nature, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS). He also published four original or translated books as the first author. Professor Liu received the Outstanding Young Scientists Award from the European Geosciences Union in 2009, making him the first hydrologist in the world to earn such an achievement. In 2017, he became the first Asian scientist to win the Communication Award of the Society for Ecological Restoration (SER). In the same year, he received the Outstanding Science Research Achievement for Institutions of Higher Education from China’s Ministry of Education.
As the leading international body for the assessment climate change, the IPCC was established by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and endorsed by the UN General Assembly in 1988. The focus of its study is the impact of human activities on climate change. One of the main IPCC activities is the preparation of comprehensive Assessment Reports (AR; related to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) about the state of scientific, technical and socio-economic knowledge on climate change, its causes, potential impacts and response strategies. The bureaux of the three IPCC Working Groups selected 721 authors from 2858 experts representing 105 countries. The selected authors are from 90 countries, with 44% from developing countries or transitional countries, 33% female experts, and 53% first-time AR authors.
The list of lead authors of AR6 can be retrieved from the following link:
http://www.ipcc.ch/report/authors/report.authors.php?q=36&p=
