IPCC suspends Addis Ababa plenary as island delegates leave early

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suspended its 65th plenary session in Addis Ababa on Friday, October 16, 2026, after deliberations ran past their scheduled close and many delegations from least developed countries and Small Island Developing States had already left.

The session had opened on Monday, October 12, with a scheduled five-day run. Its agenda was led by the timelines for the three Working Group contributions to the Seventh Assessment Report, known as AR7, and by the organisation's budget. IPCC Chair Jim Skea announced the suspension late on Friday, framing it as a measure to protect inclusive participation in a body where 195 member governments decide by consensus.

Both items remain unresolved. The AR7 working group timelines and the budget will be taken up when the plenary resumes at the earliest opportunity.

The procedural facts are narrow, but the institutional problem is not. The working groups have completed first drafts of their AR7 contributions. At the opening of the plenary, Skea stressed the importance of the Panel reaching a decision on timelines for the volunteer authors of the three reports. Those authors cannot be scheduled indefinitely while governments disagree.

The AR7 timetable matters beyond the Panel's own calendar. It shapes when governments and the public receive the next major scientific assessment, ahead of the 2028 UN climate talks. A body that decides by consensus cannot finalise decisions if the delegations most exposed to climate impacts have gone home. That is the tension the suspension exposes: consensus by exhaustion is not the same as consensus by inclusion.

What remains unknown is substantial.

The session was suspended, not cancelled. AR7 was not abandoned. But a meeting that ends because the most vulnerable delegations could not stay long enough to finish is a test of whether the Panel's consensus model can function on schedule — and that test has not yet been passed.