About

The Data Distribution Centre (DDC) was established by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1997. Over the past three decades, an IPCC data task group has provided guidance to the DDC on curation, traceability, stability, availability and transparency of data and scenarios related to the assessment reports of the IPCC. The DDC has been jointly managed by institutional partners with the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for Operation. The brief history of the task group and the DDC partners is presented in the MoU. 

The roles and responsibilities of the DDC are set out by the Guidance for the core functions of the IPCC Data Distribution Centre (DDC) in Annex 2 of the report on the 47th Session of the IPCC Plenary, in the Document IPCC-XLVII/Doc. 9 (Decision IPCC-XLVII-9).

The IPCC Task Group on Data Support for Climate Change Assessments (TG-Data) for the Seventh Assessment Report (AR7) was established in 2025. The current DDC partners include the German Climate Computing Center (Deutsches Klimarechenzentrum, DKRZ, Germany), the Center for Integrated Earth System Information (CIESIN, USA), the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Instituto de Física de Cantabria (CSIC-IFCA, Spain), and MetadataWorks (UK) in collaboration with the Centre for Environmental Data Analysis (CEDA, UK). The DDC managers are:

  • XING Xiaoshi (CIESIN, USA)
  • STOCKHAUSE Martina (DKRZ, Germany)
  • GUTIÉRREZ José Manuel (CSIC-IFCA, Spain)
  • MILWARD Adam (MetadataWorks, UK)
  • Charlotte Pascoe (CEDA, UK)

Contact of the CIESIN DDC site, hosted at the Climate School, Columbia University in New York City: