Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ( IPCC )

Better information on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and mitigation potential in the agricultural sector is necessary to manage these emissions and identify responses that are consistent with the food security and economic development priorities of countries. Critical activity data (what crops or livestock are managed in what way) are poor or lacking for many agricultural systems, especially in developing countries. In addition, the currently available methods for quantifying emissions and mitigation are often too expensive or complex or not sufficiently user friendly for widespread use.The purpose of this focus issue is to capture the state of the art in quantifying greenhouse gases from agricultural systems, with the goal of better understanding our current capabilities and near-term potential for improvement, with particular attention to quantification issues relevant to smallholders in developing countries. This work is timely in light of international discussions and negotiations around how agriculture should be included in efforts to reduce and adapt to climate change impacts, and considering that significant climate financing to developing countries in post-2012 agreements may be linked to their increased ability to identify and report GHG emissions (Murphy et al 2010, CCAFS 2011, FAO 2011).

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is broadly viewed as the world’s most legitimate scientific assessment body that periodically assesses the economics of climate change (among many other topics) for policy audiences. However, growing procedural inefficiencies and limitations to substantive coverage have made the IPCC an increasingly unattractive forum for the most qualified climate economists. Drawing on our observations and personal experience working on the most recent IPCC report, published last year, we propose four reforms to the IPCC’s process that we believe will lower the cost for volunteering as an IPCC author: improving interactions between governments and academics, making IPCC operations more efficient, clarifying and strengthening conflict of interest rules, and expanding outreach. We also propose three reforms to the IPCC’s substantive coverage to clarify the IPCC’s role and to make participation as an author more intellectually rewarding: complementing the IPCC with other initiatives, improving the integration of economics with other disciplines, and providing complete data for policymakers to make decisions. Despite the distinct characteristics of the IPCC that create challenges for authors unlike those in any other review body, we continue to believe in the importance of the IPCC for providing the most visible line of public communication between the scholarly community and policymakers.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has become a hugely influential institution. It is the authoritative voice on the science on climate change, and an exemplar of an intergovernmental science-policy interface. This book introduces the IPCC as an institution, covering its origins, history, processes, participants, products, and influence. Discussing its internal workings and operating principles, it shows how IPCC assessments are produced and how consensus is reached between scientific and policy experts from different institutions, countries, and social groups. A variety of practices and discourses – epistemic, diplomatic, procedural, communicative – that make the institution function are critically assessed, allowing the reader to learn from its successes and failures. This volume is the go-to reference for researchers studying or active within the IPCC, as well as invaluable for students concerned with global environmental problems and climate governance. This title is also available as Open Access via Cambridge Core.

