Overview

The explicit aim of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is to influence policymaking. By synthesising research on climate change and presenting it to policymakers, the IPCC tries to meet its self-imposed goal of being policy-relevant and policy-neutral, but not policy-prescriptive. The hallmark of the IPCC has been to offer a strong scientific voice demonstrating the necessity of climate policy and action, but without giving firm political advice. Yet scholars have contested the idea of maintaining such a strong boundary between science and policy in the IPCC, questioning whether upholding this boundary has been successful and whether continuing to do so offers a viable way forward. The Paris Agreement provides a new political context for the IPCC, implying a need for solution-oriented assessments. The IPCC itself has also argued that large-scale transformations of society are needed to meet the targets set by the Agreement. To be relevant and influence policymaking in this new political context, the IPCC needs to provide policy advice.

22.1 Introduction

The IPCC is a political organisation in the sense that its assessment reports are designed, decided upon and approved by national governments. Its ambition, however, is to determine the state of knowledge on climate change, and this knowledge assessment is undertaken by researchers. An additional aim of the IPCC is to perform this scholarly work in a way that is policy-relevant (see Chapter 21). This mainly means being relevant for political negotiations and decision-making under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which constitutes the primary political context for the IPCC. Hence the two organisations mutually influence each other.

An early study by Agrawala (Reference Agrawala1998b) qualifies the discussion on political influence by making a distinction between process and outcome. He argued that the IPCC had been influential in terms of process – generating and maintaining societal interest and concern regarding climate change – but also in terms of outcome. Without the IPCC, neither the UNFCCC nor the Kyoto Protocol, with its binding agreements on emission reductions, would have been possible. Furthermore, the many lobby groups funded by the fossil fuel industry and devoted to finding weaknesses in the IPCC reports are (indirect) evidence that the IPCC has influenced policy and politics (Agrawala, Reference Agrawala1998b: 639–640).

Other researchers have, however, questioned these conclusions, stressing that it is difficult to distinguish cause from effect when so many factors other than knowledge influence climate policies (Grundmann, Reference Grundmann2006). De Pryck (Reference De Pryck2018) argues that unilateral causal connections between the IPCC assessments and climate policies are claimed rather than shown, and that this assumed influence is an important part of the IPCC’s self-image. It is far too simple to claim that the IPCC’s First Assessment Report (AR1) in 1990 (AR1) led to the formation of the Convention (1992), the Second in 1995 (AR2) to the Kyoto Protocol, the Third in 2001 (AR3) to a focus on climate adaptation, the Fourth in 2007 (AR4) to the 2 ºC target, and the Fifth in 2013/2014 (AR5) to the Paris Agreement. This oversimplified view of how science influences policy is based on a unidirectional linear model in which scientific knowledge constrains and guides policy actors.

In this chapter we present the political context of the IPCC. This context is external to the Panel, but is also an inherent and crucial factor in the design of its activities. We are therefore critical of a linear understanding of the IPCC’s work, because it separates science from policy and politics, and assumes that knowledge is a necessary prerequisite for political action (Beck, Reference Beck2011a; Lidskog & Sundqvist, Reference Lidskog and Sundqvist2015; Mahony & Hulme, Reference Mahony and Hulme2018). Nevertheless, a linear understanding of the interplay between science and policy is an important part of the IPCC’s self-conception, and is also presupposed by many commentators (Sundqvist et al., Reference Sundqvist, Gasper, St and Clair2018). Contrary to the linear model, we hold that the work of the IPCC involves ongoing, close interaction between science and policy – something which, instead of being denied, should be fully acknowledged.

This contribution begins by presenting the relationship between the IPCC and the UNFCCC and its Paris Agreement. We argue that the Paris Agreement constitutes a new political context for the IPCC and thus imposes new conditions for how scientific knowledge can influence policy and political decision-making (see Chapter 18). We then analyse this new situation through one of the IPCC’s best-known reports: the 1.5 °C report published in 2018 (hereafter SR15) and its demand for transformative change to meet the political goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 °C. To what extent does the IPCC influence policies and politics when the crucial political task is more about initiating and governing transformative change than creating awareness of climate threats? We finally discuss our results in relation to the IPCC’s ambition of not being policy-prescriptive, which means not giving advice to policymakers.

22.2 Solution-oriented Assessments

The use of synthesised assessments is well established today and characterises the international policy landscape on global environmental issues. These global environmental assessments (GEAs) have increased in scope and complexity over time, both in terms of content and focus. A survey shows a large increase in the amount of assessed material, as well as in the number of experts involved in the assessment work. This trend toward increased complexity in content and focus has been described as a shift from scientific evaluations to solution-oriented assessments (from GEAs to SOAs) (Edenhofer & Kowarsch, Reference Edenhofer and Kowarsch2015; Jabbour & Flachsland, Reference Jabbour and Flachsland2017). SOAs require more explicit treatment of the values, objectives and assessments of policy proposals, which makes them more obviously political than GEAs (Haas, Reference Haas2017; Castree et al., Reference Castree, Bellamy and Osaka2021). The IPCC is no exception to this trend.

A radical change in the political context of the IPCC occurred with the adoption of the Paris Agreement in 2015. The Agreement stipulates that signatories must work to keep global warming below 2 ºC whilst ‘pursuing efforts’ to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 ºC. As part of the Agreement, the IPCC was asked to compile a Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 ºC (2018) (SR15), comparing the effects of temperature increases of 1.5 and 2 ºC, and describing possible ways to achieve these goals. The Panel accepted this request, even though the task was more specified than usual for the IPCC (see Chapter 5). The requested report was solution-oriented; its aim was to present possible ways to achieve the temperature target. Yet there was not much research to compile; few studies had been conducted on possible ways to reach the 1.5 ºC target (Hulme, Reference Hulme2016; Livingston & Rummukainen, Reference Livingston and Rummukainen2020).

The SR15 report states that to achieve the goal, radical measures will be needed, including new technologies (negative emissions technologies, NETs) such as bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS). However, these technologies have not been tested on a large scale or brought up for political discussion (Beck & Mahony, Reference Beck and Mahony2018a). Being commissioned to deliver this special report created a new context for the IPCC, both in terms of knowledge evidence and of policy relevance, and necessitated a substantial change in the Panel’s working methods (Ourbak & Tubiana, Reference Ourbak and Tubiana2017; Beck & Mahony, Reference Beck and Mahony2018a; Livingston et al., Reference Livingstone2018). In SR15, the Panel compiled relevant scientific evidence to a lesser extent than in previous assessment reports, and contributed to formulating policy proposals to a greater extent. As a result, the report had a more solution-oriented and prescriptive role, which is strengthened by its strong focus on scenarios – what SR15 calls ‘pathways’. When the Panel includes large-scale investments in nuclear power and NETs as important components of many of the presented pathways, this can and will be interpreted as the Panel advocating these technologies.

The IPCC chairman Hoesung Lee has argued strongly for the use of solution-oriented assessments in order to better serve the UNFCCC (Lee, Reference Lee2015). In practice, however, the IPCC has not taken advantage of this new post-Paris situation in any deeper sense (Hermansen et al., Reference Hermansen, Lahn, Sundqvist and Øye2021), and it still sticks to its original position of being policy-neutral, not policy-prescriptive.

The challenge for the IPCC is not only to present conclusions with high certainty, or projections derived from scenarios, but also to address controversial policy-relevant topics that demand greater inclusion and involvement of the social sciences. Similarly, Carraro and colleagues claim that the IPCC must become better at evaluating policy options on various scales – subnational, national and international – including alternative options for measuring equity and efficiency (Carraro et al., Reference Carraro, Edenhofer, Flachsland, Kolstad, Stavins and Stowe2015). However, this emphasis may lead to controversy; few governments would gladly have their policies evaluated by an international panel, and researchers may not be equipped to handle value-laden and politicised questions in the sensitive manner they require. According to Victor (Reference Victor2015), one of the few social scientists who served as a Coordinating Lead Author in AR5, the IPCC’s ambition to seek consensus and avoid controversial topics has increasingly made it largely irrelevant to climate policy.

In our estimation, the shift to SOA means that the IPCC needs to present policy options and possible ways forward, i.e., pathways. But it must also assess the feasibility and viability of these pathways in order to provide decision-makers with relevant knowledge. This means that social scientific studies need to be better integrated into the assessment work of the IPCC.

22.3 The National Turn in the Paris Agreement

The basic design of the Paris Agreement consists of two interrelated parts. One is national, and is based on the signatory countries’ own voluntary decisions about reducing greenhouse gas emissions – Nationally Determined Contributions, NDCs. The other is global, and sets the common target that the combined measures of the various countries should keep the global average temperature well below 2 °C, and preferably limit it to 1.5 °C.

The Paris Agreement implies a more decentralised global policy regime than previously envisaged, with a national focus and a strong, bottom-up governance system (Jordan et al., Reference Jordan, Huitema, Van Asselt and Forster2018; Aykut et al., Reference Aykut, Morena and Foyer2021). After years of conflict over global distribution principles and which countries should reduce their emissions by how much and by what year, it is now up to individual states to set their own climate targets and deliver on them. Complicated international negotiations can no longer be used as an excuse for prevarication at the national level. However, every fifth year (starting in 2023), the NDCs will be globally reviewed in a process called the Global Stocktake of the Paris Agreement.

This national turn shifts the focus towards defining potential pathways for reaching specified goals (Beck & Mahony, Reference Beck and Mahony2018a). The IPCC now finds itself in a position where national-level policy processes will be decisive, while the global level will continue to be relevant with the Global Stocktake process ratcheting up national ambitions. Of great importance is how the IPCC can fulfil its mandate and remain policy-relevant in this more complex, polycentric and nationally oriented post-Paris policy terrain, where the responses to climate change are becoming more diverse (Hermansen et al., Reference Hermansen, Lahn, Sundqvist and Øye2021). As argued earlier, in this situation characterised by a national turn, the IPCC will have to give more thought to how to support and inspire ongoing work on national and regional levels (Carraro et al., Reference Carraro, Edenhofer, Flachsland, Kolstad, Stavins and Stowe2015; Victor, Reference Victor2015; Livingston et al., Reference Livingstone2018; see also Hulme et al., Reference Hulme2010). The need for this kind of support will increase, as exemplified by NGO initiatives such as ‘Climate Action Tracker’, ‘Climate Analytics’ and ‘Climate Interactive’.

In line with the design of the Paris Agreement, it is mainly at the national level that decisions will be taken that can make the IPCC’s knowledge relevant and thereby increase its ability to influence climate policy. An important reason why the UNFCCC invited the IPCC to produce SR15 in the first place was to ‘inform the preparation of nationally determined contributions’ (UNFCCC, 2015: §20), and SR15 is accordingly expected to support policy formation at the national level, in line with post-Paris global climate policy. Thus, there is a strong link between the Paris Agreement’s national turn and the SR15 report, something which the IPCC has not reflected on to any greater extent. In our view, the IPCC needs to become more self-aware of its important role of providing support, including advice, to ongoing and future national climate-transformation efforts.

22.4 The IPCC on Transformative Change

The topic of transformation, or transformative societal change, in response to climate change has increasingly attracted research attention in the social sciences (O’Brien, Reference O’Brien2012; Linnér & Wibeck, Reference Linnér and Wibeck2019). It has been argued that the IPCC plays an instrumental role in producing the visions of societal change used by those arguing for its necessity (Beck et al., Reference Beck and Oomen2021). In SR15, it is explicitly claimed that ‘limiting global warming to 1.5 °C would require substantial societal and technological transformations’ in terms of energy production, land use (agriculture and food), urban infrastructure (transport and buildings) and industrial systems (IPCC, Reference Masson-Delmotte, Zhai and Pörtner2018a: 56). It also states that the work of achieving a resilient future is fraught with complex moral, practical and political difficulties and inevitable trade-offs.

SR15 presents a manifold of pathways to reach the 1.5 °C target, four of which are selected as illustrative model pathways (IPCC, Reference Masson-Delmotte, Zhai and Pörtner2018a: Chapter 2). These involve different portfolios of mitigation measures combined with different implementation challenges, including potential synergies and trade-offs with sustainable development. At the same time, they all presuppose a decoupling of economic growth from energy demand and carbon dioxide emissions, and new low-carbon, zero-carbon or even carbon-negative technologies. The differences between the pathways are presented with the help of global indicators, such as final energy demand, renewable share in electricity, primary energy source, and carbon capture and storage. Thus, the SR15 report strongly stresses the need and opportunity to make changes in energy supply.

When it comes to necessary change in the social and economic order, which is stressed at a general level, the pathways do not propose any radical changes. Societal conditions are only taken into consideration in so far as they enable or obstruct technological development. This is the case for all the different pathways that rely heavily on BECCS, whether they are based on reduced energy demand, include a broad focus on sustainability, or imply intensive use of resources and energy. SR15 states that to implement the pathways it is crucial to strengthen policy instruments, enhance multilevel governance and institutional capacities, and enable technological innovations, climate finance, and lifestyle and behavioural change (IPCC, Reference Masson-Delmotte, Zhai and Pörtner2018a: section 4.4). But apart from these sweeping statements, there is no further elaboration on how to create these conditions in relation to different pathways.

SR15 thus exhibits a paradoxical view of transformative change. It stresses its necessity, but in practice places great hope in technological fixes – technical solutions that do not require structural changes in the current economic and social order. The economic and social order is reduced to a resource for facilitating technical innovation. This view is reinforced in the report’s discussion of the risks and trade-offs – for the environment, people, regions and sectors – that are associated with the pathways. For example, the novel technology of BECCS is recognised to be unproven and to pose substantial risks for environmental and social sustainability (IPCC, Reference Masson-Delmotte, Zhai and Pörtner2018a: 121), but it is considered manageable. It is only if BECCS and other NET options are poorly implemented that trade-offs will be required (IPCC, Reference Masson-Delmotte, Zhai and Pörtner2018a: 448). Similarly, risks associated with nuclear power (IPCC, Reference Masson-Delmotte, Zhai and Pörtner2018a: 461) are mentioned, but nothing is said about whether these should have any bearing on which pathways to choose. Thus, despite the overall stress on trade-offs in the report, there seems to be a strong belief that they will be manageable and will not constitute any substantial obstacles to implementing the pathways. This makes it possible for the IPCC to present risks and trade-offs, while at the same time not according them any implications for the suggested pathways, and thereby not politicising them.

