IPCC
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a scientific body under the United Nations that assesses the latest research on climate change. It provides policymakers with regular assessments of the scientific basis of climate change, its impacts, and potential adaptation and mitigation strategies. The IPCC's reports are influential in shaping international climate policy and agreements.
6 Key excerpts on "IPCC"
eBook - ePub- Brian Dawson, Matt Spannagle(Authors)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...INTERGOVERNMENTAL PANEL ON CLIMATE CHANGE (IPCC) The IPCC is the most important source of scientific, technical, and socioeconomic information for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and has had a strong impact on the development of the Convention and subsequent international climate change negotiations. The IPCC produces comprehensive Assessment Reports about every five years as well as Special Reports and Technical Papers in response to UNFCCC requests (see UNFCCC). The IPCC also maintains the National Greenhouse Gas Inventories Program (see below). The role of the IPCC is to objectively, transparently, and comprehensively assess the scientific, technical, and socioeconomic information relevant to understanding the risk of climate change, its potential impacts, and options for adaptation and mitigation. The significance of the work was recognized with a Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. 1 How does the IPCC operate? The IPCC is a Panel that is open to all member countries of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). The IPCC meets about once a year to establish procedures, direction, and scope of reports being commissioned and to approve reports. The IPCC does not undertake new research or monitor climate-related data but bases its assessments on published and peer-reviewed scientific and technical literature...
eBook - ePubThe Global Environment
Institutions, Law, and Policy
- Regina S. Axelrod, Stacy D. VanDeveer(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- CQ Press(Publisher)
...In November 1988 the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme created the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to synthesize and assess the state of scientific knowledge on climate change and evaluate response strategies. (The IPCC does not conduct original scientific research.) The IPCC has completed five major assessments (1990, 1996, 2001, 2007, and 2014) as well as numerous technical reports and is generally viewed as the authoritative scientific body on the issue of climate change, giving it a privileged position in the policy process (see Chapter 2). 13 Although climate change science is contested in some countries, including the United States, political debates at the international level tend to focus on what to do about climate change rather than on whether it is a problem. Negotiating the International Climate Change Regime The process of developing a coordinated international response to climate change has focused on negotiation of the three multilateral agreements that constitute the international climate change regime: the FCCC, the Kyoto Protocol, and the Paris Agreement. With the first two treaties, countries employed the “framework-protocol” approach, which is common in many areas of international environmental law. As a “framework” convention, the FCCC establishes the basic architecture within which international efforts to address global climate change take place, whereas the Kyoto Protocol outlines specific obligations consistent with the guiding principles set forth in the FCCC. Together, these two documents establish the principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures that have governed interactions among members of the international community on this issue for the past thirty years...
eBook - ePubHubris
The Troubling Science, Economics, and Politics of Climate Change
- Michael Hart(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Compleat Desktop Publishing(Publisher)
...All can be downloaded in whole or in part in pdf format at: http://IPCC.ch/publications_and_data/publications_and_data.shtml. Many are published in book form by Cambridge University Press. The IPCC’s mandate was limited to working with the existing knowledge base and using it to find the anthropogenic influence on climate change. Governments were invited to nominate their best scientists to form an intergovernmental panel that would review the available, peer-reviewed literature and prepare periodic reports summarizing the state of knowledge of the human impact on the climate system. These reports would be reviewed by government officials, presumably scientifically literate ones, who would prepare summaries of the science for policy makers. The IPCC would thus provide the intellectual and evidentiary underpinnings for action by governments, both domestically and internationally. The panel was sold to the world as an independent, objective source of advice to governments, and for the next 25 years the media faithfully echoed that myth as the panel poured out one “authoritative” report after another (see Box 5-1). In reality, the panel’s leadership was chosen from the activist scientists who had from the beginning been closely involved in developing the catastrophic climate change story. Many of the scientists who contributed to its reports formed part of a closely knit group of researchers who shared the alarmist perspective. A few scientists who were not part of the “in” group participated in the early days but soon wore out their welcome and concentrated on their own work or became much-maligned critics. 292 The often-hyped work of the IPCC has been proven to be seriously flawed. 293 Its Summary for Policy Makers is less the work of scientists than of officials appointed by their governments to produce such a summary. It partakes of the characteristics of both advocacy science and official science...
