IPCC needs a rethink, say academics
http://ipccreport.wordpress.com/2014/06/11/ipcc-needs-a-rethink-say-academics/
A new paper, Towards a Reflexive Turn in the Governance of Global Environmental Expertise. The Cases of the IPCC and the IPBES (open access) looks into the organisation of the IPCC. It’s written by a large team of environmental and social science researchers from many countries, including Mike Hulme and others from the UK. It results from a meeting held in Leipzig last year.
The paper makes some criticisms of the IPCC, but some of these are rather odd:
“The IPCC has also largely failed to engage with alternative forms of expertise such as local knowledge, or to evaluate and facilitate more radical forms of civic action”.
I don’t think facilitating radical civic action is really within the IPCC remit.
There are some interesting remarks about climategate, the IAC review and the issues of transparency and public trust. They also comment on the aim for consensus and the consequent exclusion of minority views. This paragraph near the end of the section on the IPCC sums up their concerns:
The events surrounding “climategate” demonstrated that public trust cannot be reduced to a function of the quality of science or the breadth and depth of consensus on science alone, as the IPCC had assumed. They showed that trust in science is related to the performance and persuasive power of the people and institutions who speak for science – and that not all countries interpret or trust the IPCC in similar ways (Hajer 2012). The IPCC’s chosen style of risk assessment and communication has also contributed to a unitary approach to representing scientific consensus as a single voice. Not acknowledging or inviting diverse voices to speak will fail to assuage the sense of mistrust. In response, the IPCC plenary has not yet adopted a process of full public disclosure, and it continues to rely upon its existing knowledge-making processes mediated by national delegations. In addition, current discussions about the future of the IPCC continue to be conducted largely behind closed doors, even if the formal positions of countries are somewhat more transparent. It is very likely that in the future the panel will be exposed to scrutiny from more diverse and lively publics and that it will have to respond to forms of distributed or uninvited public participation”
Unfortunately, although the paper raises some interesting questions, there are no clear proposals for improvement of the IPCC beyond the general suggestion of continuously reviewing its own procedures.
