IAMC Scientific Steering Committee meeting of 18 October 2021 – summary

The last monthly meeting of the IAMC Scientific Steering Committee meeting (SSC) took place on October 18th, 2021.

The composition of the SSC for the term 2022-2024 was deliberated. CMCC (Italy) and PPE/COPPE/UFRJ (Brazil) were appointed as new Sustaining Members and will join EPRI (USA), IIASA (Austria), PBL (Netherlands), PNNL/JGCRI (USA), NIES (Japan), EMF (USA), and PIK (Germany) in this capacity. CIRED, ERI, and MIT received the most votes in the elections for three At-Large Members and will therefore join the SSC in the next term. Consistent with the objective that up to three additional At-Large Members can be appointed to balance the membership, including sufficient coverage of regions represented by member institutions, IIMA (India) and JRC (Spain) were appointed as At-Large Members. Therefore, the SSC in the years 2022-2024 will be comprised of 14 members, which the SSC feels is a good size for this group at this point.

The plenary programme of this year’s Annual Meeting was refined and the assignment of accepted papers to sessions and timeslots was discussed. The need to attract the participation of researchers from all continents, including Africa, was highlighted as an important objective.

The SSC deliberated about whether or not it should support of Scenarios Forum 2022 – Forum on Scenarios for Climate and Societal Futures, to be held on June 20th-22nd, at the IIASA, Laxenburg, Austria. The forum brings together a diverse set of communities who are using or developing scenarios for use in climate change and sustainability analysis: the SSC felt that the IAMC Community should support this event.

Finally, the need to develop a strategy to deal with the constant increase in the costs of peer-reviewed journals open access fees was identified as a high priority issue for future discussion.