eBook - ePubEcosocialism and Climate Justice
An Ecological Neo-Gramscian Analysis
- Eve Croeser(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...With the benefit of hindsight, however, it is clear that the IPCC approach has not been effective in ‘catalyzing policymakers’. It is therefore reasonable to suggest that stronger policy advocacy by scientists, if it could have been achieved, may have at least partially helped mitigate some of the additional anthropogenic global warming locked in by the increasing GHG emissions in the three decades since scientists became aware of the severity of this issue. An established intergovernmental mechanism that has now been operational for nearly two decades, the IPCC describes its main task as being to provide ‘assessment reports on the state of knowledge on climate change’ at regular intervals, and its restricted mandate is reflected in the statement that one of its most important principles is to produce reports that are ‘policy relevant’ but not ‘policy prescriptive’ (IPCC, 2010). 9 Rather than conducting new research, IPCC reports assess the most recently published and peer-reviewed scientific literature on climate change and related issues, but in the absence of such literature (which often is the case on issues such as adaptation), they also include information obtained from ‘grey literature’, which refers to government reports and work published by international organisations (IPCC, 2010). The volunteer scientists and experts conducting the assessments and writing the reports are organised into three Working Groups (WGs): WGI assesses and reports on the physical science basis of climate change; WGII focuses on the expected impacts of global warming on socio-economic and natural systems; and WGIII reports on possible policy responses to the effects identified by WGII (IAC, 2010, p. 6; Luton, 2015)...
eBook - ePubTraditions and Trends in Global Environmental Politics
International Relations and the Earth
- Olaf Corry, Hayley Stevenson, Olaf Corry, Hayley Stevenson(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...First, various academic observers have argued that the IPCC’s attempt to achieve political neutrality involves important simplifications. Scientometric studies show that the IPCC still displays a notable dependency on geophysical (rather than social) sciences and on Western/developed countries that can assist with climate models (Vasileiadou et al. 2011). The emphasis upon peer-reviewed research has simultaneously excluded alternative forms of expertise – such as legal reports, which as a rule are rarely published in these forums – along with more localised and informal forms of knowledge. Indeed, Jasanoff (2013: 451) has argued that the IPCC’s approach effectively is ‘de-skilling those outside their fields by their very capacity to understand and assess risks responsibly’. More outspoken critics have alleged that the IPCC only refers to those scientific findings that confirm dominant views of climate change and thereby tending towards ‘dogmatism’ and ‘cartel formation’ (Hulme and Ravetz 2009). Second, the IPCC has been criticised by organisations and lobbyists seeking to oppose climate change policy. In 1997 for example the fossil-fuel dominated Global Climate Coalition funded a now-famous TV campaign arguing that the proposed Kyoto Protocol was ‘not global and not going to work’. Campaigns like these tended to reinforce political debates that the IPCC was either ‘for’ or ‘against’ business interests. The most notable challenge to the IPCC’s procedures and credibility followed the event known as ‘Climategate’, when emails from the climate change research centre at the University of East Anglia were hacked and publicised just months before the Copenhagen climate conference in 2009. Much discussion focused on the statement in one email that suggested scientists were willing to ‘hide the decline’ in observed global temperatures...
eBook - ePub- Carola Klöck, Paula Castro, Florian Weiler, Lau Øfjord Blaxekjær, Carola Klöck, Paula Castro, Florian Weiler, Lau Øfjord Blaxekjær(Authors)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...1 Introduction Carola Klöck, Paula Castro, Florian Weiler, and Lau Øfjord Blaxekjær Introduction Climate change is undoubtedly one of the great challenges of the 21st century. For about 30 years, global and local communities have sought to tackle this challenge. In 1988, the United General Assembly (UNGA), at the initiative of Malta, recognised climate change as “a common concern of mankind” (United Nations, 1988), and the United Nations Environment Programme and the World Meteorological Organisation were tasked with establishing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Climate change entered the international agenda, and has only increased in importance since. Multilateral negotiations on a global climate agreement started in 1990 – also the year in which the IPCC published its first assessment report. Only two years later, negotiations culminated in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Since 1995 – one year after the Convention’s entry into force – the international community has met annually at the Conference of the Parties (COP) to further negotiate and implement the Convention’s ultimate objective of “prevent[ing] dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system” (UNFCCC, 1992). These climate summits have become “environmental mega-conferences” (Gaventa, 2010) with thousands of participants, and receive considerable academic, political, media, and public attention (Bäckstrand, Kuyper, Linnér, & Lövbrand, 2017; Lövbrand, Hjerpe, & Linnér, 2017; Schmidt, Ivanova, & Schäfer, 2013; Schroeder & Lovell, 2012). A core feature of the climate change negotiations, and in fact of any multilateral negotiation, is that many states do not negotiate individually, but through groups or coalitions; Dupont (1996) even defines “negotiations as coalition building”. At the same time, some states, particularly larger ones, may also engage in negotiations individually, although they typically are also members of a coalition...
