Wikipedia:WikiProject Climate change/Recommended sources

IPCC and other United Nations bodies

IPCC reports are highly reliable as they capture international scientific consensus. We have a useful cheat sheet on citations for IPCC reports.

These reports are some of the best available about solutions to limit climate change, not just about the causes and effects of warming. The most recent is the Sixth Assessment Report (2021-2023). The more of this report that we can get into Wikipedia, the better. While IPCC reports are the gold standard for quality sourcing, they are written in an extremely dense and academic style which makes them difficult to read. They often use terminology that Wikipedia's readers would probably not understand.

Other United Nations bodies such as the United Nations Environment Programme are also top-quality sources on climate change. Unlike the IPCC, other UN bodies may make policy recommendations. They also tend to be easier to read and summarize.

All key UN climate reports
The annual Emissions Gap report has well-organized information on mitigation

Other organizations and governments

The International Energy Agency has many useful reports. Official website. However, as described in International_Energy_Agency#Criticism, the Agency has a history of underpredicting renewable energy uptake.

The International Renewable Energy Agency similarly has a large collection of reports. May have different bias from IEA.
Royal Society reports are high-quality and often published under a Wikipedia-compatible Creative Commons license, so text can be copied into Wikipedia with attribution in the edit summary.
World Resources Institute, published under a Wikipedia-compatible license (CC-BY 4.0)
The World Bank publishes global data on climate, including country profiles. Other World Bank web pages and reports also cover energy access issues.
The U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine publishes reports that capture national-level scientific consensus on certain issues. National Academies Press Climate Change Collection

Sources to use with caution

Materials from industry coalitions or think tanks such as REN21 or the Breakthrough Institute. The first concern is whether these materials are really "RS" (WP:Reliable sources). Such sources can still be used when we are reporting what these groups say, but this usually requires inline attribution e.g., "According to Jane, Jack also ran up the hill. There may be exceptions so each case is weighed on its own merit. Often there will be reliable media reports to cite instead.
On the flip side, also be cautious with from environmental advocacy groups and political parties. The same cautions about self-published sources and inline attribution apply.

Topic overviews from reputable websites

Our World in Data has excellent articles, maps, and graphs, which are generally released in a license compatible with Wikipedia. Official website. Many of these graphs and maps have already been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, so it's easy to take them from there and insert them into Wikipedia articles.
Carbon Brief has excellent analyses and IPCC report summaries
There are a large number of (paywalled) encyclopedias published, including Oxford Research Encyclopedias - Climate science (which has a browsable table of contents, perhaps good for finding new articles to work on)
Climate Links - a USAID funded research database focused on climate change in different countries
Climate Action Tracker a tracker of government commitments to climate action

Books

University-level textbooks and books published by academic publishers such as university presses are generally excellent sources. They often explain basic concepts that IPCC reports do not. Books from non-academic publishers are of more variable quality.

Books from Cambridge University Press are available for free to qualified editors at the Wikipedia Library. These books include Introduction to Modern Climate Change (2021) by Andrew E. Dressler. If you do not qualify to borrow from the Wikipedia Library, you can request a book chapter at Wikipedia:WikiProject Resource Exchange/Resource Request.

Research tip for US libraries in particular: search for 'libguides' and 'climate change' to find library guides on the topic.

Scholarly journals

Articles in scholarly journals can be either primary or secondary. Secondary articles are known as reviews and include systematic reviews and literature reviews. When doing a Google Scholar search, you can filter search results to show review articles only. Papers that report on research conducted by the authors of the paper are primary sources and should be used judiciously, if at all.

News articles

When a new research study comes out, news outlets will often report on it. There are at least three problems with using these reports as sources. First, it is difficult for lay Wikipedia editors to correctly assess the nuance in a new professional science paper. Second, it takes a while for the rest of the science community to absorb the reported findings. Third, the practice tends to convert our articles from articles to a disjointed science news feed.

Country-specific sources

* U.S. National Climate Assessment, which is updated regularly

Citing long reports

In the climate change topic area, editors make frequent use of reports.

Unfortunately, the Visual Editor does not have a handy form for reports. Instead, you can insert a Cite report template.
When citing reports, each citation must specify a page number or range unless the report is very short. Typically the easiest way to do this is to insert a citation to the report and then add Template:Rp with the page number or range.