SR15’s recommendations – the pathways – have a radical view of technology, putting great faith in future technological innovations, but are conservative in their view of societal change: they do not propose any transformation of the economic and social order. This is remarkable, since no connections are made between technological and social change. For decades, research in the social sciences has stressed the need for societal changes and social or socio-ecological transformation (Díaz et al., Reference Díaz, Settele and Brondizio2019), in the sense of fundamentally redirecting social organisation and human activities, including technology. SR15 on the other hand, when presenting possible pathways for limiting global warming, puts its hope in technological innovations isolated from social change. If the IPCC wants to be policy-relevant, it needs to adopt a wider and more comprehensive understanding of transformative change when developing pathways, and conceptualise society as more than just a set of conditions enabling or restricting technological innovation.

We thus find that the IPCC needs to incorporate more profound knowledge about transformative change into its assessments, including a deeper understanding of the mechanisms of social change on different spatial and temporal scales. A prerequisite to being influential is being policy-relevant, and in the post-Paris context this means presenting and assessing different options for how to initiate and facilitate transformative change without losing sight of social factors.

22.5 Achievements and Challenges

The IPCC is undoubtedly one of the most ambitious efforts ever undertaken to develop and communicate science to inform environmental policy globally. Among its greatest successes is its impressive mobilisation of the scientific community to allocate substantial resources – in the form of researchers’ time – to produce knowledge syntheses on an urgent issue. Determining whether this mobilisation has influenced policymaking, however, is more difficult. The IPCC has been surprisingly stable in its method of working: making systematic assessments and delivering – on a regular, if not frequent, basis – comprehensive reports that accurately summarise the current state of knowledge. The cornerstone of their work is not to be policy-prescriptive and thereby not to politicise the results. In practice, this means that the IPCC has primarily focused on developing and maintaining its epistemic authority, and only to a very limited extent has been interested in providing guidance to policymakers. However, this strategy is an insufficient way to proceed in the post-Paris political context.

There are several ways to further increase the relevance of the IPCC’s work to support national (and thus global) societal transformation. With the shift towards SOAs and the need for transformative change, the Panel should pay more attention to the socio-political aspects of these extremely demanding challenges, and adopt a deeper understanding of how politics (and society) works. For example, proposed technical innovations and solutions need to be embedded in realistic social conditions, otherwise the pathways will work on paper only. This demands better integration of social science in the IPCC’s assessments, which will be a challenge, because the Panel’s assessment work is not well-suited for assessing social science with its diverse epistemologies and methodologies. In the post-Paris political context, the Panel should focus more on regional and national contexts to be policy-relevant for national climate policies. This includes emphasising realistic policy options that consider regional and national variation, not least in relation to the development and implementation of technological solutions.

This does not imply that the IPCC needs to be policy-prescriptive in a narrow sense, telling governments what they should do. It is possible to assess studies on transformative change and present policy options – including evaluating their feasibility – without advocating one particular way forward. Social science has a long history of assessing policy development, analysing political experiments and exploring the conditions for transformative change, while not being prescriptive in the sense of giving firm advice. However, assessing such studies will require addressing controversial topics. To increase its policy relevance, the IPCC needs not only to outline possible policy options, but also to provide knowledge about their feasibility and viability. By utilising social science research, the IPCC can assess different options, which in fact means to give policy advice.

Overview

This chapter discusses the concept of ‘civic epistemology’ in relation to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the governance of climate change. Civic epistemology refers to ‘the institutionalised practices by which members of a given society test and deploy knowledge claims used as a basis for making collective choices’ (Jasanoff, Reference Jasanoff2005: 255). Differences in civic epistemologies seem to be directly related to how scientific climate knowledge, presented in IPCC assessment reports, relates to political decision-making at different scales – national, regional, global. The concept is especially rich because it enables a nuanced understanding of the role of IPCC assessments in national climate governance and in meeting the challenges of building more cosmopolitan climate expertise. Both of these aspects are important if emerging institutional arrangements that seek to govern global environmental change are to be understood. Through a critical review of the civic epistemology literature related to the IPCC, this chapter investigates how the cultural dimensions of the science–policy nexus, in different national and geopolitical contexts, conditions the legitimation and uptake of IPCC knowledge.

23.1 Introduction

Environmental governance regimes are enacted and legitimised by states and epistemic networks. The role of science in such regimes has been the subject of much debate, and many have considered knowledge consensus-building to be a crucial factor in shaping policy (Haas, Reference Haas1992). However, the history of the IPCC shows that the influence of climate change knowledge is not restricted to a linear idea of agreed-upon science directing policy (see Chapter 22). For example, scientific consensus often appears less relevant for policy than the persuasive powers of those speaking for science (Jasanoff, Reference Jasanoff, Dryzek, Norgaard and Schlosberg2011). Understanding the science–policy interface therefore requires explaining how scientific claims gain policy-relevance in specific, sometimes divergent, ways across different countries (Agrawala, Reference Agrawala1998a; Hulme & Mahony, Reference Hulme and Mahony2010). At the national level, scientific consensus becomes one factor among many in the public deliberation of how to govern climate change or how to incorporate scientific claims into national or local policies (Hulme, Reference Hulme2009).

The IPCC has attempted with relative success to provide a common and reliable scientific knowledge base for international climate dialogues, but its credibility in the eyes of citizens and policymakers varies significantly from country to country. The multiplicity of modes of validation of the legitimacy of knowledge and the different forms of interaction between science and politics (Beck, Reference Beck2012) challenges the supposedly abstract universality of climate science – represented as the ‘view from nowhere’ (Borie et al., Reference Bony, Stevens, Held, Asrar and Hurrell2021) institutionally maintained by the IPCC. This poses several problems for understanding the IPCC’s role in global politics. Several authors have called for the building of a more ‘cosmopolitan climate expertise’ as a way to navigate these challenges (Hulme, Reference Hulme2010; Beck, Reference Beck2012; Raman & Pearce, Reference Raman and Pearce2020). Cosmopolitan knowledge has been defined as expertise which is comfortable with multiplicity and ambiguity, yet amenable to integration in a critical debate and a ‘reasoning together’ about a broader public good (Raman & Pearce, Reference Raman and Pearce2020: 3).

This chapter explores this challenge by using the concept of ‘civic epistemologies’ (Jasanoff, Reference Jasanoff, Dryzek, Norgaard and Schlosberg2011), an idea which alludes to the historical, social and political dimensions of the different publicly accepted and institutionally sanctioned ways of performing trust and validating knowledge. We will explore the case of Global South nations – Brazil and India – to show how the reception and appropriation of knowledge organised by the IPCC occurs in contexts of scant public participation in the assessment and deliberation of science. We reiterate that the idea of civic epistemologies moves beyond the linear model of science for policy. We emphasise how this idea helps to understand the politics of climate knowledge not just in the Global North – for which there are many examples in the literature on the IPCC – but also in the Global South, even though there are fewer published examples available.

23.2 Civic Epistemologies and Climate Change

The concept of civic epistemologies emerged in science and technology studies (STS) and refers to ‘the institutionalised practices by which members of a given society test and deploy knowledge claims used as a basis for making collective choices’ (Jasanoff, Reference Jasanoff2005: 255). These practices include the following: institutionalised or explicit norms, protocols and systematic ways of producing and testing knowledge; tacit and implicit forms of deliberating; cultural predispositions and value judgements; and historical traditions that impinge upon the ways knowledge helps order social and institutional life. These epistemologies include ‘the styles of reasoning, modes of argumentation, standards of evidence, and norms of expertise that characterise public deliberation and political institutions’ (Miller, Reference Miller2008: 1896). They make it possible to analyse and understand the myriad ways publics and states arrive at agreements collectively regarding how knowledge can become a foundation for public decisions.

To illustrate how the idea of civic epistemologies can be applied to climate change, Jasanoff (Reference Jasanoff, Dryzek, Norgaard and Schlosberg2011) compared three cases: the United States, Britain, and Germany. These nations share many cultural, technological and political characteristics, but have fundamentally divergent understandings of how climate science relates to climate policy. In the United States, a country ‘founded on common law’s adversary system’ (Jasanoff, Reference Jasanoff, Dryzek, Norgaard and Schlosberg2011: 135), information is usually generated by parties with vested interests in the issues at hand and tested in public through overt confrontation, for example in courts. In opposition to the United States, ‘the British approach has historically been more consensual. Underlying Britain’s construction of public reason is a long-standing commitment to empirical observation and common-sense proofs’ (Jasanoff, Reference Jasanoff, Dryzek, Norgaard and Schlosberg2011: 136). The trustworthiness of the individual expert is the focus of concern in Britain. In Germany, by contrast, it is believed that ‘building communally crafted expert rationales, capable of supporting a policy consensus, offers protection against a psychologically and politically debilitating risk consciousness … The capacity to form inclusive consensus positions functions as a sine qua non of stability and closure in German policy making’ (Jasanoff, 2011: 138, 140). Through this comparison, Jasanoff shows how practices of public reasoning and validation of knowledge are culturally situated. These examples demonstrate that scientific consensus does not move policy in the same directions in different countries; simple applications of the linear concept of the science–policy relationship are therefore questionable.

23.3 Brazil and India: Epistemic Sovereignty and Political Culture

One factor related to civic epistemologies that Jasanoff (Reference Jasanoff, Dryzek, Norgaard and Schlosberg2011) did not explore concerns the geopolitical influences on the acceptance of the IPCC reports by different countries. Developed nations produce climate science that is well-represented in the IPCC’s scientific assessments. This is not the case with Global South countries, where issues related to a lack of ‘epistemic sovereignty’ over climate change knowledge (Mahony & Hulme, Reference Mahony and Hulme2018) might be far more important for influencing national policy than the existence of a ‘global consensus’.

Being represented in IPCC assessments through patterns of authorship (see Chapter 7) can begin to explain differential national uptake and trust in the assessments produced. Studies show that the United States, Britain, and Germany are the highest contributors to the IPCC in terms of the number of authors (El-Hinnawi, Reference El-Hinnawi2011). For nations like India and Brazil – albeit less present in terms of IPCC authorship – having large populations and extensive territory makes them central players in any global effort to curb climate change. One of the common characteristics of the civic epistemologies of these latter countries is that lower participation in the IPCC’s assessments – alongside other political and economic variables – may be associated with a reduced level of trust in the associated scientific conclusions and weaker engagement with the political agendas that emerge from them.

After the Fourth Assessment Report (2007) (AR4), climate change became an increasingly charged political issue in India and Brazil in different ways and with divergent consequences in terms of political action in these countries. A series of errors were discovered in the AR4 report, including one claim that Himalayan glaciers might completely disappear by 2035. This statement was challenged by the Government of India in the review process. Still, it remained in the final report and, three years later, circulated publicly in international media as a warning to the subcontinent about the perils of climate change and the need – for India as much as for the rest of the world – to act. The claim even appeared in a speech by John Kerry, then the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair, who argued that unchecked climate warming could reignite geopolitical tensions between India and Pakistan. The Indian Government responded by commissioning local glaciologists to conduct their own assessments of the prospects of Himalayan glaciers and by setting up what some dubbed an ‘Indian IPCC’ – the Indian Network for Climate Change Assessment (Mahony, Reference Mahony2014b). This example suggests that the absence of locally accepted knowledge on glaciers – or the presence of claims produced by an international assessment with little participation of Indian scientists and with potentially disruptive political consequences – drove the Indian state to produce counter-assessments to the IPCC. This relates both to the specificities of Indian civic epistemologies and to India’s specific political history under British colonisation.

In the case of Brazil, dissatisfaction with what some dubbed ‘Northern’ framings of climate change – most notably concerning deforestation and the role of the Amazon in the carbon cycle – caused controversy about the validity of scientific claims for directing national policy. Northern climate models used parameters that were considered inadequate by local scientists for simulating the effects of tropical forests on the carbon cycle. Among elected officials, the historical view that the Amazon region should be integrated into the national economy through economic exploitation was pervasive throughout the twentieth century. In that context, Brazilian Government officials felt that scientific assessments, such as those of the IPCC, directed deliberations over mitigation strategies towards the interests of global North countries (Lahsen, Reference Lahsen2009; Reference Lahsen and Pettinger2016). The Amazon historically occupies a sensitive spot in Brazil’s environmental policy, and fears over foreign interference have long roots (Monteiro et al., Reference Monteiro, Seixas and Vieira2014). Like elsewhere, local histories and cultures therefore condition how deliberation over technical expertise is applicable to environmental policy, specifically expertise produced outside the country in question. Brazilian civic epistemologies, like those in India, are related to longstanding concerns over sovereignty, albeit for different reasons.

The question of scientific credibility in the Brazilian case was not just about whether models and observations assessed by the IPCC were right or wrong. It was about fundamental inequities in national capacities to produce and frame knowledge (Miguel et al., Reference Miguel, Mahony and Monteiro2019). For the historically dominant Brazilian civic epistemology, local scientists working in national scientific infrastructures are seen as more trustworthy and credible than those from the global North, especially in politically sensitive issues like Amazon deforestation. The creation of a Brazilian Panel on Climate Change (BMPC) to produce systematic reviews of the scientific literature clearly reflects concerns of scientists and decision-makers about epistemic sovereignty (Duarte, Reference Duarte2019). This is in direct relation to Brazil’s role in international negotiations on greenhouse gas emissions and securitisation extended to territorial control.

One important shared idea of civic epistemologies emerging from Global North countries discussed by Jasanoff (Reference Jasanoff, Dryzek, Norgaard and Schlosberg2011b) is that governmental decisions pertaining to climate change should be deemed acceptable by the public and directed by scientific principles. It can also be noted that these nations have well-established and well-funded scientific infrastructures, well-educated publics, and pathways of public deliberation about science. However, these political cultures and infrastructural conditions are radically different in the Global South. Issues of sovereignty, for countries like Brazil and India, play a role in different ways than in other places when technical decision-making is concerned; these issues become important elements of both scientific and political discussions related to climate change.

