The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has learnt with great sadness of the death of Dr. James Michael Penman, a member of the Bureau of the IPCC’s Task Force on National Greenhouse Gas Inventories from 1999 to 2015.
Jim Penman, an outstanding scientist with over thirty years of national and international experience in science, energy and environment, died aged 66 on 8 September 2016 from injuries sustained after a cycling accident. Dr. Penman will be remembered as one of the first members of the Task Force Bureau, where he played a key role in the work of the Climate Panel’s Task Force on National Greenhouse Gas Inventories. His soft, constructive and reasoned views in Task Force work were highly respected by all the Task Force Bureau members and experts who participated in Task Force activities.
He was the Interim Co-Chair of the Task Force Bureau’s first session in 1999, and continued as a Bureau member till 2015. He co-chaired the project that produced the IPCC Good Practice Guidance and Uncertainty Management in National Greenhouse Gas Inventories published in 2000. He was a member of the steering group that produced the IPCC’s Good Practice Guidance for Land Use, Land-Use Change and Forestry published in 2003.
Jim was a member of the steering group that produced the 2006 IPCC Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories, which Annex I Parties to the UNFCCC use to estimate emission and removals of greenhouse gases in their national inventory submissions.
Jim was also one of the leading members of the group that led the production of the Climate Panel’s latest Methodology Reports: the 2013 Supplement to the 2006 IPCC Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories: Wetlands and the 2013 Revised Supplementary Methods and Good Practice Guidance Arising from the Kyoto Protocol.
He was awarded an OBE (Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) in 2009 in recognition of his work on establishing the United Kingdom emissions mitigation evidence base, and in international negotiations. He will be greatly missed by the scientific community both in the UK and internationally.
His family created a Just Giving fund in his honour to raise money for UNICEF.