We write as a group that include authors, chapter scientists, and review editors of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)'s most recent assessments of sealevel and ice-sheet changes, as well as scholars of the IPCC process and developers of tools to communicate IPCC sea-level projections.

The IPCC is a United Nations (UN) body established to assess the science of climate change. By providing governments with a common, rigorously reviewed, scientific fact base for policy discussions, rather than leaving scientific disagreements to play out in more politicized, policy-making venues, it plays a critical role in global climate governance.

Unfortunately, a recent UN secretariat technical brief on sea-level rise attempts to update the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6)’s assessment without the benefits of the IPCC’s established assessment processes. In concluding that “since the publication of the IPCC AR6 [report] in 2021, a growing number of scientific studies on ice-sheet loss are raising alarm among scientists that future [sea-level rise] could indeed be much larger and occur sooner” than AR6 assessed, it misunderstands the IPCC AR6 presentation of future sea- level rise and presents an unbalanced perspective on literature published since AR6.