Civic epistemologies in Latin America for example – as part of broader political cultures – tend to be marked by top-down, non-participatory approaches to decision-making, which relate to the historical role of military dictatorships in the region. In addition, scientific systems and infrastructures were built across the continent in waves of centrally induced rapid modernisation; these mixed technocracy and the radical depreciation of local, popular forms of understanding reality. Such hierarchical patterns of deliberation are a legacy of authoritarianism and often persist intermingled with democratic processes. These structural elements weaken the inclusion of civil society in the assessment of government and expertise, and limit public participation in the decision-making processes related to climate governance. Lahsen (Reference Lahsen2009: 360), for example, argues that science and decision-making on matters of environmental risk in Brazil reflect a general attitude that assumes that ‘high-ranked decision-makers can be trusted to define national policy single-handedly, and that they better serve the common good than the processes of democratic politics’. In Brazil, a ‘technocratic civic epistemology’ keeps decision-making centralised in the hands of experts located in government bodies, which constantly alienates civil society from technically based political decisions.

In the Indian case, the emergence of civil society organisations after India’s independence – with objectives ranging from popularisation to the democratisation of science and related policy making – pressed against the Indian government’s resistance to public debate around scientific questions. The country also adopted a technocratic model of governance, directed at furthering the geopolitical interests of the state. At the same time, the memory of British colonialism in the country built a political culture focused on the search for sovereignty and the need to place political and scientific processes under the central control of the government (Agarwal et al., Reference Agarwal, Kalpana and Ravi1982; Mahony, Reference Mahony2014b).

Comparing the Indian and Brazilian cases with the UK, United States, and Germany, two factors emerge as distinct in their respective civic epistemologies. First, for nations of the Global North the issue of the authorship of scientific works assessed by the IPCC is not seen as a problem of legitimacy. In contrast, in many nations of the Global South, epistemic sovereignty is an important factor in the legitimacy of science in politics. Second, while the Global North frames climate science as an object of public scrutiny, Global South countries tend to frame climate science as a ‘science for the administration of the state’ and thus as part of the geopolitical process. These examples illustrate the different ‘epistemic geographies of climate change’ (Mahony & Hulme, Reference Mahony and Hulme2018) and the importance, for users and observers of the IPCC, of knowing about different civic epistemologies. Box 23.1 offers another case – that of Russia – which helps to illustrate the diversity of climate change civic epistemologies in non-Western nations.

23.4 Achievements and Challenges

In this chapter, we have shown the rich potential of the concept of civic epistemology to make sense of difficulties in enacting global climate governance through the IPCC. We have illustrated the need for further comparative research into how global environmental assessments result in robust policy impact across different countries, notably in non-Western ones. From our discussions about different civic epistemologies of climate change, a central question arises: Can the IPCC stimulate a more effective scientific and political arena for climate governance in the face of such globally diverse civic epistemologies?

Authors have suggested that the IPCC could prioritise a more cosmopolitan climate expertise (Raman & Pearce, Reference Raman and Pearce2020). The promise of cosmopolitan knowledge is to recognise the diversity and ambiguity of forms of knowledge-making and knowledge appropriation as a strength rather than a weakness for engaging with climate change. However, matters of epistemic sovereignty pose a more profound question related to inequality in the production of global climate science. How can the IPCC deal with the claim that climate science produced in developed countries does not fully represent underdeveloped nations in global climate governance? Global governance means dealing with global inequalities on several levels, two of the more important ones being unequal means of producing knowledge, and unequal access to economic and scientific resources that are essential to adaptation and mitigation of climate change. These inequalities condition how countries enter global climate debates and engage with policy development. They also influence the variety of civic epistemologies that condition how international scientific assessments, such as the IPCC, and global governance structures are accepted, deemed legitimate, and incorporated into national and local governance.

Overview

Research on the interaction between climate science and policy has pointed to the production of so-called ‘boundary objects’ as one way in which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has influenced climate policymaking and broader climate discourses. By providing a common framework that enables interaction across social worlds, while still allowing more localised use by different groups of actors, such objects have been key in bringing together climate science and policy, in turn shaping the trajectory of both. This chapter reviews several concepts that have been analysed as boundary objects – such as the concept of climate sensitivity and the 2 °C and 1.5 °C targets – and explains how they have been productive of new science/policy relations. It also points to new challenges for the IPCC as climate policy development moves towards implementation and increases demand for more ‘solution-oriented’ knowledge.

24.1 Introduction

Much analysis of the IPCC – and indeed the IPCC’s traditional self-understanding – assumes that its influence and authority is premised on a strong demarcation between science and policy. In practice, however, the ways in which the IPCC may come to influence policy development or wider public perceptions of climate change is by making connections across these two spheres of science and policy (see Chapter 22). This presents a puzzle that requires solving in order to understand the IPCC’s influence: How can ideas about a clear separation between science and policy coexist with practices that constantly criss-cross or undermine the presumed boundary between them (cf. Sundqvist et al., Reference Sundqvist, Gasper, St and Clair2018)?

One way of attending to this puzzle is by analysing the specific objects that bring the IPCC and its contributing scientists into contact with policymakers, political activists or other groups of actors on different sides of the presumed boundaries. The notion of boundary object, originally proposed by Star and Griesemer (Reference Star and Griesemer1989; Star, Reference Star2010), describes some ‘thing’ – whether concrete or abstract – that holds together across different social worlds, allowing actors with different interests and views to act without the need for consensus on the object’s precise meaning. In studies of the IPCC and its relationship to publics and policymaking, the notion of boundary objects offers a way of focusing not simply on the construction of boundaries between social worlds or on how actors on one side of the boundary influence the other. Rather, the idea of boundary objects begins to explain how these actors produce new realities together. Analysing boundary objects is thus a way of going beyond general assertions about ‘co-production’ to study what exactly is produced at the intersection of science and policy, and with what effects.

This chapter employs the notion of boundary objects to show how the work of the IPCC has been closely intertwined with climate policy development, and how this interplay has shifted over time. It reviews existing studies of boundary objects that have been important for the IPCC’s influence on climate policy – and that have simultaneously worked to influence the IPCC’s own assessments and the wider trajectory of climate science. Two sets of such objects are identified. The first one represents features of the physical climate system, namely the concepts of Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS) and Global Warming Potentials (GWP). These objects illustrate the influence of the IPCC on the early features of the emerging international climate policy regime.

The other set of objects is a series of future-oriented limits, targets and scenarios, which have come to strongly structure both IPCC assessments and climate policy discourse in recent years. Most prominent among these are the 2 °C and 1.5 °C targets. These objects serve to connect the IPCC more closely to policy goals and explicitly normative considerations of desirable futures. They thereby increase the potential influence of IPCC knowledge on policy development. At the same time, they challenge the idea of a strong demarcation between science and policy on which the IPCC’s self-understanding has been premised. The concluding section discusses what this challenge might mean for the IPCC’s future role, and how the notion of boundary objects may help in understanding the influence of the IPCC more broadly.

24.2 Climate Sensitivity and Emission Equivalents: Epistemic and Governable Things

A key challenge in assessing climate change for policy purposes is how to align a scientific understanding of climate change – as a complex and insufficiently understood phenomenon – with the certainty and simplicity required for policymaking and governing. Knowledge about future climate change originates in complex models that are not easily understood outside the community of modellers (see Chapter 14). Research on the interaction between climate science and policy has pointed to the production of boundary objects as one way in which knowledge from climate models has become stabilised and taken up in policy processes.

Van der Sluijs and colleagues (Reference van der Sluijs, van Eijndhoven, Shackley and Wynne1998) analysed the concept of climate sensitivity as a case of a particularly stable boundary object. The IPCC defines climate sensitivity as ‘the change in the surface temperature in response to a change in the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration or other radiative forcing’ (IPCC, 2021a). The concept emerged as a way of comparing and summarising model results in a way that enabled new forms of interaction between climate modellers, other scientific communities and policy actors. It was initially used as a heuristic tool for comparing different climate models, as modellers tested the sensitivity of models by comparing the temperature response of a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration. With the need to communicate model results to policymakers through assessment reports, the concept was deployed for a different purpose – as a shorthand for summarising the expected magnitude of climate change given continued carbon dioxide emissions.

In early climate assessments reports, the sensitivity of different models was summarised in an estimated range for climate sensitivity of between 1.5 °C and 4.5 °C for a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide (van der Sluijs et al., Reference van der Sluijs, van Eijndhoven, Shackley and Wynne1998: 299). When IPCC chair Bert Bolin delivered the IPCC’s statement to the first Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Berlin in 1995 (COP1), this estimate was among his key messages from the scientific community to the attending government representatives. In this way, the understanding of climate sensitivity as a measurable property of the physical climate system became a key reference point for climate policy discussions (van der Sluijs et al., Reference van der Sluijs, van Eijndhoven, Shackley and Wynne1998: 311).

Making the climate sensitivity relevant for policy actors in this way, impacted not only policy and public understandings of climate change. It also influenced the further scientific use of the concept, since it created a new demand for estimating and constraining climate sensitivity – not just as a metric for comparing models, but as an actually existing property of the climate system – in order to better inform policymaking (van der Sluijs et al., Reference van der Sluijs, van Eijndhoven, Shackley and Wynne1998).

Climate sensitivity originated from climate modelling, but was made relevant in new ways for policy communities. A different example from the IPCC’s early years illustrates that boundary objects may also originate from a specific policy need. When international discussion about how to govern climate change began in the late 1980s, some countries – the United States in particular – favoured a ‘comprehensive approach’ which dealt not only with carbon dioxide emissions, but also with other greenhouse gases (Shackley & Wynne, Reference Shackley and Wynne1997: 91). To address the need for a simple way of comparing the climate effects of different gases, the metric of Global Warming Potentials (GWP) was developed and published in the IPCC’s First Assessment Report (AR1). The GWP metric allows for a conversion of gases by calculating their ‘CO₂-equivalent’ warming effect. The metric was later adopted by the UNFCCC to underpin quantified emission reduction commitments and international carbon trading (MacKenzie, Reference MacKenzie2009).

Among IPCC scientists, GWP was understood as an ambiguous and potentially problematic simplification (Shackley & Wynne, Reference Shackley and Wynne1997). For example, because the warming effects of greenhouse gases differ depending on their atmospheric lifetime, the choice of time-horizon for comparing them greatly influences the result.¹ In AR1, GWPs for three different time horizons were presented ‘as candidates for discussion’ (quoted in Shackley & Wynne, Reference Shackley and Wynne1997: 91). Thus scientists saw the development of GWP as opening up a scientific area of inquiry – a discussion of how gases could usefully be compared in order to inform policy. Meanwhile, in the policy arena, the GWP metric was quickly adopted and put to use as an unambiguous fact of the climate system, as a basis for calculating exact amounts of allowable emissions, or the price at which carbon credits can be sold in international markets (MacKenzie, Reference MacKenzie2009).

Similar to the concept of climate sensitivity, the GWP metric became an object that stabilised and simplified complex and ambiguous knowledge. The objects thereby enabled interaction between different social worlds, while also generating new problems and practices both in scientific and policymaking circles. Crucially, however, although both objects were flexible enough to mean something rather different in policy discussions among climate modellers, they also maintained their distinct use in both arenas (van der Sluijs et al., Reference van der Sluijs, van Eijndhoven, Shackley and Wynne1998). In this way, the boundary objects that resulted from the interaction between the IPCC and policy communities in the organisation’s early years held a dual role – on the one hand enabling scientific knowledge-production about the climate system, and on the other hand underpinning new projects for governing it.

In the first role, these objects are similar to what Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (Reference Rheinberger1997) has labelled ‘epistemic things’. These are objects to be studied and worked on through the scientific process, which are characterised partly by the things not yet known and the questions they open up for study. In this sense, they embody an ‘irreducible vagueness’ (Rheinberger, Reference Rheinberger1997: 28). On the other hand, for policy purposes these objects take on a much more definitive character, representing something that is already known, and that can therefore be governed. They become objects or technologies of government, imbued with quantified precision and premised on a belief in scientific certainty and rigour (Porter, Reference Porter1995; cf. Asdal, Reference Asayama and Ishii2008).

This ‘tacking back-and-forth’ (Star, Reference Star2010: 601) between a ‘weakly structured common use’ and a ‘strongly structured individual-site use’ (Star and Griesemer, Reference Star and Griesemer1989: 393) is what makes climate sensitivity and GWP usefully understood as boundary objects. Their value lies in enabling the IPCC to interact with non-scientific actors through a common language, while at the same time meeting the requirements of each group necessary to uphold internal credibility and thereby the idea of a clear separation between science and policy.

24.3 Targets and Pathways: Dangerous Anthropogenic Objects?

The examples above show how boundary objects enabled the IPCC to influence the early stages of the international climate regime. As policy development has progressed, however, a different set of objects have emerged, which are directed less towards the physical climate system and more towards future policy action. Most prominent among these is the target to keep warming below 2 °C (and later the ambition of 1.5 °C), which has frequently been analysed as a boundary object (Randalls, Reference Randalls2010; Cointe et al., Reference Cointe, Ravon and Guérin2011; Lahn & Sundqvist, Reference Lahn and Sundqvist2017; Morseletto et al., Reference Morseletto, Biermann and Pattberg2017; Livingston & Rummukainen, Reference Livingston and Rummukainen2020).

The UNFCCC in 1992 established the goal to avoid ‘dangerous anthropogenic interference’ with the climate system, yet without specifying at which level climate change would be considered ‘dangerous’. Partly informed by the concept of climate sensitivity – which summarised the climate system in the metric of temperature rise – discussions about how to define ‘dangerous’ and ‘tolerable’ levels of climate change came to centre on a global temperature limit (Randalls, Reference Randalls2010). The EU adopted the 2 °C limit in 1996, and was its main proponent internationally until its formal adoption in the UNFCCC in 2010 (Morseletto et al., Reference Morseletto, Biermann and Pattberg2017).

The EU adopted the 2 °C target based on ‘trust in the underlying scientific content’ (Morseletto et al., Reference Morseletto, Biermann and Pattberg2017: 661), regarding the target as derived from scientific knowledge about climate impacts. In public discourse, it has also been widely represented as a ‘scientific’ target, often with implicit reference to the IPCC (Shaw, Reference Oppenheimer and Petsonk2013: 567). In the scientific literature, however, it is usually considered a political target, and has even been critiqued as not sufficiently scientifically grounded (e.g. Knutti et al., Reference Knorr Cetina2016). In other words, while the target provides an intuitive and simple metric capable of bringing together a range of actors, its precise meaning varies widely among them.

The IPCC has arguably played an important role in enabling and upholding this multiplicity of meaning. Although IPCC reports have never endorsed any specific temperature limit as a marker of ‘dangerous’ climate change, they have increasingly been framed around temperature increase as a unifying metric. This is seen, for example, in the so-called ‘Reasons for Concern’ framework, which was introduced in the Third Assessment Report (AR3) and lent credibility to the idea of considering climate impacts in relation to global temperature rise (Mahony, Reference Mahony2015; Asayama, Reference Asayama2021; see Chapter 21).

