Inside the political struggle at the IPCC that will determine the next six years of climate science

By Hannah Hughes, Aberystwyth University

The UN’s climate science advisory group, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is currently meeting in Bulgaria to decide on a timeline for its next “cycle” of reports over the rest of this decade. That decision should have been taken in January, but government divisions arose over aligning IPCC outputs with UN climate negotiations, at a meeting that the IPCC chair described as “one of the most intense” he had experienced.

Political struggle over the final wording of IPCC reports is well known, but this division at the start of the process reflects the organisation’s achievements. The more successful it becomes in disseminating climate knowledge, the more deeply imbued in climate politics it becomes.

I have studied the IPCC for 15 years and think these political factors are often overlooked. For instance, though the reports are written by scientists, governments play an integral role throughout the process. The IPCC is after all an intergovernmental body – it’s governments that decide to produce the reports and give the final approval, not scientists.

Most notably, this involves the final line-by-line approval of a report’s key findings in the “summary for policymakers” (the only bit most people read). Media reporting and accounts by IPCC authors frequently reveal the extent of negotiation over how the latest knowledge of climate change is presented to the public. This has lead to whole sections being deleted and open conflict between scientists and government delegates.

However, decisions made at the start of an assessment cycle are equally fraught with politics. These include electing the bureau and approving the report outline. The politics sometimes come to light, as it did when Wikileaks revealed US manoeuvring to secure the election of the US co-chair candidate for a previous round of reports which were published in 2013 and 2014.

These struggles indicate the impact that IPCC reports can have on official UN climate negotiations, where its reports provide the knowledge base to inform a collective response.

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