DEPARTMENT OF SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, ENGINEERING
AND PUBLIC POLICY (UCL STEaPP)
Report of a Workshop held at UCL on 4 and 5 February 2014
Arthur Petersen, Neil Morisetti and Jason Blackstock (UCL STEaPP)
This workshop brought together faculty from UCL STEaPP with 17 participants from
IPCC member governments, IPCC Executive Committee, intergovernmental organisations, national government departments, city governments, business and
NGOs to evaluate the IPCC from the perspectives of users of IPCC products.
Participants participated in their personal capacity and the workshop was held under the Chatham House Rule: participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed. This report reflects the rapporteurs’ summary of some of the most salient points that arose in the discussion.
Main outcomes
• IPCC reports still command respect globally and have universal buy in, standing as they do for a comprehensive, transparent and open approach.
• The main use of IPCC reports has been to underpin global climate negotiations and to provide legitimacy for national climate policies. However, a disjunction exists between the IPCC and many other assessment reports that are regional, national or local, or sector specific. The IPCC could adapt its products to facilitate better use by such other assessments.
• There are limits to what the IPCC can do. There is no appetite for revolution or to become more engaged in national or local specifics. However, there is a recognition of the need to evolve if the IPCC is to retain its global standing.
• Possible evolution includes:
1. Review the frequency of solution space activity (adaptation/mitigation)
2. Additional modules, including on methodologies, good practice guidance, training and accreditation for performing climate assessments and translating IPCC findings to other venues
3. More special reports produced in conjunction with partners
4. Structure comprehensive assessment cycle around Synthesis Report
5. Employ a more active, flexible, updateable reporting mechanism that establishes a higher level of transparency with easier access to data
6. Ensure that all TSUs are shared between developed and developing country Working Group/Task Force co-chairs
• The Task Group on the future work of the IPCC should consider how it can systematically engage with a wider user community in order to further enhance the relevance of the IPCC.
Department of Science, Technology, Engineering and
Public Policy (STEaPP)
University College London,
66-72 Gower Street, London WC1E 6EA www.ucl.ac.uk/steapp

Rationale of the workshop
Actors who make decisions on climate-change adaptation and mitigation need data and knowledge to inform these decisions. The actors concerned are governments (including their militaries), businesses, NGOs – at various scales, from the international to the local level. Are the scientific, technological and engineering communities who can deliver these data and knowledge, for instance through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), sufficiently aware of the decisions the various actors are facing and of their real information needs? The hypothesis for this workshop was that this is not the case, that the IPCC should be evaluated from the perspectives of users of IPCC products and that alternative models to the present IPCC model should be explored (some of which may be implementable in a reformed IPCC, others may not). Below we summarise the discussions, clustered around the topics that we asked the participants to reflect on.
Strengths of the IPCC
The IPCC assessment model is seen as in essence a good model for what it was set up to do at the global level. This is also why other organisations, such as IPBES, closely study this model when setting up their own assessment processes. Principally, IPCC products are used to underpin global climate negotiations and in this respect the IPCC is generally regarded as a great success. IPCC reports still command respect globally and have universal buy in, standing as they do for a comprehensive, transparent and open approach.
There is an enormous value in IPCC reports, both the comprehensive Assessment Reports and the Special Reports. Different audiences make use of IPCC reports, not only of the
Summaries for Policymakers but also of individual chapters.
Weaknesses of the IPCC
Despite efforts from the beginnings of the IPCC to ensure a balance in the participation of developed and developing country scientists, some regard IPCC authors as being members of a developed countries’ club. The impression of unbalance is amplified by the visible lack of information for many regions in the developing world – on maps in IPCC reports such regions are often coloured white, Also it has turned out to be too difficult for the author teams to make use of literatures in different languages. Furthermore, it has been difficult to engage developing country reviewers.
While IPCC reports may provide legitimacy for national climate policies, a disjunction exists between the IPCC and many other reports being produced that are regional, national or local, or sector specific. Also the outreach in relation to IPCC reports has not been properly addressed, especially in the developing world. A tension was observed between the need for simplified uncertainty language in the communication about climate change with a wider public and the need not to simplify the messages of the IPCC too much in order to prevent a loss of credibility.
Governments and sectors at present do not receive methodological guidance from the IPCC on how best to perform their own targeted climate-change assessments while making as much use of IPCC products as possible.
Another weakness of IPCC reports, including their SPMs, is that they are hard to read for many user groups.
Sources and robustness of information on climate change used in decision making
For some international organisations that work in different countries, being able to demonstrate that some information comes from the IPCC is very important, since IPCC products have been approved by all countries. However, the IPCC products can typically only be used to demonstrate the scale of the problem. There is not much information that can be harvested for local decisions. Climate is usually not the most important thing to consider for national and local decision makers. Given that they often do not have robust information about climate change at the national and local level, there is a real risk that people rely on their own interpretations of IPCC WGI information, which in some cases has proven to be seriously wrong. The outreach activities for the IPCC Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation (SREX), which
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were based on regional summaries, successfully delivered decision-relevant information to different regions.
Also in governmental departments, e.g. for international development or energy, the evidence for making decisions on investments (in adaptation in developing countries or in domestic mitigation) usually does not come from the IPCC. Separate research programmes exist to generate the necessary evidence base, in the case of international development often jointly with the developing countries so that local capacity is built.
There are examples, however, where a repackaging of IPCC information on climate in the context of particular sectors in a user-friendly form has led to decisions within intergovernmental organisations outside of the climate domain.
Gaps in knowledge that need to be addressed
The participants in particular identified gaps in the knowledge assessed by WGII and WGIII.