In this way, the 2 °C target became established as a unifying object that is ‘neither scientific nor political in essence, but instead co-produced by both’ (Livingston & Rummukainen, Reference Livingston and Rummukainen2020: 10). Its influence on climate policy discourse has been such that even criticism of it came to be framed in the same terms. Thus, developing countries or activists arguing that 2 °C represents an ‘unsafe’ level of warming did not criticise the framing of IPCC reports around temperature targets. Rather, they asked for alternative targets such as 1 °C or 1.5 °C to be included for scientific analysis and policy debate, both in IPCC assessments and in UNFCCC negotiations (Cointe et al., Reference Cointe, Ravon and Guérin2011: 18; Lahn, Reference Lahn2021: 21; for more on the 1.5 °C target, see Guillemot, Reference Guillemot, Aykut, Foyer and Morena2017; Livingston & Rummukainen, Reference Livingston and Rummukainen2020).

The formal adoption of 2 °C in 2010, and the further inclusion of 1.5 °C as an additional ambition in the Paris Agreement, marks a (provisional) end to discussions about how to define ‘dangerous anthropogenic interference’. Attention has thereby shifted from overall goals towards scenarios, pathways and technologies that may achieve those goals. Bringing together policy goals and scientific knowledge in a common representation of futures to be achieved or avoided, such as pathways and scenarios, may well be seen as new boundary objects in the making (cf. Garb et al., Reference Garb, Pulver and VanDeveer2008).

Examples of such new boundary objects are the Representative Concentration Pathways and the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways, which have been produced for, but organised independently from, the IPCC (see Chapter 15). The goal of these new scenarios is explicitly to provide a common framework through which different groups within the IPCC can work together, thus producing an ‘epistemic thing’ that links (for example) climate modelling, integrated assessment modelling and research on climate impacts. At the same time, as Beck and Mahony (Reference Beck and Mahony2018a, Reference Beck and Mahony2018b) have shown, the new pathways also bring new governable objects into being. By legitimising new technologies such as bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), they serve to make some mitigation measures ‘politically legible and actionable’ while potentially obscuring others (Beck & Mahony, Reference Beck and Mahony2018a: 8).

This double character makes the new pathways similar to the boundary objects from the IPCC’s early years, as described earlier. However, in contrast to concepts such as climate sensitivity – which came to be seen as a feature of the physical climate system – the future-oriented and goal-directed character of the pathways make them explicitly ‘anthropogenic’ in origin. They are directly implicated in the ‘world-making’ work of rendering certain futures more or less thinkable or desirable. For this reason they challenge any notion of a clear-cut divide between scientific fact and political or societal values – thus ‘raising new questions about the neutrality of climate science’ (Beck & Mahony, Reference Beck and Mahony2018a).

Following international agreement on how to define ‘dangerous anthropogenic interference’, then, a new class of ‘dangerous anthropogenic objects’ are rising to prominence in the work of the IPCC. What makes them ‘dangerous’ to the IPCC is not so much that they make scientists engage more explicitly with policy goals in a ‘solution-oriented’ mode. Rather, the danger lies in how they challenge the IPCC’s self-understanding based on a strong demarcation between science and policy, thus potentially forcing a reassessment of the IPCC’s role in relation to policy development. This is illustrated in the controversy that arose around the Bali Box (see Box 24.1).

24.4 Achievements and Challenges

As the examples above have shown, the IPCC’s influence has in part been enabled by the establishment of boundary objects that allow different groups of actors to interact while maintaining their distinct identities and commitments. The notion of boundary objects, however, also points to a broader understanding of ‘influence’ than a simple one-way transmission of scientific knowledge to policymaking. Indeed, the objects described in this chapter produce new realities in both spheres, simultaneously raising new scientific questions and enabling new forms of governing.

An important aspect of several boundary objects reviewed in this chapter is that they have allowed for close interaction and mutual influence between science and policy, while still permitting an understanding of the two spheres as clearly separated. With new demands being placed on the IPCC for solutions and roadmaps for achieving societal goals, this may no longer be the case. Rather than upholding the idea of separation, new boundary objects emerging in the post-Paris terrain of climate science and policy – such as pathways towards global or national targets – may instead prompt recognition of how climate science and policy are intricately interlinked. This presents an obvious challenge to the IPCC’s traditional self-understanding (Hermansen et al., Reference Hermansen, Lahn, Sundqvist and Øye2021).

Beck and Mahony (Reference Beck and Mahony2018b) have suggested that the IPCC could deal with this challenge by substituting its self-understanding as ‘neutral arbiter’ with the goal of producing ‘responsible assessment’. This would include ‘opening up to a broader and more diverse set of metrics, criteria and frameworks’ for assessing responses to climate change (Beck & Mahony, Reference Beck and Mahony2018b: 6). Analysing the IPCC from the perspective of boundary objects shows that influence and relevance is achieved through mutual adjustment and the development of shared meaning across various groups of actors. However, as the controversy around the Bali Box illustrates, such achievements stand in danger of being eroded if the interdependencies between science and policy are denied or ignored. This suggests that the IPCC should be more reflexive about how it helps bring about new science–policy realities. It should therefore think through what kinds of objects might result from a new and more ‘responsible’ assessment mode in the future.

Overview

This chapter reviews the types, use, production, accessibility and efficacy of data visuals contained in the assessments and special reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), drawing upon available published literature. Visuals of different types are key to the communication of IPCC assessments. They have been subject to academic interest among social and cognitive scientists. Furthermore, wider societal interest in the IPCC has increased, especially since the publication of its Fifth Assessment Report (AR5). In response, the IPCC has revisited its approach to communication including visuals, which has resulted in a greater professionalisation of its visualisations – involving information designers and cognitive scientists – and in new forms of co-production between authors and users.

25.1 Introduction

IPCC visuals¹ are integral to the communication of IPCC assessments, and have been the subject of academic research since the late 1990s. Visuals provide diverse representations of evidence, primarily in the form of graphs, maps, diagrams, tables, and more recently, icons and infographics, such as those in the Technical Summary of the IPCC’s Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate (IPCC, Reference rtner, Roberts and Masson-Delmotte2019f). The focus of research on this topic has broadly addressed four questions:

• What types of visuals are used in reports, and how?

• How have they changed over time and why?

• How are visuals produced?

• How well do they convey the messages they intend to, and how well are they understood by different audiences?

As societal interest in the work of the IPCC has expanded, the accessibility of IPCC communications has been scrutinised in more detail (see Chapter 26). Studies by social and cognitive scientists have explored the effectiveness of IPCC visuals and how they are interpreted and understood by a variety of users, including policymakers and non-experts. This chapter explores these aspects in detail, with reflections on how these intersect with the nature, role and authority of the IPCC and on its response to calls for change in its communication processes.

25.2 Types of IPCC Visuals

IPCC visuals are provided to communicate data and information, consonant with the tradition in scientific literature of illustrating specific evidence through visuals. Visuals are bespoke to Summary for Policymakers (SPM) reports, but typically evolve from figures contained in Working Group (WG) chapters or in Technical Summaries, which in turn may have their origins in published literature. The bespoke nature of SPM visuals reflects the purpose and format of IPCC assessments. Although visuals are embedded within the written narrative of the reports, there is a paucity of research exploring how readers use text and visuals in isolation or in relation to each other, and the effectiveness of these approaches.

There is wide variation in the type and content of visuals used within and between reports and over time. Box 25.1 shows an example for the changing visualisation of observed global temperature between the First Assessment Report (AR1) in 1990 and the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) in 2021. These differences are related in part to scientific and social advances – knowledge, modelling capacity, understanding of uncertainty, data availability – and partly to representational choices (discussed later). The visuals provide representations of a range of topics – for example, observational data (in time series format or geographically referenced), projections, processes, comparisons of change, model outputs, risk assessments – drawing upon a variety and diversity of data sources as well as expert judgement. Multiple aspects of climate change are often represented in a visual – for example the ‘burning embers’ diagram, discussed later – reflecting the need to synthesise information as part of an assessment. The media through which visuals in IPCC reports are disseminated has evolved over time – from print-only copies of the earlier assessments to more recent digital online availability supported by multimedia (for example WGI’s short video of its AR6 contribution, FAQs, an Interactive Atlas, Regional Fact Sheets, Data Access, and Outreach Materials).

Box 25.1Development of visuals of global temperature change

These two visuals (Figures 25.1 and 25.2) – with original captions included – drawn from IPCC SPM reports in AR1 (1990) [top panel] and in AR6 (2021) [lower panel], show the evolution in the way IPCC has depicted observed trends in global temperature. The visual from the AR6 WGI SPM denotes the causes, as well as the changes, of recent warming. It uses titles and annotations to help guide the reader, and includes a detailed caption about the data presented. Reproduced here from AR1 WGI (IPCC, Reference Houghton, Jenkins and Ephraums1990a: SPM, p. 23, original greyscale), and AR6 WGI (IPCC, Reference Masson-Delmotte, Zhai and Pirani2021a: SPM, p. 6, original in colour).

Figure 25.1

Reproduction of Figure 11, plus original caption, from the IPCC SPM for AR1 WGI in 1990.

Figure 25.2

Reproduction of Figure SPM.1, plus original caption, from the IPCC SPM for AR6 WGI in 2021.

25.3 Presentation and Use of Visuals

The varied foci and key messages contained in visuals, as well as the need to convey these to multiple audiences effectively, can be challenging for their production. Doyle (Reference Doyle2011) and Nocke (Reference Nocke, Schneider and Nocke2014) mention that the production and presentation of visuals in the first four of the IPCC’s assessment reports were influenced by a focus at the time on datasets capturing global observations to monitor and project global change, facilitated by the emergence of institutions with a global remit. Observational data in early IPCC visuals is often presented in graphs showing temporal change on one axis, with environmental and ecological variation depicted as linear change, its complexity thus constrained by the representational medium used (see Doyle, Reference Doyle2011).

In maps, variation in ecological processes is expressed in spatial terms. These have until recently lacked regional specificities (Doyle, Reference Doyle2011; Nocke, Reference Nocke, Schneider and Nocke2014) and have been critiqued for removing the local relevance of change and connection to a sense of place. Temporal change was also more challenging to present in maps of earlier IPCC reports. It has been argued that the use of these formats denotes the power of western cartography in terms of which features are represented and how (see discussion in Doyle, Reference Doyle2011). To enhance the accessibility of visuals for wider audiences, choices were made in regard to presentation, style and aesthetics (Doyle, Reference Doyle2011: 57). For example, the graphs in the AR3 Synthesis Report included a wider range of colours; this was accompanied by specific choices for typeface and borders to draw attention to specific content.

Static visuals may be useful for presentational purposes, although these can be perceived as being simplistic (Nocke, Reference Nocke, Schneider and Nocke2014). More in-depth and comprehensive exploration of data can be enabled through interactive options, made possible through recent digital advances. Conversely, interactive data platforms can be challenging for users if they lack knowledge of how to navigate the complex datasets and portals available (Hewitson, et al., Reference Hewitson, Waagsaether, Wohland, Kloppers and Kara2017). In recognition of the potential for interactive data visual products displaying tailored information, the AR6 WGI assessment developed an Interactive Atlas (IPCC, 2021d). This enabled users to customise representations of regional information and access the underpinning data.

Studies have highlighted how the representation of visuals in IPCC reports is affected by the complex relationships between those who create, review, shape and use such visuals. Visuals may evolve over time, acquiring diverse social and political significance. One well-known visual that was produced to represent and convey the likelihood of future risk and uncertainty is the ‘burning embers’ diagram (see Figure 25.3; see also Chapter 21). Mahony’s (Reference Mahony2015) study of the origins and development of the visual examines how its representation of thresholds at which climate change may become dangerous was revisited, debated and embraced/rejected, through processes underpinned by a range of interpretations and ‘political objectives’ (Mahony, Reference Mahony2015: 153). These were, he concludes, indicative of tensions and debates among different knowledges and practices of sense-making. Recognising these differences opens up opportunities for further understanding the iterative creation of visual forms of knowledge through multiple disciplinary perspectives. Zommers et al. (Reference Zommers, Marbaix and Fischlin2020) note how lessons learnt from debates about the burning embers diagram have translated into more formalised processes – protocols, standardised metrics for risk thresholds – in recent IPCC reports that aim to increase transparency. Another contested visual is ‘the hockey-stick’ graph in AR3, showing a significant rise in temperatures in the twentieth century in the context of the last thousand years. Its visual presentation and the statistical methods used to represent the data (Walsh, Reference Walsh2010) received criticism, in part fomented by the rise of internet communications (Zorita, Reference Zorita2019).

Figure 25.3

Risks associated with Reasons For Concern at a global scale are shown for increasing levels of climate change.

The so-called ‘burning embers’ diagram, reproduced here in greyscale from colour visual in IPCC (2014b) AR5 SYR, Box 2.4, Figure 1 (p. 73)

Research on visuals has mainly focused on the physical science of climate change, typically reports produced by WGI. As a point of departure, Wardekker and Lorenz (Reference Wardekker and Lorenz2019) evaluated the content and framing of visuals in WGII from AR1 to AR5. Their work shows that the majority of the over 700 visuals examined focus on impacts (problems), but few on solutions and adaptation. The authors point to the importance of understanding how visual information is framed (presented), given its influence on how information is interpreted, perceived and used in decision-making. Wardekker and Lorenz (Reference Wardekker and Lorenz2019) also acknowledge the potential for debating the visual framing of information in internal IPCC processes. Such debates can be highly politicised with competing interests at stake. The aforementioned authors note how opportunities may arise for tailoring visuals – for example more specific national and regional foci in regional chapters or increased interaction across drafting teams earlier in the SPM process – and for learning from the use of visuals in other contexts, for example on climate adaptation by national agencies.

