Report Details Reforms for UN Climate Change Panel
ENVIRONMENT & HEALTH, SUSTAINABILITY
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
In its recently published review of the process used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to produce its periodic assessment reports, the InterAcademy Council (IAC), an organization of the world's science academies, says the much-criticized U.N.-sponsored organization "needs to fundamentally reform its management structure and strengthen its procedures to handle ever larger and increasingly complex climate assessments as well as the more intense public scrutiny coming from a world grappling with how best to respond to climate change."
The IPCC, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore, was established by the United Nations Environment Programme and the World Meteorological Organization in 1988 to inform policy decisions through periodic assessments of climate change. Recently, the organization has come under intense scrutiny amid controversies over statements it made that were perceived as advocating policy on global warming and the accuracy of its scientific assessments on that matter, including the prediction that the Himalayan glaciers would likely disappear by the year 2035.
In response to these controversies, in March 2010, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and IPCC chair Rajendra K. Pachauri requested that the IAC review the organization and recommend ways to improve its structure and strengthen the processes by which it conducts its assessments. On August 30, the IAC released its report on the IPCC, offering the following recommendations:
1. The IPCC should establish an Executive Committee to act on its behalf between Plenary sessions. The membership of the Committee should include the IPCC Chair, the Working Group Co-chairs, the senior member of the Secretariat, and 3 independent members, including some from outside of the climate community. Members would be elected by the Plenary and serve until their successors are in place.
2. The IPCC should elect an Executive Director to lead the Secretariat and handle day-to- day operations of the organization. The term of this senior scientist should be limited to the time frame of one assessment.
3. The IPCC should encourage Review Editors to fully exercise their authority to ensure that reviewers’ comments are adequately considered by the authors and that genuine controversies are adequately reflected in the report.
4. The IPCC should adopt a more targeted and effective process for responding to reviewer comments. In such a process, Review Editors would prepare a written summary of the most significant issues raised by reviewers shortly after review comments have been received. Authors would be required to provide detailed written responses to the most significant review issues identified by the Review Editors, abbreviated responses to all non-editorial comments, and no written responses to editorial comments.
5. All Working Groups should use the qualitative level-of-understanding scale in their Summary for Policy Makers and Technical Summary, as suggested in IPCC’s uncertainty guidance for the Fourth Assessment Report. This scale may be supplemented by a quantitative probability scale, if appropriate.
6. Quantitative probabilities (as in the likelihood scale) should be used to describe the probability of well-defined outcomes only when there is sufficient evidence. Authors should indicate the basis for assigning a probability based on measurement, expert judgment, and/or model runs).
7. The IPCC should complete and implement a communications strategy that emphasizes transparency, rapid and thoughtful responses, and relevance to stakeholders, and which includes guidelines about who can speak on behalf of IPCC and how to represent the organization appropriately.
If implemented, these recommendations could not only restore the IPCC's lost credibility, but, more importantly, provide impartial, transparent, and accurate assessments of climate change, something that would benefit us all.
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