The Stern Review on the Economic Effects of Climate Change

On 17 September 2021, the Grantham Institute hosted a follow-up to the Royal Meteorological Society's virtual event on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 6th assessment report (AR6). The event focused on the response to the climate crisis and taking actions from AR6. Three sectors were covered, including 'School leaders and educators', led by Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) Learning Network & London Schools Climate Summit; 'Business and Industry - Environmental, social and corporate governance', chaired by Anita Punwani, Deputy Chair NED, Institute of Risk Management; and 'Geologists, earth scientists and energy experts', led by the European Federation of Geologists and Imperial College London researchers. Panel members were from British Standards Institution, 11 https://www.bsigroup.com/ Save the Children UK, 22 https://www.savethechildren.org.uk/ University College London 33 https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ and Resurgence. 44 https://www.resurgence.io/ Dr Alex Brown (STEM learning) and Malini Mehra (Globe International) chaired a session on the implications of AR6 for school leaders and educators. Participants agreed that we now have an opportunity for collaboration, as the UK Prime Minister recently appointed a new Education Secretary (Nadhim Zahawi) and Schools Minister (Robin Walker). With COP26 (Smith et al., 2021) at the time just five weeks away, it was emphasised that now is the time to put climate education on the agenda and embedded in the green recovery. There was a feeling that teachers are constrained by the curriculum and do not have the skills, capacity, or appropriate resources to apply climate issues to their own subjects. Recommendations were given to address this through exam bodies and quality assurance organisations, and to provide better training for teachers, so they are empowered to embed climate change into their lessons. A curriculum reform should also include green skills for students, to ensure the next generation is equipped to apply for green jobs in the future. Further discussion focussed on climate risk and adaptation. Few educational leaders recognise that the most harmful impacts of climate change to the educational sector are likely to be physical, such as flooding and extreme heat. It is important to find ways to communicate this effectively with school leaders, drawing on what has been learned from COVID-19. The session ended with discussion about the next steps, starting with a letter to the Education Secretary and Schools Minister regarding an enquiry into whether the current education system is fit for purpose in relation to the government's net zero commitments. Nuha Eltinay's (Middle East and North Africa representative) 55 https://www.resurgence.io/team/ key messages included the need to build bridges between existing communities and weather forecasters. The need to communicate weather information and climate change to grassroots were essential for progress. Specifically, what the IPCC meant to her organisation was centred around vulnerabilities in Middle East and Northern African regions. It was emphasised that compound and cascading hazards after natural events are often not reported and under-addressed, despite their ability to produce further catastrophic hazards that propagate through socio-economic systems (e.g. Alexander and Pescaroli, 2019). Kit Vaughan (Save the Children) mentioned the importance of dealing with the disruption arising from climate change. Kit also explained the interrelationship between other global issues including COVID-19 which led us to recognise global inequality. Kit raised the important point that children born in 2020 are subject to a seven-fold increase in climate events when compared with their grandparents born in the 1960s (Thiery et al., 2021). This is further exacerbated by the fact that one billion children are living in high-risk areas. This discussion raised important issues of climate change with regard to children. These stakeholders require a specific focus of support and integration at every level with effective communication. Gianluca Pesacaroli (University College London) expressed issues pertaining to operational silos whereby private companies operate independently from public bodies. This becomes problematic when addressing and meeting mutual climate mitigation targets. There is a need for the co-production of information between private and public entities, scientists and non-scientists, which can facilitate important discourses allowing for effective policy making. Lesley Wilson (British Standards Foundation, BSI) emphasised the need to have a common benchmark of sustainability that organisations should employ in their environmental agendas. The BSI works collaboratively across sectors to foster such common standards. Katrina Ramage (World Values Day) highlighted the need to communicate climate change to young children in layperson terms so that they can understand the issues facing them and how the government aims to support the future generation. Discourses in the realm of decision making, be that public or private, regarding the next generation, often do not directly involve young people. Moreover, the complexities of such discourses are rarely understood by children and more needs to be done to explain the ramifications of climate change to them. Examples of this include encouraging children to debate climate change in educational establishments and visiting schools to educate children and facilitating such discussions. Hannah Wood (UBS Foundation) identified that there is a funding gap between climate and environmental issues. There is growing concern that within corporate settings there is untapped capital which can be used to support financing the global environmental agenda (Clark et al., 2018). Funding is not disseminated appropriately with little communication between corporate and public entities. Therefore, there is a serious need to trigger funding for climate change initiatives and move capital to where it is more needed. Glen Burridge (European Federation of Geologists) led the breakout session 'Earth Sapience: How can Earth Scientists work together to address the climate crisis?'. Dr Yves Plancherel (Imperial College London) started by highlighting that much of the new IPCC reports are not novel, raising the debate of how the information in the IPCC should be delivered in the future. Cedric John (Imperial College London) and Dr Edward Gryspeerdt (Imperial College London) agreed with the sentiment but added that the IPCC reports do pave the way for more platforms to discuss the IPCC, beyond the short periods that it is popularised by the news media (Pearce et al., 2014; Sanford et al., 2019). Dr Isabelle Fernandez (European Federation of Geologists) continued this concept of communication, highlighting that involving people – both the general public and companies – is an important solution to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Dr Edward Gryspeerdt followed this saying that geologists can develop such solutions at economic cost, with the key being to find a way where it is cheaper not to emit, but to leave the CO2 in the ground. Magnus Johansson (SGU) was the last panellist in the group and highlighted that there also needs to be resilience built into everyday life, as well as a push for mitigation measures. At present, Magnus Johansson said, there is a disconnect between those planning climate mitigation and resilience measures and those applying it on the ground. The session was then opened up for general input, where carbon capture and storage (CCS) was heavily discussed. Highlighted as a sustainable opportunity, CCS needs to be implemented as soon as possible to ensure CO2 is utilised, not wasted (Martin-Roberts et al., 2021). Yves highlights that, due to the cost of implementation, oil and gas companies might be in a unique position to spearhead the transition over to CCS by converting their assets (infrastructure, knowledge and workforce) over. The breakout room concluded on discussions around the importance of investigating other energy sources and alternate forms of carbon storage. Renewable and thermal energy are important clean energy options but must also be discussed alongside a candid conversation about their accompanying issues, such as raw material supply. Forest restoration is hugely valuable in tackling both the biosphere crisis, as well as providing a nature-based solution to the carbon issue (Seddon et al., 2020). The event was concluded with a large discussion of all three sectors and the key points that were brought up in the breakout rooms. Melina Mehra clarified that one overarching message that came through was the need to be clear with messages that are being communicated, ensuring those messages are accessible in terms of the capabilities of that person, group or industry. There needs to be clarity on questions such as: What is being asked to be done? How is the success of it measured? Katrina Ramage highlighted how societal tolerance of climate injustice has reduced and that works in favour of better communication, but it does not lessen the complexity of the issue being communicated. COVID-19, as a potentially climate-induced zoonotic 66 An infectious disease which has spread from animals to humans. pandemic, and the rise in extreme weather events, has made it clear that the impacts of climate change are happening now. Glen Burridge summarised that clear communication of complex issues alongside de-biased and practically analysed decisions will allow these issues to be addressed effectively, in the present rather than in the future.