25.4 Accessibility and Efficacy of Visuals

Studies have examined how individuals cognitively interpret visuals, providing insights into their comprehensibility and usefulness. Understanding a data visual involves the direction of visual attention to specific visual features, and the sense-making of features using prior knowledge. Hence, comprehension is influenced both by visual aspects – for example format, colour, text – and by user characteristics, for example the reader’s goal, knowledge of graphs, knowledge of the content (Harold et al., Reference Harold, Lorenzoni, Shipley and Coventry2016). McMahon et al. (Reference McMahon, Stauffacher and Knutti2015) examined representation and understanding of two types of uncertainty – scenario uncertainty and climate response uncertainty – through interviews with people similar to the IPCC target audience. This was presented in the IPCC AR4 WGI SPM visual of modelled global surface temperatures according to various scenarios. Their work indicated that individuals often attributed most of the uncertainty to climate models – the participants interpreted the visual using their own prior assumptions – whereas scenario uncertainties were largely unnoticed; this was due to the design choices included in the visual which were not interpreted in the same way by the scientists creating the figure and the readers viewing it. The findings point to the need for involving users during the process of designing visuals to identify different interpretations, and to inform how the communication of information might be improved.

A more recent study on AR5 WGI SPM visuals identified a tension between the need to retain scientific accuracy in visuals – as expressed by the IPCC authors – and the desire for increased accessibility (Harold et al., Reference Harold, Lorenzoni, Shipley and Coventry2020). Non-specialists found the more complex figures more difficult to understand, which the IPCC authors also recognised. The authors of this study suggested that visuals be evaluated for complexity and be co-designed and tested with users. This may provide opportunities to produce visuals that could better enable the different goals of scientific accuracy and user accessibility to be constructively considered and possibly balanced. A further consideration is the perceived association of the format of a visual with expectations of scientific content and ‘authority’. McMahon et al. (Reference McMahon, Stauffacher and Knutti2016) showed that visuals perceived to be more scientific – graphs, maps and so on – were more closely associated with the authority of a scientific source. Both McMahon et al. (Reference McMahon, Stauffacher and Knutti2015) and Harold et al. (Reference Harold, Lorenzoni, Shipley and Coventry2020) propose that IPCC visuals are created with input from the stakeholders for whom they are devised, and tested for comprehensibility at various opportunities during the drafting process.

An important recent development that has affected IPCC communications is the exponential evolution of societal interest in visual communication over the past 30 years and extensive use of social media for discussion and exchange. IPCC reports have regularly received print and television media attention. More recently, their communication has also increasingly occurred through social media – either through direct recirculation of IPCC materials or through indirect reference to the IPCC visuals themselves. The IPCC has also had to keep up with such visualisation trends (see Section 25.5). When analysing the media coverage and framing of IPCC AR5 reports – both text and visuals – O’Neill et al. (Reference O’Neill, Williams and Kurz2015) found that the ‘newsworthiness’ of the WGIII report was lower than that of WGI and WGII. The authors suggest this may be due in part to the visuals in the WGIII report – despite some visually attractive images – not speaking to the requirement of dramatisation and personalisation, which news outlets frequently draw upon for presenting their stories. To inform future IPCC assessments, O’Neill et al. (Reference O’Neill, Williams and Kurz2015) advocated co-produced research by academics and media outlets about the place of visuals in the production of news, and research into how audiences interact with media narratives and visuals, expanding the work to non-English speaking nations.

The visual portrayal of climate change in legacy media may not make frequent use of IPCC visuals, even when reporting IPCC assessments. One study used a sample of print newspaper articles reporting the IPCC AR5 to show that accompanying visuals tended to be photographic material, even if consonant with the content of the related article text (Dahl & Fløttum, Reference Dahl and Fløttum2017). The authors indicated that selection of visuals continues to present a challenge for news producers. Imagery of human beings ‘taking action’ or ‘being impacted’ has the potential to engage audiences more than decontextualised representations which often characterise IPCC visuals – in other words imagery without an explicit human or geographical reference. Walsh (Reference Walsh2015) offers a similar perspective, arguing that the rhetorics embedded in, and associated with, IPCC graphics may be distancing people from engaging with climate change. Other (more local) forms of visualisation may therefore be more effective for inducing action on climate change. However, the contents of visuals used to communicate IPCC reports require careful attention. Nerlich and Jaspal (Reference Nerlich and Jaspal2014) analysed images of extreme weather in English-speaking media following the publication in 2011 of a draft IPCC report on extreme weather and climate adaptation. They found that the images studied may have ‘largely negative emotional meanings’ (Nerlich & Jaspal, 2013: 253) and conveyed some sense of helplessness; they may, therefore, disengage audiences from climate change.

25.5 Co-producing Visuals

The IPCC has pioneered new features to support improved communication, for example the use of headline statements to provide a concise summary of the overall assessment (Stocker & Plattner, Reference Stocker and Plattner2016: 637). However, despite such innovations, the accessibility of IPCC reports was critiqued following the publication of AR5 (2013/2014). In an Expert Meeting on Communication held in February 2016, the IPCC (Reference Lynn, Araya and Christophersen2016b) acknowledged ‘growing calls from policymakers and other users to do more with its communications’, having faced criticism that even its SPMs are ‘unreadable and inaccessible for non-specialists’ (for further context, see Chapters 6 and 26).

Starting with the AR6 cycle, co-production of visuals has taken centre stage within the IPCC SPM process. This is based on recognising the importance of co-developing scientifically accurate and rigorous visuals and of meeting the needs of ‘users’, even if there are challenges in such co-production (Morelli et al., Reference Morelli, Johansen and Pidcock2021). This approach was pursued in both the Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 ºC (2018) (SR15) and the Special Report on Climate Change and Land (2019) (SRCCL), where visuals were collaboratively produced and guided by design and cognitive psychology principles. These principles were to establish and agree upon a clear intent (message) of the visual (see Box 25.1) as a main reference point. The visual could then be built iteratively with chapter authors as the content and focus of the IPCC report became better defined and with consideration of feedback elicited through user testing.

Concurrent with the growing social attention to visuals, visual design within the IPCC has also been professionalised, for example through collaboration with designers and recruitment of graphics officers within Technical Support Units (TSUs). This professionalisation supports authors in their preparation of visuals and also enhances the efficacy of the resulting visuals in terms of reach and understanding. The visuals featured in the AR6 WGI SPM are therefore substantially different from visuals in previous reports, both in terms of the cognitive insights adopted to convey data and information, and their visual presentation and format. Having been coordinated by the IPCC, co-created by professional designers in association with authors and cognitive experts, and refined through testing with policymakers, they may turn out to be more ‘usable’, ‘intuitively understood’ and ‘enhance climate literacy’ (Gaulkin, Reference Gaulkin2021).

25.6 Achievements and Challenges

Published research increasingly recognises the role of visuals in IPCC reports as key components of communication, in association with and complementing relevant text. Concurrently, the IPCC has acknowledged the relevance of its reports to audiences much more diverse and broader than the policymakers to whom its SPMs are explicitly addressed. The context within which the IPCC operates has also evolved, with now much wider societal interest in novel tools for digital and instant communication. The IPCC has responded to critiques by embarking upon innovative co-design for some visuals included in its reports, as part of a wider focus to improve its communications. The attention to the IPCC’s visuals in a variety of settings by a diversity of social actors reflects a development in IPCC processes. Co-production of visuals presents opportunities for widening participation and for more meaningful inclusion of diverse perspectives. However, new visual designs and formats raise questions about how these are evaluated by expert reviewers and national delegates.

There is a paucity of research on the effects of these new processes. Research is needed to understand how the SPM visuals in the AR6 reports have been reviewed and evaluated by national delegates, how they are received and used by policymakers, how they are communicated by print and social media, and how they are understood, used, and (re)circulated by different societal actors with an interest in communicating climate change. For example, to what extent are IPCC visuals circulating in other media and contexts, outside of the IPCC processes, perhaps detached from the original report in which they were included? This is especially relevant given the widespread use and accessibility of social media. Little is known about how public and media framing of IPCC visuals occurs and how this influences their circulation and reframing (O’Neill et al., Reference O’Neill, Williams and Kurz2015; Mahony, Reference Mahony2015; see also van Beek et al., Reference van Beek, Metze, Kunseler, Huitzing, de Blois and Wardekker2020b). Nor is much known systematically about the knowledges and perspectives that are highlighted or excluded as a visual is subsequently iterated, (re)used and recast across different media platforms.

Furthermore, in the context of media and user-generated content inspired by the IPCC communications, there is a need to understand how this downstream visual content expresses new or diverse meanings and perspectives around climate change, beyond those intended by the IPCC’s authors. Of relevance too is better understanding how key climate change messages are communicated. Do IPCC visuals circulate widely, and for which purposes? Or do its visuals have a limited efficacy in certain regions or amongst particular publics, for whom perhaps other visuals more effectively represent key messages on climate change? Expanding current understandings and drawing together existing work to inform and continue building on the reflections and new processes initiated within the IPCC could help its visuals, products and messages be relevant to those it wishes to reach.

Overview

This chapter analyses the development of the policy of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for the communication of its reports, the content and style of its communication, and how its knowledge becomes reappropriated for alternative, often political, purposes. In doing so, we review IPCC policy documents, key literature on the IPCC and climate science communication, as well as providing a case study of a recent controversy in IPCC communication: the reappropriation of a paragraph from the IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 °C (SR15) to headline a political campaign that there were only 12 years to prevent dangerous climate change. This controversy highlights the huge transformations in the political and media landscapes since the IPCC’s formation in 1988 and opens up the question of whether its communication approach remains fit for purpose. We highlight how the IPCC’s communication dilemma stems from the historic decision to design it to be an authoritative voice rather than a deliberative space.

26.1 Introduction

The importance of communicating authoritative scientific knowledge to multiple audiences was integral to the IPCC from its establishment in 1988. In his history of the IPCC, Bert Bolin, its first chairman, argued that ‘forthcoming reports must be written by renowned scientists and in such a manner that … would be read far outside the scientific community’ and that ‘there would be a need to reach out to the public, stake-holders, decision-makers and politicians’ (Bolin, Reference Begum, Lempert, Ali and Pörtner2007: 48). Bolin’s successor as IPCC chairman, Robert Watson, similarly described outreach and communication as one of the characteristics necessary to make scientific assessments useful (Watson, Reference Watson2005: 473). With particular regard to public communication of climate science, Bolin identifies how a stringent assessment of the science could help to resolve disagreement between scientists and prevent a ‘chaotic’ debate with citizens (Bolin, Reference Begum, Lempert, Ali and Pörtner2007: 49). He further noted that ‘the scientific community does not yet fully appreciate the way politicians make use of and the general public interprets the information that scientists provide’ (Bolin, Reference Begum, Lempert, Ali and Pörtner2007: 199).

The imagined model here is one where different strands of the climate science literature are transformed by IPCC processes into a coherent and consensual knowledge product (see Chapter 19), which is then communicated to different groups outside climate science communities. However, this model could be more accurately referred to as ‘science distribution’ than science communication, with a view to persuading these groups as to the robustness and importance of the knowledge (Trench, Reference Trench, Cheng, Claessens, Gascoigne, Metcalfe, Schiele and Shi2008). While this model of science communication has been prevalent far beyond climate change, it was particularly embedded into the IPCC from the organisation’s inception (see Chapter 2). Clark Miller identifies how, although the IPCC has an ostensibly global orientation in its framing of the climate system, a single political culture – that of the United States – has had a disproportionate influence on the organisation’s design. This has established the IPCC as a means of projecting scientific authority, rather than as a space for deliberation around competing framings and meanings of climate change (Miller, Reference Miller, Heazle, Griffiths and Conley2009: 158–159). This quest for authority over and above the political fray has led the IPCC to prize global framings, scientific disinterestedness and consensus over local issues, policy relevance and plurality (Pearce et al., Reference Pearce, Mahony and Raman2018). These trade-offs have implications for the IPCC’s communication model, and while its ‘just the facts’ approach has established scientific authority, recent developments have reinforced the model’s structural weakness in a world where media technology has transformed and methods for validating public facts are rapidly evolving (Marres, Reference Marres2018).

This chapter takes these issues in turn. First, we review recent developments in the IPCC’s communications strategy, which reinforce the importance of objectivity and authority. Second, we highlight key issues in the social science literature on IPCC communication and how these relate to the organisation’s structural issues. Third, we focus on the recent ‘12 years’ controversy as an example of how both epistemic authority and climate politics have changed in the last three decades, and the dilemmas this opens up for the IPCC in its communications strategy.

26.2 IPCC Communication Strategy: Authoritative Objectivity with Multiple Audiences

Notwithstanding the IPCC’s involvement in outreach activities since the release of the Third Assessment Report (2001) (AR3), and despite controversies and increasing pressures from outside under the chairmanship of Rajendra Pachauri, it was not until 2012 that the organisation first adopted an official communications strategy (IPCC, 2021e; De Pryck, Reference De Pryck2021b). This strategy was last revised in March 2021 and is guided principally by two policy documents produced by the IPCC Secretariat in consultation with the IPCC’s Communications Action Team. These documents are, one, a review of the IPCC’s Communications Strategy (IPCC, 2021e) and, two, the subsequently updated IPCC Communications Strategy of 2021 (IPCC, 2021f). In these documents, the IPCC adopts two central goals for its strategic communication efforts: to communicate the issue of climate change and to communicate its own organisational processes and structures. Phrased differently, it aims to communicate the scientific knowledge it produces and also how this knowledge is produced. The former centres on providing ‘clear and balanced information on climate change’ (IPCC, 2021f: 1), and the latter on underpinning this information with the IPCC’s ‘reputation as a credible, transparent, balanced and authoritative scientific body’ (IPCC, 2021f: 1). Together, these goals construct the principal aim ‘to establish the IPCC as the key science/policy interface organisation for climate change’ (IPCC, 2021f: 2).

In its communications strategy, the IPCC defines for itself two ‘primary target audiences’ (IPCC, 2021f: 3), namely the United Nations and its intergovernmental processes – in particular the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) – on the one hand, and ‘governments and policymakers at all levels’ on the other (IPCC, 2021f: 3). Next to these two primary targets the IPCC lists a wide range of secondary audiences including the scientific, education, business and non-governmental organisation (NGO) sectors, and names various strategic communication goals, such as to build relationships with the media and to produce context specific ‘tailor-made outreach activities’ (IPCC, 2021f: 3). While their communications strategy points to third parties as intermediary communicators of IPCC assessments, it makes unmistakably clear that such third-party communication products must not be considered ‘in any way products of the IPCC’ (IPCC, 2021f: 3).

