In December 2015, the 21st Conference of Parties (COP21) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change invited the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to provide a special report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways. In October 2018, the IPCC issued a Special Report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. This was the first IPCC report to employ the concept of the Anthropocene in its climate-change assessments – referring to it as the ‘overarching context’ and a ‘boundary concept’ that provides the ‘unifying lens’ through which to acknowledge ‘profound, differential but increasingly geologically significant human influences on the Earth system as a whole’.