The AWI climate model AWI-CM consists of the Finite Element Sea-ice Ocean Model (FESOM) developed at the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven and the ECHAM6 atmosphere land model developed at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg. With the innovative flexible mesh structure of the FESOM model it is possible to highly resolve key ocean regions such as the western boundary currents or the Antarctic Circumpolar Current. In relatively coarse resolutions the model has proven to be of comparable quality as the CMIP5 models when measured with objective performance indices while in finer resolutions long-standing biases such as the North Atlantic deep ocean bias could be improved considerably. The AWI climate model will be part of CMIP6 including HighResMIP and production simulations have recently been started. Furthermore, at the moment the AWI-CM is being coupled to the Parallel Ice Sheet Model PISM to investigate the stability of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet when considering ice shelf – ocean interactions at very high resolutions (5 to 10 km) locally around Antarctica while leaving the ocean resolution in the order of 100 km in the dynamically less active subtropical areas.