The IPCC’s concern for authoritative objectivity is made explicit in its discussion of the selection and training of spokespeople, who are expected to ‘focus on communicating a factual, objective presentation of information from the approved IPCC reports and refrain from public statements that could be interpreted as advocacy and compromise the IPCC’s reputation for neutrality’ (IPCC, 2021f: 5). In the review of its 2019 communications strategy (IPCC, 2021e), the IPCC positions this choice of audience as the central decision of any communication strategy. In particular, it posits a tension between targeting a specific core audience on the one hand and, on the other, reaching ‘as many people as possible’ (IPCC, 2021e: 9). The importance of the former is expressed as concerning climate policy relevance, while the latter ‘matters for overall impact and visibility’ (IPCC, 2021e: 9). It is this distinction that underlies the demarcation between primary and secondary target audiences mentioned earlier. Interestingly, the IPCC does not position its attempts to reach a wider audience as a response to an impetus emerging from within the organisation itself. Rather, it is a response to the ‘widespread and growing interest of the non-specialist public in our work’ (IPCC, 2021e: 9). Notably, the IPCC expresses a need to ‘understand advances in climate communications specifically, such as behavioural science’ (IPCC, 2021e: 4) in order to pursue these objectives.

In addition to the review and strategy documents, in September 2020 the IPCC published a guidance note for authors of its Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) specifically on communicating climate change-related risks and risk management options. The note is in many ways similar to its much earlier guidance note on communicating uncertainties for the authors of its Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) (see Chapter 17). The issue of uncertainty, in fact, is one of the central points of discussion in its guidance concerning risk, with attempts to harmonise uncertainty communication across the IPCC’s three Working Groups (WGs) proving challenging (Janzwood, Reference Janzwood2020; see also Chapter 25).

26.3 Issues in IPCC Communication

The IPCC’s approach to communication has been subject to wide-ranging criticisms in the social scientific literature. The majority of this literature assumes a linear model of communication by which the IPCC’s efforts produce varyingly inadequate or insufficient outcomes among the so envisioned audiences. A long-standing and central element of this critique is the IPCC’s communication of risk and uncertainty, an issue the IPCC is itself concerned about as seen in its author guidance documents. The issues discussed by the literature on the IPCC’s approach to risk and uncertainty have included the following four: ambiguity in wording and subsequent invitation of interpretive biases by different readerships (Patt & Dessai, Reference Patt and Dessai2005); inconsistencies in communicating the distinctions between the different sources of uncertainty such as climate system response and future emissions (Ekwurzel et al., Reference Ekwurzel, Frumhoff and McCarthy2011); a too narrow communication of risks as statistical expectations detached from the strength of the knowledge supporting them (Aven, Reference Aven2020); and a lack of concrete representations and efficacy information to motivate action (Poortvliet et al., Reference Poortvliet, Niles, Veraart, Werners, Korporaal and Mulder2020). In recent years the academic literature has raised a wider array of concerns regarding the IPCC approach to climate change communication. These concerns include the persistent reliance on a consensus policy in communication (Hoppe & Rödder, Reference Hoppe and Rödder2019), an unhelpful use of complex language and its subsequent misinterpretation (Bruine de Bruin et al., Reference Bruine de Bruin, Rabinovich, Weber, Babboni, Dean and Ignon2021) and, most radically, the prominence of an economic growth framing that some see as hindering a transition towards carbon-neutral societies (Kanerva & Krizsán, Reference Kanerva and Krizsán2021).

Many of these critiques relate to the reception of IPCC communications by different audiences. Yet as Beck (Reference Beck2012) pointed out a decade ago, the relationship between the IPCC and wider publics cannot be reduced to whether or not communication is effective when the linear model of expertise that the IPCC operates under itself conditions transparency, accountability and public trust. Dudman and de Wit (Reference Dudman and de Wit2021) have recently pushed further in this more fundamental rethinking of forms of scientific appraisal and models of expertise and communication. These authors argue for the IPCC to adopt a reciprocal rather than a unidirectional approach in its communication efforts. Instead of focusing on further strengthening the voice of the IPCC, they propose a new approach to communicative thinking built around both speaking and listening that ‘makes space for social complexity within the machinery of the institution’ (Dudman and de Wit, Reference Dudman and de Wit2021: 8). Nightingale et al. (Reference Nightingale, Eriksen and Taylor2020) similarly argue that what guides current responses to climate change is a techno-scientific apparatus represented by organisations such as the IPCC. This apparatus insufficiently addresses how climate change acquires meaning and value – how it is known and experienced – while simultaneously disempowering people. In contrast, they argue that climate change needs to be addressed ‘with contested politics and the everyday foundations of action, rather than just data’ (Nightingale et al., Reference Nightingale, Eriksen and Taylor2020: 348). Many of the debates reviewed in this section map onto trends in the wider science communication literature; in particular, the shift from a deficit model of communication to greater dialogue between scientists and their audiences (Smallman, Reference Smallman2016). Next, we look at an emerging focus of science communication studies that is more specific to the IPCC: appropriation.

26.4 The Appropriation of IPCC Communication

Whether distributing knowledge or starting to engage in a more dialogic process, the IPCC remains a key actor in the communication of its knowledge. However, as climate change becomes ever more political, the likelihood increases that the IPCC’s scientific knowledge will be appropriated by other actors without prior consultation. For example, Sanford et al. (Reference Sanford, Painter, Yasseri and Lorimer2021) draw parallels between the responses to the 2019 IPCC Special Report on Climate Change and Land and the 2018 SR15 report, in particular the ‘12-year deadline’ narrative emerging from the latter report that was appropriated by activists (see Box 26.1). It is in this context that the authors charge the IPCC to ‘respond more effectively to distortions of the content of its reports’ (Sanford et al., Reference Sanford, Painter, Yasseri and Lorimer2021: 21). Boykoff and Pearman (Reference Boykoff and Pearman2019: 285) similarly identify the ‘12-year “deadline” trope’ in the appropriation of SR15 and its potentially obstructionist effects. The effect, they claim, induces fear and disengagement and points to a ‘critical need for more creative, co-produced, and innovative ways to meet everyday people where they are on the existential collective-action problem of climate change’ (Boykoff & Pearman, Reference Boykoff and Pearman2019: 287).

Similarly to the discussions summarised earlier, some scholars argue for a more fundamental shift away from concerns about the communication of knowledge to concerns about how the IPCC’s knowledge is produced and applied. Drawing on surveys and interviews with, among others, policy-makers – and using the IPCC’s AR5 report – Tàbara et al. (Reference Tàbara, St. Clair and Hermansen2017) argue that it is not the adequacy or inadequacy of assumptions about knowledge that stand to be critiqued and transformed. Rather, it is the assumptions of the IPCC’s knowledge systems, their interactions and normative positions. What climate policy requires, they conclude, are ‘new knowledge integration spaces in which meaningful dialogues leading to solutions and new forms of communication strategies can be jointly elaborated’ (Tàbara et al., Reference Tàbara, St. Clair and Hermansen2017: 36), rather than further attempts to fill knowledge gaps and deficits (Hulme, Reference Hulme2018).

It is also noteworthy that much literature on the IPCC’s communication efforts is concerned almost exclusively with a universalisation of climate change and its communication. The literature on the appropriation of IPCC’s knowledge, however, shows more concern for particularities, especially in local appropriations. Studies illustrating this critique would include analysis of the coverage of IPCC reports in Japanese mass media, domesticating the global to the national and blurring lines between science and politics (Asayama & Ishii, Reference Asdal2014), or the particularised perceptions and representations of climate change as a social phenomenon emerging out of political and media contexts in Spain (Teso-Alonso et al., Reference Teso-Alonso, Morales-Corral and Gaitán-Moya2021).

26.5 Achievements and Challenges

The IPCC has unquestionably transformed the production and communication of climate change knowledge, and there is now widespread awareness and acceptance of some basic facts about climate science, even in the traditionally sceptical USA (Pearce et al., Reference Pearce, Grundmann, Hulme, Raman, Hadley Kershaw and Tsouvalis2017b). By projecting its authority as a novel organisation at the interface of climate science and policy, the IPCC has established a widely accepted baseline of climate knowledge, with reports prompting discussions of climate science across mainstream and social media, and frequently referred to by a broad range of actors. The IPCC has attempted to learn from previous missteps, developing a more comprehensive communications strategy in response to criticisms from the InterAcademy Council regarding uncertainty communication and the acknowledgement of errors (Beck, Reference Beck2012). The IPCC is also starting to demonstrate increased reflexivity on the context for its science communication, with a section in Chapter 1 of the AR6 WG1 report (IPCC, Reference Masson-Delmotte, Zhai and Pirani2021a) explicitly addressing the new media context for its work.

However, despite these advances, the IPCC remains faced with structural challenges to communication. As the IPCC has helped broaden awareness of scientific knowledge about the physical processes of climate change, so the focus of opposition has shifted to the efficacy and impacts of ‘policy options and solutions’ (Bounegru et al., Reference Bounegru, De Pryck, Venturini and Mauri2020). For example, in 2021 the Global Warming Policy Foundation – a UK body renowned for its climate scepticism – transmogrified into Net Zero Watch. In its previous incarnation, the Foundation gave prominence to a flatlining global temperature graph. Now it focuses on the economic impacts of net zero, where values are likely to play a prominent role in choosing, for example, how future damage from climate change should be valued in the present (Jasanoff, Reference Jasanoff2010b). The IPCC has less leverage in these areas, as the institution remains explicitly not ‘policy-prescriptive’ and does not engage in controversies about their reports.

• Looking forward, the IPCC could, in theory, adopt a radically different deliberative model closer to that envisaged by Clark Miller (see Chapter 27), more attuned to the shift in attention to political climate change issues where values are more prominent. This ‘cosmopolitan’ approach could enable a shift from knowledge distribution to more genuine dialogue (Raman & Pearce, Reference Raman and Pearce2020). For example, the IPCC could provide space for people to declare and discuss their hopes and fears about climate change, prompted by normative questions such as ‘how shall we live?’ (Corner & Groves, Reference Corner and Groves2014). Such a move would require the re-structuring of IPCC reports, providing a means of directing the IPCC assessment agenda towards topics of public interest. Undoubtedly such a shift would bring risks for the IPCC and for its position as an epistemic authority in climate politics. Equally risky perhaps, would be for the IPCC to persist in its commitment to policy neutrality in a world where these climate politics are becoming ever more contested and urgent. Either way, the IPCC cannot afford to proceed without a meaningful reflection on the impacts and implications of its communication practices within a rapidly evolving political climate.

Overview

This chapter positions the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in the context of global efforts to understand and combat climate change. Throughout its first three decades, as nations have sought to understand and prioritise climate change in global policy, the IPCC has served as the world’s principal knowledge-making institution. It has created, authorised and narrated a new kind of global knowledge; profoundly shaped global public imagination of the climate emergency; and provided epistemic support to the call for collective global action to tackle it. Looking forward, however, it is less clear whether the IPCC is well positioned to help support the work of institutions around the world to end fossil fuel use and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The chapter asks, therefore, whether the IPCC needs to be re-imagined if it is to help advance the transition to a climate-neutral global economy and energy systems.

27.1 Introduction

When the IPCC was established in 1988, it was intended as a space of global politics for translating climate science into the design and negotiation of coordinated global action (Miller Reference Miller and Jasanoff2004). That idea quickly broke down after the signing of the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Instead, the IPCC was rebuilt as a scientific advisory body to review and synthesise scientific and social scientific knowledge about climate change for global policymakers. It has exercised that responsibility for nearly three decades (Beck et al., Reference Beck, Borie and Chilvers2014).

The shift to science advice did not ultimately reduce the IPCC’s political significance. In packaging assessed scientific knowledge for public and policy consumption, the IPCC constructed out of the cacophony of disjointed scientific work a global fact base that establishes the existence of the Earth’s climate system, illuminates the dangerous risks threatening that system, and demonstrates humanity’s responsibility for creating those risks (Borie et al., Reference Bony, Stevens, Held, Asrar and Hurrell2021). In short, the IPCC helped fashion the imaginary of a climate emergency now shared broadly in the global public imagination (for one illustrative framing, see Ripple et al., Reference Ripple, Wolf and Newsome2021) and positioned its knowledge as the definitive source for understanding this planetary crisis. There are, to be sure, many framings of the climate emergency – and how to tackle it. Yet, there are also continuities: that climate change is an emergency; that it is a disturbance of the global climate system; and that solutions must be global. The IPCC has contributed deeply to shaping these continuities. It is no accident that the UN Secretary General specifically identified the 2021 IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) Working Group I (WGI) report as a ‘code red’ for humanity (Guterres, Reference Guterres2021).

This chapter reviews the IPCC’s intertwined epistemic and political work over the past three decades. Scholars in science and technology studies (STS) label such work co-production, meaning the ways in which knowledge and social order are configured together (Jasanoff, Reference Jasanoff2004). The IPCC epitomises co-production, simultaneously helping create three key ‘products’: a new kind of global knowledge; a new class of global knowledge institutions to make it; and a new form of global politics centred on forging global policy responses to global problems (Miller, Reference Miller and Jasanoff2004). Few such exercises of global power go uncontested, however. From the 1990s through the 2010s, the IPCC was a lightning rod for opposition in fights over global climate science and policy. Critics challenged many aspects of the IPCC, and for many reasons (Feder, Reference Feder1996; Hulme, Reference Hulme2009; Hajer, Reference Hajer2012; Martin, Reference Martin2014; Beck & Mahony, Reference Beck and Mahony2018a; Sanford et al., Reference Sanford, Painter, Yasseri and Lorimer2021). Two sets of criticisms are especially relevant to this chapter. From one direction, opponents of climate action sought to undermine the credibility of specific IPCC knowledge claims and of the IPCC as a scientific institution in an attempt to protect fossil fuel industries. Others criticised the IPCC’s ways of knowing as an illegitimate approach to making global knowledge and organising global governance. They argued that the IPCC excluded important groups and their knowledges, and inappropriately framed climate change as a singular, universal global problem.

The IPCC has largely defeated the first set of criticisms, amid broader shifts in climate policy and public opinion toward the foreseeable elimination of fossil fuels. Since 2020, global climate debates have passed an important turning point (see Fink, Reference Fink2020, for an illustration of an influential financial institution adopting climate change as central to its own transformation). As witnessed at COP26 in Glasgow, a substantial majority of the world’s governments and industries now publicly support systematic action to create a climate-neutral future and transform the global economy and energy systems by 2050 (for example EU, 2021).