This article contributes to Indigenous literature on Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment Reports (ARs) for an exploration of the science–policy–politics interface at the global scale. It presents findings from the systematic review of the latest AR6, conducted by the Knowledge Justice Collective, that examined Indigenous content in the report and the scientific knowledge base AR6 is based upon. It shows that paying attention solely on numerical increases of Indigenous content rather than the uneven Indigenous representation in the IPCC knowledge base produced in the English language by researchers largely in environmental science-related disciplines at elite institutions limits our understanding of the nuances of Indigenous lived realities in the ARs. Therefore, without an intervention at the knowledge base level, Indigenous Peoples and Indigenous Peoples’ Knowledges will continue to be legible only through extractive relationships in the IPCC AR processes while continuing to promote epistemic Eurocentrism.

In its Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) addresses serious risks that could undermine the living conditions of people all over the world (IPCC 2007). Impacts on food and water availability, flood and storm disasters, and large-scale events such as loss of the monsoon, breakdown of the thermohaline circulation, polar ice melting, or sea level rise could affect a considerable fraction of the global population. After publication of this report a number of studies suggested that the struggle for food and water, the impact of natural disasters, and large-scale migration could pose security risks that would destabilize social systems and aggravate existing conflicts. These concerns inspired a debate on the securitization of climate change (Wæver 1995; Brauch 2009b). The IPCC reports did not focus on the links between climate change, security, and conflict (IPCC 2007; Nordås/ Gleditsch 2009), although statements by IPCC Chair Rajendra Pachauri upon acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize suggest such a linkage. In its planned fifth assessment report, the IPCC will include a chapter on the human security dimensions of climate change.

Climate Change and Health: Strengthening the Evidence Base for Policy

The sixth major <scp>IPCC</scp> assessment report and its implications: 15 September 2021

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has some agenda-setting power for global climate policy. This explains worries about the fact that the governments had decided in 2009 that the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) was to explicitly address geoengineering options, which could then possibly legitimate the serious consideration of such options in global climate policy negotiations. Such worries, however, neglect two factors. First, the IPCC has a long history of dealing with geoengineering and, second, the IPCC performs its assessments without endorsing any options and being based on what is available in the primary literature. It must be admitted that the assessment of geoengineering options in the AR5 of 2014 has been the most extensive of all IPCC reports, mainly because much literature has appeared in the AR5. This is a moral issue: the IPCC carries a special responsibility to give the most comprehensive and clear portrayal of uncertainties, risk, and limitations of geoengineering methods and technologies.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been producing influential reports for over 35 years. As the IPCC’s Seventh Assessment Report (AR7) cycle begins, we offer our perspective as former members of the IPCC Technical Support Units from Working Groups I, II & III, and the Synthesis Report on lessons learned during the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) cycle. We identify three broad issues that, if addressed, could reinforce and sustain the IPCC in continuing its mission to comprehensively assess the scientific understanding of human-induced climate change. These are the imperative to ensure balanced representation, the importance of author recognition, and the need for improved institutional memory. Our recommendations include addressing skill and training needs, tackling barriers to participation particularly for Global South authors, and ensuring all contributors receive appropriate recognition for their efforts. We focus, in particular, on feasible incremental changes that could be implemented during AR7 without major changes to the underlying procedures that require approval by the 195 member governments that make up the IPCC.

