With cascading climate shocks unfolding faster than scientists can track them, the United Nations scientific agency that assesses global warming risks and response options is stuck in a procedural logjam and facing a potential budget shortfall.
The latest plenary session of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in Bangkok concluded last week without members approving a final schedule for completing the Seventh Assessment Report, even though the cycle officially began nearly two years ago. And experts warned that the reduction in funding could affect future work.
The IPCC was established by global consensus in 1988 and has published comprehensive climate science assessments on five- to seven-year cycles. The next report on cities and climate change is expected to be released in about a year. However, the lack of agreement on basic steps and funding issues suggests that current international tensions could undermine hard-won international consensus at the intersection of climate science and policy.
IPCC reports are the global reference point that governments use to plan, invest, and respond to climate change. As schedules shift and funding tightens, there is a risk that the shared infrastructure will begin to wobble, creating delays and gaps in the basic climate science guidance that many countries with limited scientific resources need.
Trying to build a durable global science and policy consensus at the IPCC is difficult at the best of times, and it has not gotten easier. Renowned climate scientist James Hansen recently predicted that human-induced warming could cause global average temperatures to rise by 1.7 degrees Celsius (3.06 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial average temperatures by 2027. This would far exceed the 1.5 degrees Celsius climate risk threshold identified in the landmark 2018 IPCC report and adopted as a climate target under the Paris Agreement. At that level, warming could have irreversible consequences, including centuries of sea level rise and disruption of ocean currents that control the climate. At the same time, conflicts over fossil fuels, which are the cause of the climate crisis, are growing.
Taken together, these circumstances have made the past few years some of the most difficult in the IPCC’s 15 years of work, said Jim Skee, the committee’s current chair. However, he emphasized that important scientific research is continuing well for now, and noted the IPCC’s track record of approving and delivering comprehensive assessments on time over the past several decades.
The report’s authors and reviewers, including about 50 from the United States, are meeting as scheduled. But he acknowledged that not knowing exactly when major reports are due makes it difficult for researchers who volunteer hundreds of hours to work on them.
Skeer said the current budget should provide the commission with enough funding to complete its planned reports in the current cycle through 2029, but some “worst-case” funding scenarios pose financial risks.
“I don’t mean to make light of this situation, but I don’t feel any existential anxiety at this point,” he added.
The IPCC meeting opened in Bangkok last week. Credit: IPCC
The IPCC’s annual operating budget is about $9 million from voluntary government contributions, but the value of its trust fund has declined by about 30 percent in recent years due to loss of U.S. funding and uneven support from other countries. The gap is small enough that a few wealthy countries can close it, but so far they have done so by drawing down their reserves. Long-term concerns will remain if funding does not recover.
“This is not a lot of money. We should absolutely be able to deal with it,” Ski said, pointing to the commission’s funding uncertainty as an example of a key finding of the recent IPCC report.
“In our last report, we had a very clear conclusion that the world has enough money to deal with climate change,” he said. “The question is how do we direct the money to where it’s needed?”
frayed beliefs
The $2 million gap left by the U.S. funding cut could be filled by five or six other countries contributing less than $500,000 each, but that funding is just the tip of the iceberg, said Mike Hulme, a professor of human geography at the University of Cambridge who has studied the IPCC for many years.
“The implicit assumptions that held the IPCC together may be beginning to unravel,” Hulme said. Recent issues demonstrate the depth of uncertainty over the health of the global climate change agreement, which could face “possibly fragmentation and repositioning, if not dissolution,” he said. Other signs of tension include countries “retreating to side agreements and parallel initiatives when consensus breaks down,” he said, referring to non-binding agreements adjacent to the U.N. climate framework, such as tree-planting initiatives and methane reduction commitments.
At the recent Bangkok meeting, independent observers for the Global Negotiations Bulletin said the lack of agreement on a formal schedule at this stage of the IPCC cycle was unprecedented. Earth Negotiation Bulletin is a reporting service of the International Institute for Sustainable Development that monitors and analyzes global environmental negotiations.
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They tracked “persistent disagreements” and “controversial debates that bounced across the agenda,” and noted that some participants had expressed concerns about whether the work plan could be delivered.
“These are tough and challenging times for the IPCC,” said Jessica Templeton, a political scientist who attended the meeting and heads IISD’s Global Negotiations News Team. “It has become very political. My understanding is that the decisions being made about the timeline are unprecedented,” she said, adding that the IPCC report is the cornerstone of global climate policy.
“It’s really important to get this out there…especially with climate change happening so rapidly,” Templeton said. The report provides reliable scientific information. “It has been vetted by all member states and its credibility is very useful to policymakers.” Without the report, many countries would not have access to the best science to prepare for and respond to climate impacts, she added.
actual impact
The impacts of climate change are still real, killing and displacing tens of thousands of people every year and destroying property, food supplies and power systems, making the IPCC’s scientific role more important than ever, said Karl Friedrich Schleusner, lead author of a key chapter in the panel’s upcoming report.
Much of the world still relies on accurate global climate science assessments shared by the panel “to ground public policy debates,” said Schleusner, a climate researcher at the Austria-based International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, which studies how the climate will respond to warming beyond the goals of the Paris Agreement. He said that despite continued turmoil in some areas, the IPCC will continue to play an important role in spurring action from governments, businesses and civil society.
Uncertainty about the IPCC’s schedule is a “real concern” and could have a disproportionate and exclusionary impact, particularly on researchers in the Global South, he said.
At the same time, he said, the scope and scale of reports is growing in line with the growing impact on climate change, and the demands on their production are increasing.
Earth Negotiations News expert Templeton said participants were gathering resolve for the October meeting.
“What gave me hope was seeing so many very dedicated individuals coming together and working together in a really tough geopolitical situation,” she said. “They will succeed in delivering a valuable report.”
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bob berwin
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Bob Barwin is an Austria-based reporter who has covered climate science and international climate policy for more than a decade. Previously, he reported on the environment, endangered species, and public lands for several Colorado newspapers, and also worked as editor and associate editor for a community newspaper in the Colorado Rockies.