Accomplishing this goal will not be easy, and knowledge will remain critical to informing world action. The kinds of knowledge and politics needed, however, may differ significantly from those developed and curated by the IPCC to date. This makes the second set of criticisms of the IPCC all the more poignant. What kinds of knowledge should guide action to end fossil fuel use and decarbonise the global economy? Who should participate in that knowledge-making? Is the global construction and organisation of knowledge that underpins imagination of the climate emergency what is now needed? It concludes, therefore, by asking ‘Now what?’ for the IPCC. The chapter argues that the IPCC should carefully consider the kind of knowledge and politics it is bringing into being and informing – and re-imagine itself as fit-for-purpose for the task(s) ahead. Understanding the challenge of transitioning to a post-carbon economy and the different possibilities for replacing it, and helping different communities and places advance that agenda, in differentiated ways, is a critical problem to which the IPCC could potentially contribute. Or not. Different pathways forward could lead to very different futures, and how both the science and politics of those pathways is narrated matters (Hulme, Reference Hulme2019).

27.2 The Organisation of Global Knowledge-making

At its most basic meaning, the idea of co-production emphasises (i) that new knowledge is made – i.e., it is a product of human work – through the design and organisation of new social and institutional practices; and (ii) that new ways of ordering social organisation and practices are orchestrated through the making and application of new kinds of knowledge (Miller & Muñoz-Erickson, Reference Miller and Muñoz-Erickson2018). The emergence of a new kind of politics of planetary emergency is no exception. Throughout its history, the IPCC has pioneered both the globalisation of knowledge-making and its use to inform and drive global politics (Miller & Edwards, Reference Miller and Edwards2001). The IPCC has worked to characterise and establish the ontological reality of the climate system as a global object at risk from human affairs (Edwards, Reference Edwards, Schneider, Miller and Edwards2010). It presents itself as an institution that represents and synthesises scientific and social scientific knowledge from all peoples and countries (Ho-Lem et al., Reference Ho-Lem, Zerriffi and Kandlikar2011); can thus present its findings credibly to policy audiences across the globe (Mahony, Reference Mahony2014a); and is capable of identifying and analysing global problems so as to inform and coordinate collective global action to correct them (Turnhout et al., Reference Turnhout, Dewulf and Hulme2016). See Chapters 7 and 23 for a thorough and appropriate critique of that self-image.

Even the earliest statements of the IPCC present the basic outlines of this framework. In presenting the findings of the IPCC First Assessment Report (AR1) in 1990, for example, Bert Bolin, the first chair of the IPCC, emphasised the factual reality of climate change – ‘there is a greenhouse effect’; its global ontology – ‘how the global climate system operates’; and the ability of the IPCC to guide collective action – ‘clear justification for the need to start the process of combating climate change now’ (Bolin, Reference Bolin, Jäger and Ferguson1991: 19–20). Over time, these core elements of IPCC knowledge-making became even clearer and more ambitious, as the IPCC incrementally ratcheted up the immediacy of its warnings and the need for rapid, global action to combat it (IPCC, Reference Masson-Delmotte, Zhai and Pirani2021a).

This epistemic and narrative work by the IPCC played a central role in establishing climate change as a widely shared global fact in the imagination of publics around the globe. It has also shaped and delimited what people know about climate change, and built causal narratives that connect these evidentiary foundations to visions and values of action within a global imaginary of climate emergency. In a recent survey of 1.2 million people in 50 countries, ‘nearly two-thirds (64 per cent) of people in 50 countries believe that climate change is a global emergency’ (UNDP, 2020: 15), including 58 per cent in the least developed countries and 61 per cent or more in every region of the world.

The drip, drip, drip of three decades of IPCC reports, responses to and criticisms of them by policymakers, business leaders, activists and scientists around the globe – and its coverage in global media – has had an enormous impact on global public imagination (Kunelius et al., Reference Kunelius, Eide, Tegelberg and Yagodin2017). Today, the IPCC stands at the centre of a world-spanning – admittedly somewhat decentralised – global machinery, extending throughout diverse policy, economic, media, social media and non-governmental institutions in every country, dedicated to creating and distributing knowledge about climate change among global publics (Boykoff & Yulsman, Reference Boykoff and Yulsman2013). Within those networks, the ideas about climate change that the IPCC articulates are the grist around which all sorts of knowledge-making gets spun (Boykoff & Pearman, Reference Boykoff and Pearman2019).

27.3 The Conflict over Global Knowledge-making

The IPCC’s success in creating a global fact base for understanding and acting on climate change catalysed a multi-decade conflict over global knowledge-making. One facet of this conflict has centred on attacks on the credibility of the IPCC and its knowledge claims (Hulme, Reference Hulme, Doubleday and Wilsdon2013). These attacks have come from very different directions – some motivated by a narrow desire to protect carbon economies, some by a fear that knowledge of global risks will support rising calls for stronger global governance, and some by deep concerns about the narrative of emergency that circulates in and around IPCC reports. These attacks – and responses to them – have done little to slow the global spread of the imaginary of a climate emergency. They have, however, done damage – for example polarising the IPCC among some groups, slowing policy responses, and contributing to the rise of post-truth knowledge politics in global discourses, especially but by no means exclusively in the United States (Fischer, Reference Fischer2019).

A second facet of the conflict has focused on efforts to extend the model of the IPCC into other domains of global governance. This criticism has focused more on the legitimacy of the IPCC’s ways of knowing, practices of inclusion and governance, and role in framing climate change. In important ways, the IPCC has become the model for making knowledge about global risks, especially in the health, environmental and biological sciences (Beck et al., Reference Beck, Borie and Chilvers2014). In biodiversity conservation, for example, scientists have sought to articulate the diversity of life on Earth as ‘an irreplaceable natural heritage’ at risk of a global ‘biodiversity crisis’ and to establish ‘a mechanism akin to the IPCC’ to build a global fact base that justifies global action to halt the loss of species and habitats around the world (Loreau et al., Reference Loreau, Oteng-Yeboah and Orroyo2006). The World Health Organisation (WHO) adopted similar strategies on tobacco and emerging diseases. It cast both as ‘global health risks’. It established, in 2003, a Framework Convention on Tobacco Control – note the similarity in language to the Framework Convention on Climate Change. Finally, in 2005, upgrades to the WHO’s International Health Regulations allowed the WHO to declare global health emergencies (Miller, Reference Miller, Jasanoff and Kim2015a).

These efforts to globalise science, risk, and governance for biodiversity and health ultimately backfired. Viewing them as threats to national sovereignty – over, respectively, the ownership of national biological resources and health security decision-making – key countries refused to countenance the globalisation of either knowledge-making or policy authority. Under Chinese leadership after 2006, WHO capacity to detect and respond to infectious diseases was systematically dismantled. This contributed to slower and less effective responses to Ebola in 2013–2016 and COVID in 2020–2021, as well as to political conflict over the scientific guidance and proper role of the WHO in both instances. In parallel, opposition from Brazil, Indonesia and other large, biodiverse countries, slowed the development of international scientific advisory processes for biodiversity conservation. When the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) was finally established in 2012, it followed a very different model to the IPCC. It emphasised cultivating distributed and diversified scientific capacity and governance at local and national scales (Beck et al., Reference Beck, Borie and Chilvers2014; Borie et al., Reference Bony, Stevens, Held, Asrar and Hurrell2021). This was despite repeated agitation by the scientific community for stronger, more centralised knowledge-making and action (Wilhere, Reference Wilhere2021).

27.4 Knowledge-making and Public Imagination

The tremendous impact of the IPCC in shaping global public imagination – and the conflicts it engendered – is a reminder that it matters how global knowledge is chosen to be made and how global knowledge is made to entwine with global politics. Scholarship on knowledge politics has long emphasised this point –knowledge is power, forms of knowledge-making are forms of governance, and the modern state incorporates a wide diversity of institutional arrangements for making knowledge and applying it to the exercise of political muscle (Jasanoff, Reference Jasanoff1990; Ezrahi, Reference Ezrahi1990; Foucault, Reference Foucault, Burchell, Gordon and Miller1991; Miller, Reference Miller, Hilgartner, Miller and Hagendijk2015b). It is no surprise that similar dynamics are at play in global governance.

What next, then, for the IPCC? The current form of knowledge politics produced by the IPCC – global, emergency, centred on the threat to planetary systems – demands a global policy response and mirrors those that, historically, have helped buttress the creation of strong national states (Scott, Reference Scott1995) and state regulatory apparatuses for controlling resources and protecting against risk (Rueschemeyer & Skocpol, Reference Rueschemeyer and Skocpol1996; Hays, Reference Hays1999). Thus, given the current IPCC orientation, it is no surprise to note high levels of anxiety over the persistent failures of the UNFCCC Conferences of Parties (COP) to write strong global climate rules (Dauvergne, Reference Dauvergne, Weiss and Wilkinson2021), recurring calls to establish a world environment organisation (Biermann, Reference Biermann, Morin and Orsini2020), or calls for emergency global powers to address the climate crisis (Gills & Morgan, Reference Gills and Morgan2020).

Is that really the way to go, however? Mike Hulme has argued that the politics of emergency are a treacherous foundation on which to build a sustainable future for humankind (Hulme, Reference Hulme2019). Especially at a time when democracy seems fragile, and many see a growing gap between the world’s citizens and the governments that represent them (Castells, Reference Castells2018), it is appropriate to ask whether an alternative politics of climate change might exist.

Although the IPCC has always framed its work as informing and motivating global policymakers, an alternative, bottom-up social movement has also formed to accelerate climate action. Worldwide, cities, communities, businesses, energy organisations, local governments, countries and other kinds of organisations are setting their own targets to achieve climate-neutral futures and, more importantly, making plans and investments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (Kuramochi et al., Reference Kuramochi, Roelfsema and Hasu2020). This movement – far more than the prospects of a global treaty or extensive new national investments in clean energy infrastructures (IEA, 2021) – gives me hope that climate change will be tackled over the next few decades.

I see in all of this frenetic activity a validation of recent scholarship on sociotechnical imaginaries – the shared, socialised forms of public imagination that permeate modern societies (Jasanoff & Kim, Reference Jasanoff and Kim2015). Two aspects of this literature are especially interesting: the centrality of organised practices of fact-making to the creation of sociotechnical imaginaries among democratic publics; and the decentralised processes of knowledge uptake, engagement and interpretation through which those epistemic claims are transformed into social organisation and collective action. In his book Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson depicts the contribution of maps, museums and censuses, all products of State knowledge-making, to the rise of collective national identities in the transition from colonial and monarchic rule to democracy (Anderson, Reference Anderson1991). Similarly, in Imagined Democracies, Yaron Ezrahi argues that a foundation of ‘reality’ – built on shared factual resources, often produced by the state, describing what exists in the world and the causal relationships among its parts – forms an important element in the imaginative resources of publics through which they imagine themselves as democratic (Ezrahi, Reference Ezrahi2012; Miller, Reference Miller, Hilgartner, Miller and Hagendijk2015b).

The question is whether there are ways that the IPCC could leverage its power in global knowledge-making to help create new kinds of knowledge capabilities that both support decentralised, polycentric climate action (Ostrom, Reference Ostrom2009; Keohane, Reference Keohane2015) and strengthen democratic public imaginations around the world. Unfortunately, the current focus of the IPCC on knowledge of global environmental systems offers little to no informational value to sub-global entities seeking to map out paths to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, for example the world’s ten thousand electric utilities. Nor is it immediately clear how the current approach of the IPCC helps support the imagination and construction of post-carbon futures by diverse communities around the world.

Maybe the IPCC shouldn’t try to help communities find local climate solutions. The power of global scientific institutions like the IPCC to crowd out local ways of knowing must be taken seriously. However, it is worth also taking seriously the possibility of redesigning the IPCC to provide support to regional knowledge institutions and energy transitions. Ending humanity’s addiction to fossil fuels will be complex, arduous and tricky. It will take different forms in different communities and places, yet also need to be coordinated to avoid catastrophic risks to regional energy infrastructures – especially in the context of growing weather and climate extremes.

Could the IPCC help develop and distribute the know-how necessary to undertake this work, in a way that supports rather than imposes itself on local communities and actors? For example, the IPCC could leverage its position as an influencer of global public imagination to advocate for new investments in developing the substantial sub-global knowledge capabilities needed to inform decentralised climate action. And it could re-orient and re-imagine its own work in terms of engaging, motivating and supporting polycentric action. Such an approach could potentially help strengthen communities and facilitate democratic imagination and action by helping foster public understanding of what is happening, in detail, at sub-global scales. This would improve deliberation of the adequacy, orientation and justice of sub-global economic and energy transitions (Dryzek, Reference Dryzek2012). At the same time, the IPCC could serve as a counterweight to other global actors seeking to inappropriately influence and shape local efforts to imagine and create post-carbon futures. These are ideas worth exploring.

27.5 Achievement and Challenges

In this moment of deep despair for the prospects of the planet, democracy and the human future, it is worth reflecting on what the IPCC has achieved, despite its shortcomings. Today, publics and institutions worldwide understand the need for and are working to achieve climate neutrality by 2050. That new climate social movements and shared climate imaginaries exist is – in no small part – due to the work of the IPCC.

What responsibilities does the IPCC have to these movements to support their work? Correspondingly, what risks does the IPCC face in continuing to support a narrative of climate emergency without also supporting those working, at all levels, to tackle climate change? Up to this point, the IPCC has chosen not to invest substantially in helping diverse actors mobilise or build distributed capacity for the knowledge and expertise necessary to understand how the world’s diverse energy systems work, how these energy systems intertwine in complex ways in particular places with a host of other critical infrastructure systems, and what it will take to transform them to achieve a climate-neutral future. Nor has the IPCC sought to track or assess in any significant way the work underway by distributed actors to transform the global economy and global energy systems. The result, unfortunately, is that the IPCC helps perpetuate the idea that the world is not acting sufficiently to tackle climate change, while simultaneously also not working to help those institutions that are pursuing that effort.

If the IPCC is to help the world’s diverse peoples tackle climate change through collaborative action – and in the process help usher in a transformation of the global economy and energy systems – it needs to reflect on and re-imagine itself as a maker of global social order, not simply a maker of global facts. It needs to ask what kind of global social order it wants to help call into being. This would be a radical departure for the IPCC and the alternatives are stark. Continued climate emergency is one possibility, along with the treacherous forms of global politics it entails. Another possibility is for the IPCC to reconstitute itself to support a robust, decentralised movement to undertake the essential work of navigating the transition to climate-neutrality – which has to happen everywhere, anyways. Such a movement might make real contributions to shoring up, or even reconstituting, global democracy.

