Elvira Poloczanska

Dr Poloczanska is the Science Advisor to the Co-Chairs and Technical Support Unit (TSU) of Working Group II (WGII) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and is a Senior Scientist at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany. She also holds an Honorary Professorship at the Global Change Institute, The University of Queensland,Australia. In her current role, she provides scientific support to the development of the three IPCC Special Reports: Global Warming of 1.5°C (approved October 2018), The Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate, and Climate Change and Land, as well as the main WGII Assessment Report in the Sixth Assessment Cycle.  Shewas a Lead Author of Chapter 30 The Ocean in the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report.

Prior to joining the WGII TSU in 2016, Dr Poloczanska was a senior research scientist at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) for11 years. Her research focus is on the vulnerability, impacts(including detection and attribution) and risks of and adaptation to climate variability and climate change for species and ecosystems, and the human populations and industries that depend on them. The communication of climate change science to policy, decision makers and public are central to her work. She has worked in multi-disciplinary teams with climate scientists, engineers, social scientists, agricultural scientists, ecologists, conservation biologists, and economists among others, thus has a broad oversight of the climate change risks, challenges and adaptation options. She has published over 40 papers on climate change ecology, impacts and adaptation.