WGIII kicked off the IPCC’s fifth assessment cycle at its First Lead Author Meetingin Changwon, Korea from 12-15 July 2011. The Coordinating Lead Authors and Lead Authors met to begin the formal assessment process of the WGIII contribution to the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report Climate Change 2014: Mitigation of Climate Change. Each author team developed a detailed chapter outline, identified common themes across chapters and Working Groups and modes of collaboration on these issues. Authors also discussed areas of insufficient coverage in the peer reviewed scientific literature and how to include non-peer reviewed sources of high quality to fill these gaps. Moreover, chapter teams started reviewing their own portfolios of expertise to identify needs for inviting further Contributing Authors.

The writing team members met again from 19 to 23 March 2012 at the Second Lead Author Meeting in Wellington, New Zealand. Additionally to preparing for the writing of the First Order Draft, authors continued exchange on common subjects across chapter teams and set up the infrastructure to ensure consistent use of historical and scenario data throughout the report.

The Third Lead Author Meeting (LA3) took place from 5 to 9 November 2012 in Vigo, Spain. At this meeting, the Coordinating Lead Authors and Lead Authors were joined by the Review Editors to consider the comments received during the Expert Review of the First Order Draft of the WGIII AR5 and to prepare the Second Order Draft. The first meeting of the Technical Summary writing team was also convened at this meeting.

From 5 to 9 July all authors and Review Editors gathered for a final meeting at the UN Conference Center in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. At this meeting, the comments received during the Expert and Government Review of the Second Order Draft were considered. Additional meetings by the summary writing teams were held before the submission of the Final Draft to governments in order to ensure consistency of the Technical Summary and the Summary for Policymakers with the underlying chapters.

See WGIII AR5 Timeline for more detail.

In addition to meetings of Lead Authors for the AR5, a number of expert meetings and workshops have been held to broaden the basis for the assessment, as well as to address cross-cutting matters. Several of these were organized across two or even all three WGs; a full list can be found here.