Jim Skea to take helm at IPCC as world enters crucial climate decade

British professor elected chair of UN’s expert panel, which warned in March that 1.5C threshold could be hit in a decade

The British professor Jim Skea has been elected to head the UN’s climate expert panel, taking the helm of the organisation charged with distilling the best science to guide global policy in a crucial decade in human history.

Skea, who is a professor of sustainable energy at Imperial College London and who co-chaired the report on solutions in the panel’s latest round of publications, said in a statement he was “humbled” to have been elected chair at a meeting of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in Nairobi, Kenya.