IPCC-FCCC Issues at COP 10
December 15th, 2004Posted 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.