Governments that support climate science must stand firm against naysayers

Piers Forster is Professor of Physical Climate Change and Director of the Priestley Centre for Climate Futures at the University of Leeds. He has previously served as a lead author on several IPCC assessment reports.

Evidence of a rapidly changing climate and our improved scientific understanding is compelling nations to act, but not always in a good way. The science itself is facing well-organised obstruction.

Piers Forster is Professor of Physical Climate Change and Director of the Priestley Centre for Climate Futures at the University of Leeds. He has previously served as a lead author on several IPCC assessment reports.

Evidence of a rapidly changing climate and our improved scientific understanding is compelling nations to act, but not always in a good way. The science itself is facing well-organised obstruction.

The consequences of politicising the evidence are now more apparent than ever, especially in the run-up to a crucial intergovernmental climate meeting taking place in Addis Ababa this week.

On the agenda is a proposal that would prevent all governments from being able to use the most up-to-date analysis of options for combatting climate change at a critical stage in UN negotiations.  

The meeting is the 65^th session of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the body charged with providing gold-standard scientific and economic evidence on climate change to the world.

Often characterised as a scientific organisation, the IPCC is actually a forum of governments that commissions assessments from scientists from across the globe. This unique effort is doubly important as it represents the world’s only climate science reports that are approved by consensus among the 195 countries that make up its membership.

But this consensus also means that governments can regulate the IPCC’s reports and timescales. Countries can make it difficult for their scientists to participate or even withhold the organisation’s budget.

By doing so, they can place a straitjacket on the production of analysis that these self-same governments are obliged to consider when they assemble under a different umbrella – the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which relies on the findings from the IPCC to guide negotiations.

When it works well, this intergovernmental approach means that countries agree on, and have a firm, authoritative scientific basis for acting on the evidence in a cooperative way. 

Until now, the system has largely functioned as it should, despite a certain amount of posturing and politicking. This month, however, could be the time when that delicately balanced state of affairs comes to an end.

Enemies of science?

The vast majority of governments – in Europe, Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America and most importantly the small island developing states which sit on the frontlines of climate impacts – want the three main parts of the IPCC’s current assessment report (AR7) finished by the end of 2028. That would mean its conclusions can inform the next Global Stocktake – the five-yearly process set up under the Paris Agreement where governments review progress on climate action and ideally commit to stronger efforts.

Against this view stands a handful of major emitters who are determined that the IPCC’s upcoming report on mitigation – reducing climate-heating emissions – will not emerge until after that crucial political decision-making point.

The figureheads for this group are Saudi Arabia and India, with a few others such as Russia lurking in the background. Finding the Saudis here is absolutely expected, but India’s presence is more surprising given President Narendra Modi’s commendable commitment to building a clean energy economy, most notably his leadership of the International Solar Initiative.

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Underneath pretexts of giving the authors more time, or making it fairer in terms of who can contribute, they have a hidden motive: if the report on mitigation is delayed beyond the second Global Stocktake, the same governments that delayed it will then argue that the stocktake cannot meaningfully discuss vital mitigation action without the latest report, effectively delaying more ambitious agreements on cutting emissions by another five years.

It is the duty of every government that professes to care about climate change to oppose such a retrograde step. There are worrying signs, however, that some governments which are highly influential within the IPCC system may be about to cave.

No time to appease

What seems to be happening is that in the face of signals that the Saudis, for example, are prepared to block the IPCC’s budget if they don’t get their way, some governments are leaning towards appeasement, i.e. publishing the mitigation report only after the Stocktake been has completed, just to keep the whole process moving – better a bad agreement than no agreement.

This would be a major error of judgement, for two reasons.

One is that appeasement will not stop the naysayers’ moves to derail climate action – quite the opposite. Giving ground on this will only embolden them to propose other roadblocks, such as further delays and arguments over report content, or further minimising and excluding UN and non-UN science in other fora, such as the UNFCCC science negotiation tracks.

The second is that giving way would be a betrayal of communities in countries impacted by climate change around the world. In India itself, 90% of the workforce toils outdoors in informal settings and temperatures are rising well above 40C – so constraining global warming as soon as possible is clearly desirable for both human health and economic productivity.

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For the UK, this is a time to remain rock-solid in support of an outcome that so manifestly serves the interests of people at home and around the world. Britain has a distinguished record in international climate science, being the only country to have supplied two chairs to the IPCC, including the incumbent, Jim Skea.

The climate impacts seen around the world this year – from lethal heatwaves in Europe to Nepal’s devastating flood – prove there is no time to wait. Climate action needs to be accelerated. Getting the right decision this week, so that the latest evidence can be acted on at the right time, is essential.

The world will be watching and counting on governments to stand strong and defend the need to deliver relevant and timely climate science for us all.