The IPCC has commissioned and approved several sets of scenarios for climate research over the past two decades. New scenarios are created periodically to reflect advances in research, new data, and to support the increasing sophistication of integrated assessment and climate models. The IPCC decided in 2006 to catalyze the development of new scenarios by the research community, rather than developing them itself, with the intention that those scenarios, and research building on those scenarios, would underpin its 5th Assessment Report scheduled for completion in 2013/14.