First, there are significant gaps in the knowledge on climate impacts and adaptation. This knowledge is still undergoing stepwise development involving an increasing number of disciplines. In particular a knowledge gap was observed vis-à-vis the issue of loss and damage related to climate change. Furthermore, there is a strong mismatch between the need for tailored localised climate information and what the WMO is at present able to deliver in the context of its Global Framework for Climate Services. Second, there are major gaps in the knowledge on transitions, that is, on how sociotechnical transitions work, the study of which involves many disciplines and is still under development.
Even though the remit of the IPCC is only to do large-scale assessment and not to do largescale research, the assessment model can also be used to identify gaps in the knowledge base. This of course requires a significant intellectual effort.
Alternative models to deliver expert assessments on climate change and their pros and cons
IPCC reports are not geared to deliver their information in the context of a clear decision making framework. Even though negotiators within the UNFCCC process find the existence of these reports useful, there is no straightforward way to employ them. In contrast, an alternative model to deliver expert assessments can be obtained from looking at how military decision making processes make use of expert knowledge. Then it becomes clear that expert assessments on climate change can be mainstreamed in strategic decision making as soon as they are able to relate to risk. If there is a framework in place of decision making on risks, specialists’ advice can readily be included in scenario-based strategic decision making.
An alternative model of delivering expert assessments in a much more readable form than the
IPCC’s hard-to-read SPMs would involve communication specialists and interaction with the users early on in the writing process for the summaries. This would also entail the use of focus groups for the figures: it should be checked whether readers see the same things in the figures as was intended by the authors.
Another alternative model, which departs from the static content offered by the IPCC, is a web-based dynamic model in which frequent updates are made if the scientific community feels that a change needs to be made. This amounts to a more active, flexible, updateable reporting mechanism. A web-based dynamic model could also facilitate a high level of transparency, in which it would take much less effort for users to get to the sources of statements and data (including data behind figures). Tailored portals could be added that cater to different specific user groups. Further thought has to be put into how the filtering and review process should take place in this model.
For making actual decisions at a low level in societies, the IPCC model is not even close to delivering a useful product. An alternative for this level of individual decision makers is to provide them with decision making tools that concretely help them to make decisions.
However, such tools are only sparsely available in the climate-change field.
The alternatives discussed should not be understood as suggestions to replace the IPCC, but as ideas that could possibly be (partially) incorporated by the IPCC within its present mandate.
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What could be done by the IPCC and what could best be done by others
There are limits to what the IPCC can do. There is no appetite for revolution or to become more engaged in national or local specifics. However, there is a recognition of the need to evolve if the IPCC is to retain its global standing. An ecology of institutions should work together to deliver the information that different user communities need. The IPCC could be better connected to other organisations, with more and less formal ties, and cater its information better to other assessment activities.
To enhance developing country participation in the IPCC, others could first of all stimulate an increased size and quality of the national research base vis-à-vis climate change in developing countries. This involves setting up collaborations between developed and developing country institutions. The IPCC can help in expanding the group of experts available for participation in the IPCC by building capacity for performing climate-change assessments and the associated writing tasks. Such capacity building is also needed for facilitating regional, national and local assessments which can make use of improved IPCC products. Furthermore, ensuring that all TSUs are shared between developed and developing country Working Group/Task Force co-chairs, could be another way to address the present unbalance in the involvement of developing countries in the production of the IPCC reports.
Finally, resources could be sought to hire translators in order to be able to include more literature from other languages than English.
The IPCC could structure its comprehensive assessment cycle more around the Synthesis
Report. Especially for topics which have long been established, such as most WGI and some
WGII topics, an approach could be considered of making updates of targeted parts of the comprehensive assessment, e.g. every two years. This could be done by surveying author teams and the scientific community with the question of where updates are needed. Such an approach should be carefully designed, however, to address the ‘IPCC fatigue’ that is observed in some scientific communities. In addition, a careful phasing could be introduced between first the assessment of new climate projections (presently WGI) and subsequently the assessment of new impacts studies (presently part of WGII). Also the assessments of the
‘solution space’ (adaptation, presently part of WGII, and mitigation, presently WGIII) could be distributed more over the length of the full assessment cycle, which would lead to more frequent reports.
The IPCC could consider the production of a number of Special Reports in collaboration with other organisations. In addition, the IPCC could reconsider the role of Technical Papers and reintroduce the possibility to assess recent literature in such papers, which have a relative light and fast production process.
The IPCC could adapt its products to facilitate better use by other, targeted assessment processes. The IPCC should not try to orchestrate what happens at the different levels and in the different sectors. However, the IPCC can offer suggestions and guidance for reaching a high quality and making appropriate use of IPCC products in these other assessments.
Furthermore, the IPCC could refine its data portal and assist users in interpreting the data, that is, in turning the data into information.
Since there is an issue of the quality of scientific advice on climate change at national and local levels, the IPCC could revive a module for methodological work (for instance, on good practice for national impact and adaption assessments or for national communications to the
UNFCCC). In addition the IPCC could partner with academic institutions to provide training in climate assessment (e.g., through summerschools), using training manuals and a system of accreditation, especially aimed at talented academics from developing countries. This would also facilitate translating IPCC findings to other venues. Both adaptation and mitigation solutions could be included, which require different practical hand-on protocols, assessment methods and decision tools (e.g. risk profiles; economic appraisal tools; finance tools; methodology for producing mitigation road maps; portfolio management for adaptation and mitigation). Note that this is not similar to copying the IPCC assessment model (studying peer-reviewed literature), which works fine for the global scale, to the national or local scale: other assessment tools will be needed and should be included in the methodological toolbox offered by the IPCC.
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