IPCC-FCCC Issues at COP 10

December 15th, 2004

Posted by: Roger Pielke, Jr.

The International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) performs an invaluable service by providing daily updates from the meeting of the Conference of Parties (COP) to the Framework Convention on Climate Change. This week the IISD is providing daily updates from COP-10 in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

The IISD’s report of a briefing of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change held on Tuesday, 14 December 2004, raises some interesting issues.

First, the report notes that in his presentation, “Rajendra Pauchari (sic), IPCC Chairman, described IPCC’s mandate, noting that its main purpose is to provide comprehensive scientific assessments that are relevant to policy makers without being prescriptive.” The notion of “relevant, but not prescriptive” is not a clearly defined concept in the IPCC, and it seems to mean in practice that the IPCC will lend support to those policies that it deems important and ignore others, without providing any transparency to this process to outside observers. This is not policy neutral, close to being policy prescriptive, and may or may not be policy relevant. We have discussed this challenge here. The IPCC needs some help thinking about and shaping its role in climate policy.


The IPCC’s odd stance on issues of policy means, oddly enough, that it does not engage in a systematic discussion of post-Kyoto options for climate change and instead focuses its attention on options already on the table, which is a guarantee that the IPCC will be politicized and a great waste of effort, given that the world needs new options on the table. Such a concern was made apparent in the IISD report: “Harald Dovland, Norwegian Ministry of the Environment … expressed concern over the number of [FCCC] SBSTA members attending IPCC meetings, noted the risk of politicizing the IPCC …” The concern expressed about the number of FCCC participants in the IPCC process suggests that the IPCC is increasingly view as a subsidiary instrument of the FCCC and not an independent, honest broker on climate change policy more generally. In its first assessment the IPCC played more of an honest broker role.

A second issue is a comment attributed to Rajendra Pachauri, IPCC Chairman, “Regarding the fourth assessment report due in 2007, he said the working group on basic science needs to reduce key scientific uncertainties.” Given that the IPCC doesn’t actually do any new research, it simply assesses existing research and provides a comprehensive synthesis; it is very difficult to understand how the IPCC can “reduce uncertainties.” At best it can characterize uncertainties. Pushing the IPCC to reduce uncertainties can itself foster politicization of the process. More generally, it is the very notion that reducing uncertainties is a prerequisite to effective policy action on climate change that has helped to foster the state of gridlock we are in today. It seems like gridlock is here to stay for a while.

A final comment is that Dr. Pachauri, “indicated that the IPCC reports are not subject to external evaluation.” Who evaluates the IPCC? Who is it accountable to?

It seems that some very fundamental issues related to the IPCC – its role in policy, its handling of uncertainties, its processes of evaluation and accountability — are being overlooked.

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