The mission of the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) is to provide the worldwide climate-research community with access to the data, information, model codes, analysis tools, and intercomparison capabilities required to make sense of enormous climate data sets. Its specific goals are to (1) provide an easy-to-use and secure web-based data access environment for data sets; (2) add value to individual data sets by presenting them in the context of other data sets and tools for comparative analysis; (3) address the specific requirements of participating organizations with respect to bandwidth, access restrictions, and replication; (4) ensure that the data are readily accessible through the analysis and visualization tools used by the climate research community; and (5) transfer infrastructure advances to other domain areas. For the ESGF, the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) Earth System Grid Center for Enabling Technologies (ESG-CET) team has led international development and delivered a production environment for managing and accessing ultra-scale climate data. This production environment includes multiple national and international climate projects (such as the Community Earth System Model and the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project), ocean model data (such as the Parallel Ocean Program), observation data (Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Best Estimate, Carbon Dioxide Information and Analysis Center, Atmospheric Infrared Sounder, etc.), and analysis and visualization tools, all serving a diverse user community. These data holdings and services are distributed across multiple ESG-CET sites (such as ANL, LANL, LBNL/NERSC, LLNL/PCMDI, NCAR, and ORNL) and at unfunded partner sites, such as the Australian National University National Computational Infrastructure, the British Atmospheric Data Centre, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, the German Climate Computing Centre, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The ESGF software is distinguished from other collaborative knowledge systems in the climate community by its widespread adoption, federation capabilities, and broad developer base. It is the leading source for present climate data holdings, including the most important and largest data sets in the global-climate community, and - assuming its development continues - we expect it to be the leading source for future climate data holdings as well. Recently, ESG-CET extended its services beyond data-file access and delivery to include more detailed information products (scientific graphics, animations, etc.), secure binary data-access services (based upon the OPeNDAP protocol), and server-side analysis. The latter capabilities allow users to request data subsets transformed through commonly used analysis and intercomparison procedures. As we transition from development activities to production and operations, the ESG-CET team is tasked with making data available to all users seeking to understand, process, extract value from, visualize, and/or communicate it to others. This ongoing effort, though daunting in scope and complexity, will greatly magnify the value of numerical climate model outputs and climate observations for future national and international climate-assessment reports. The ESG-CET team also faces substantial technical challenges due to the rapidly increasing scale of climate simulation and observational data, which will grow, for example, from less than 50 terabytes for the last Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment to multiple Petabytes for the next IPCC assessment. In a world of exponential technological change and rapidly growing sophistication in climate data analysis, an infrastructure such as ESGF must constantly evolve if it is to remain relevant and useful. Regretfully, we submit our final report at the end of project funding. To continue to serve the climate-science community, we are currently seeking additional funding. Such funding would allow us to maintain and enhance ESGF production and operation of this vital endeavor of cataloging, serving, and analyzing ultra-scale climate science data. At this time, the entire ESG-CET team would like to take this opportunity to sincerely thank our funding agencies in the DOE Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) program and the Office of Biological and Environmental Research (OBER) - as well as our national and international collaborators, stakeholders, and partners - for allowing us to work with you and serve the community these past several years.

This comparative review of three assessment reports, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, (IPCC), The National Research Council (NRC), and United States Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), respectively is presented in response to comments in the press suggesting that the three reports varied substantially in their assessments of associations between global climate and infectious disease in humans. Comparisons of the assessment teams, approach, reports' findings, views on predictive modeling, recommendations to policymakers and future research are presented. All teams were interdisciplinary, two international, one US-based. Although their approaches differed somewhat, all addressed the role of climate change, El Nino and climate variability, and ultimately, human health, especially infectious disease. The panels agreed that a paucity of long-term data and complexity of relationships among factors affecting climate variability and change and human health rendered projections of current predictive models inadequate as the basis for policy decisions. Each team suggested further study of associations among climate variability/climate change and human infectious disease and downscaled models to project regional and subregional outcomes. Each added additional areas for investigation, e.g., mathematical modeling, effects of socioeconomic factors, emergence of zoonotic disease in humans, transmission dynamics of disease agents. Rather than disagreements, there were differences in emphasis on known components and on hypothesized additional contributing factors and relationships among climate and human infectious disease variables.

This perspective critically assesses how the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) could facilitate a closer alignment of its activities and include lessons drawn from the policy and decision-making communities working on the ground at the regional/local levels. The objective is to facilitate practitioner input into the detailed choice of topics and priorities for IPCC review and in the conclusions drawn (we define practitioners as those engaged in the development and application of practical responses to climate change on the ground). By means of a series of workshops with academics, policy officials and decision-makers in the United Kingdom, the research reported here illuminates how the IPCC’s Working Group II (WGII) has been used in the past to inform decision-making and how practitioner responses to climate change could better inform the IPCC process in the future. In particular, we recommend three key actions. Firstly that IPCC WGII should incorporate more practitioners as authors to improve the awareness and understanding amongst the writing teams of the nature and detail of decisions being made in response to climate change; secondly a practitioner-led IPCC Special Report should be commissioned on good-practice responses to climate change; and thirdly a new body should be created, attached to the IPCC, to synthesise and report on good practice on climate response strategies in a timely manner. By adopting these recommendations, the IPCC could become more directly useful to decision-makers working on adaptation at the national, regional and local levels and enable more actionable decision-making.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has shaped the international debate on human-induced climate change since 1988. It has developed a unique methodology for the assessment of scientific knowledge as a basis for policy formation and its reports and their use by governments have been both warmly praised and strongly criticised. Although the integrity of the IPCC assessment process has been subject to many pressures, and the demands on its Chairmen, Working Group Co-Chairs, Lead Authors, reviewers and national delegations have been heavy and sustained, this insider assessment of the overall role and operation of the IPCC over the past 20 years concludes that, on balance, the IPCC assessment process has been extraordinarily successful and that it has served the world well. The paper provides both an anecdotal and analytical view of the origin, establishment and operation of the IPCC and an evaluation of some of the main lines of criticism that have been directed at its role, its modus operandi and its reports.