Overview

In this chapter we offer concluding remarks based on issues raised in the book and informed by discussions between its contributors at a workshop held in December 2021. We emphasise the need to understand the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as a complex epistemic, social, political and human institution and we evaluate its activities, achievements and challenges using three metaphors. First, we suggest opening the ‘black box’ of the IPCC to examine its internal workings, to understand how it functions and where its authority comes from. Second, we call for thinking of the IPCC as a ‘ship on the ocean’ to help situate its work within the scientific and (geo)political contexts in which it evolves. Finally, we caution against thinking of the IPCC as a ‘Swiss army knife’ that can successfully be all things for all people. These reflections on the design, function and future of the IPCC have implications for the study of other expert institutions.

28.1 What This Book Has Achieved

In A Critical Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we have brought together more than 30 social scientists who have each studied the IPCC as an institution, and some of whom have been involved in its activities. These authors bring different disciplinary perspectives to the study of the IPCC, assessing, with a critical eye, the main features of the institution and evaluating its influence. They draw upon the available literature and their own experiences. Taken individually, each chapter offers an analysis of key questions relating to, among other things, the governance of the IPCC, the participants involved, the types of knowledge assessed, the processes guiding its work, and its influence in society. Taken as a whole, the book offers the first comprehensive and detailed overview of the procedures, principles, practices and products that, together, comprise the IPCC and which underpin its authority and project its influence.

The book refrains from treating the IPCC as a unitary actor with a singular function, identity and culture. The starting point for many of the chapters has been recognising the heterogeneity of the institution, which brings together diverse scientific, social scientific, practitioner and political communities. The book therefore presents the IPCC as a complex epistemic, cultural, political and human knowledge institution whose ramifications extend well beyond its organisational boundaries. It shows that the procedures put in place to guide the assessment process, the types of knowledge assessed, as well as the individuals and institutions involved in the organisation, matter for how we think about the knowledge that produces. The IPCC is not a neutral loudspeaker for the voice of climate experts worldwide, but an active participant in producing such a voice. And its reports, products and messages – what that voice speaks – are not interpreted the same way around the world. The IPCC’s procedures and modus operandi have implications not only for the framing of climate change in its reports, but also for the construction of its authority in various national and international contexts.

By compiling this book we also seek to start a debate about the perceived successes of the IPCC. We give contributors space to identify and discuss its various achievements, as they understand them, and the range of challenges it faces. ‘Success’ is not only defined in terms of impact and communication, but also in terms of governance, participation, diversity, transparency and reflexivity. The different chapters thus assess the IPCC with regards to its ability (or failure) to reach across different audiences, to develop inclusive, transparent and fair practices and processes of knowledge assessment, and to reflect on its own role in society.

In this conclusion, we draw out several threads that run through the book, using three different – and deliberately incommensurable – metaphors: the IPCC as a ‘black box’, as a ‘ship in the ocean’ and as a ‘Swiss army knife’.

28.2 Opening the ‘Black Box’ of the IPCC

The IPCC is primarily known for the authoritative and scientifically rigorous reports that it periodically publishes and that make headlines in media outlets worldwide. From the outside, like many successful institutions, it resembles a ‘black box’ – a complex organisation whose internal workings are hidden or, at least, not well understood. The contributions in this book have demonstrated the importance of opening the black box of institutions like the IPCC to describe how expert claims are produced, how their legitimacy and credibility are constructed, and how they are interpreted by a wide range of public audiences. These perspectives have shown that the IPCC is many things: it is a panel of member states; it is three distinct Working Groups (WGs) and a Task Force; it is a small secretariat; and it is a network of researchers, government representatives and bureaucrats spread around the world in different national and international institutions. The chapter contributors have also offered a nuanced reading of some commonplace assumptions about how the IPCC selects its authors, produces its reports and communicates its findings.

First, opening the black box of the IPCC allows us to see how it is a unique experiment of co-production between scientific and social scientific experts and government representatives. It has evolved into a distinct professionalised space of encounter between these different worlds, with its own norms, codes, culture and philosophy. Applying a sociohistorical perspective to the IPCC makes two things clear. First, the institution was imagined, founded and originally designed in the late 1980s, within a particular geopolitical context that shaped its institutional form and governance procedures, and within an epistemic context that recognised a particular relationship between (scientific) knowledge and policymaking, namely, a ‘science-first’ approach. But, second, in its subsequent history, the institution has been continuously re-shaped by scientific advances, knowledge controversies, and national and international politics; for example, by climate contrarians, by UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiations and by shifts in geopolitical power. For all these reasons, the IPCC was ‘born political’, has never escaped subsequent politicisation and never will. All the contributions in this book deconstruct the carefully defended narrative that the institution is able to separate science from politics and that the IPCC is neutral with respect to policy. Yet they also observe that the political nature of the IPCC is not necessarily a problem, if acknowledged and reflected upon.

Second, opening the black box of the IPCC draws attention to how its knowledge assessments are constructed. This construction occurs through both the micro-practices of its participants and through the Panel’s orchestration efforts that reach well beyond its institutional boundaries. Over time, the IPCC has developed one of the most sophisticated machineries of all global knowledge assessments, one which mobilises thousands of experts, hundreds of research institutions and scores of bureaucrats, working together over several years. Contributions in this book reveal the importance of the internal rules that guide the work of the institution, manage interactions between authors and government delegates, and respond to criticism. At the same time, they caution against thinking that procedures act as a proxy for objectivity. Rather, such procedures reveal the informality and learning-by-doing approach that prevails in many aspects of the IPCC’s assessment process.

Third, opening the black box of the IPCC foregrounds the importance of participation for the legitimacy of its global assessments. Participation in the IPCC is multifaceted. It is characterised by a high level of turnover among expert authors and government representatives, but also by the existence of a small group of individuals building their career and work around IPCC assessments. Participation is also limited. Despite efforts to increase the involvement of various groups – experts from developing countries, civil society, early career researchers, Indigenous Peoples, social scientists, humanities scholars, women – contributions to the book show the difficulties the institution still faces in developing procedures to enhance their participation. Contributors also argue that participation is less about quotas and statistics than it is about strengthening the capacity of these participants to contribute effectively, and with influence, to the IPCC’s assessment work. Enhancing such capacity is not only essential to strengthen participants’ engagement with the IPCC, but also to improve the quality and relevance of knowledge assessments produced by the IPCC.

Fourth, opening the black box of the IPCC renders visible some of the power asymmetries that characterise relations between disciplines (the natural and social sciences) and epistemologies (scientific and non-scientific systems of knowledge), between authors and governments, and between governments (for example, fossil fuel exporters, small island states, forest-rich countries). IPCC deliberations do not occur in a vacuum; they are subject to the same asymmetries that characterise, more broadly, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research, and the distribution of knowledge production between the Global North and the Global South. Many of the chapters identify moments in the assessment process where these asymmetries become visible and limit the consensus strategy pursued by the IPCC. They can restrict meaningful participation and deflect the overall narrative of the assessment.

Finally, and drawing upon the above insights, opening the black box of the IPCC helps situate the particular kind of knowledge that the institution produces and puts into global circulation. Several contributions to the book emphasise the IPCC’s reliance on numerical modelling and quantitative analysis to tell the story of climate change, its impacts and potential solutions. Such framing comes at the expense of presenting plural narratives, grounded in perspectives from the social sciences, humanities, and Indigenous knowledge systems, which could reflect how climate change is experienced and interpreted differently around the world. The IPCC’s particular framing of climate change also comes at the expense of acknowledging – especially in the Summaries for Policymakers – some of the disagreements and asymmetries of power that run deep within and between societies. And this framing further tends to support technocratic climate solutions that run the risk of locking in certain futures and narrowing the policy options available.

Who the IPCC’s experts are (from which country, discipline or societal group) and how they arrive at their conclusions (the content of the black box) are thus as important as what they say (the reports).

28.3 ‘A Ship on the Ocean’

To use this metaphor of a ship on the ocean, A Critical Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, while focusing on the IPCC (‘the ship’), is also about the context (‘the ocean’) in which the institution evolves and operates.¹ The IPCC navigates an ocean of variable depth and with dynamic currents and it regularly needs to adapt its sailing techniques. Its architecture and navigation system has evolved over time as the profile of its passengers and crew diversified, as conflicts over its destination arose, and as the physical properties of a warming ocean changed. This is not to say that the ‘ship’ does not also shape the ocean when its hull enters the water. Quite the contrary. Contributions in the book argue that the IPCC has played a key role in giving prominence to climate science, supporting international climate negotiations and raising global awareness on climate change. And they also show how these processes have, in turn, shaped the IPCC.

First, the authority of the IPCC derives not only from its internal procedures and practices, but from a large network of scientific and research institutions – principally located in Europe, Australia and North America – that have historically supported its work. The IPCC would not be what it is if it could not rely on the resources of these institutional actors whose own activities have, over the years, become increasingly organised around the IPCC’s assessment cycles. In turn, these research institutions occupy key positions in the Panel’s operations, creating feedback loops whereby the knowledge that these semi-independent and powerful institutions produce becomes even more prominent and influential in shaping and communicating the story of climate change as told by the IPCC.

The ‘ship’ of the IPCC, through its institutional proximity with the UNFCCC, is also closely connected to ‘the ocean’ of international climate negotiations. As shown by several contributions in the book, the IPCC has on several occasions become enmeshed in controversies over issues relevant to the negotiations – for example, when the UNFCCC commissioned a Special Report on Land Use, Land-Use Change, and Forestry (SRLULUCF) in 2000, or requested a Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 °C (SR15) in 2015. In these situations, the IPCC is explicitly called upon to settle a political conflict between parties. The hope is that a rational and technical management of a political problem through IPCC knowledge assessment procedures may ease normative disagreements – such as, in the examples given earlier, what a carbon sink is and why 1.5 °C of warming is safer than 2 °C.

The IPCC is not insulated from the ‘winds and currents’ of external influences and often ends up trying to respond to them through internal deliberations. So far, the ship of the IPCC has not run aground in these tempestuous storms, although as several of our chapters illustrate it came close to doing so in 2010 following the ‘Climategate’ controversy and some errors found in the Fourth Assessment Report (2007) (AR4). Several contributions also delve into the implications of the new role taken up by the IPCC in the post-Paris (after 2015) context. The IPCC’s principal mandate, dating back to 1988, of assessing what is known about the changing climate and its impacts is evolving into an expectation for the IPCC to pay more attention to the assessment of solutions. In these chapters, our contributors express concern about the prominent place given in IPCC reports to putative solutions to climate change whose technical, social and political feasibility is uncertain – for example, afforestation and bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, also known as BECCS. By promoting certain technocratic solutions that have not been debated through democratic means, the IPCC can be seen by some as exceeding its role as an assessor and synthesiser of knowledge. There are some dangerous rocks here around which the ship of the IPCC needs to navigate.

The IPCC is also connected to other institutions producing global environmental assessments through the links that are made with other problems, such as ozone depletion, biodiversity, desertification, chemical waste pollution and so on. For many interested observers, the IPCC sets an institutional precedent. As an exemplar of a science–policy interface, the IPCC’s internal arrangements – consensus-based, intergovernmental, science-focused – serve as a design template for other advocated global environmental assessments. However, the fact that the IPCC ship is still afloat after more than 30 years does not mean that the same ship design and navigating principles are appropriate for the different challenges of different oceans. The establishment in 2012 of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) is a good illustration of adopting some design features of the IPCC, but choosing a ship and a crew that looked and moved rather differently in order to navigate a different ocean. The IPBES, for example, brings together more diverse types of knowledge and explicitly includes capacity building in its mandate (which the IPCC formally does not).

To continue with this metaphor, the contributions to this book also draw attention to the multiple layers of various depths of the ocean the IPCC navigates. IPCC reports are relevant not only for global governance, but also for different regional, national and local decision-making processes. At the same time, IPCC reports – their framing of climate change, the analytical techniques adopted, their assessment of uncertainties and promotion of visuals – are circulated, used and interpreted in many different ways around the world. The perceived legitimacy of its reports, and their usefulness for various actors, vary significantly over time, and depending on context. In the wake of increased public attention to climate change in recent years – and the worldwide mobilisation of a youth climate movement – IPCC reports are under the spotlight in many countries and are being used by various groups to call for more ambitious national action. But the IPCC also faces contestation by other actors who question its legitimacy and credibility for a variety of reasons. For instance, in the Global North, the IPCC has been the target of climate contrarian groups that sought to delay climate action by discrediting its work. In the Global South – where inequalities in knowledge production and access to resources hinder participation in the IPCC – its reports are criticised for underrepresenting the perspectives of developing countries. And as is made clear in one of our chapters, many Indigenous Peoples feel that the IPCC has not done justice to the Indigeneous knowledge systems held by peoples who feel excluded from participation and yet whose knowledge needs formal means of recognition by the IPCC.

The metaphor of the ship in the ocean draws attention to how the IPCC (the ship) shapes and influences the social, political, cultural and epistemic context (the ocean) in which it is embedded. But the metaphor also points to how this changing environment within which the IPCC operates prompts adjustments to the staffing, the navigational protocols and even some infrastructural elements of the ship.

28.4 ‘The Swiss Army Knife’ Problem

While A Critical Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been more concerned about what the IPCC is than about what the IPCC ought to be, this normative question is considered in many contributions. They reveal the diverse expectations that societal actors have about how the IPCC should function and what kind of knowledge it should produce. These ambitious expectations are a reflection of how successful the IPCC is in the eyes of many.

After each assessment cycle, reform of the IPCC is called for. For some, the IPCC should adapt its work so as to produce more tailored and context-specific regional and local information relevant for actors in charge of developing mitigation and adaptation policies. In contrast, for others the IPCC should listen more closely to the needs of the UNFCCC and adjust its publication timeline to key mechanisms, such as the Global Stocktake due to be completed by 2023. Contributors to this book also offer their own expectations for the IPCC. Several of them call for a greater integration of insights from the social sciences, Indigenous knowledge systems, practitioners and even the public at large. Others call for the IPCC to acknowledge its political role and for it to be more reflexive about the policy choices and value judgements that underpin its assessments. One of our contributors calls for the IPCC to redesign itself to be an engine for constituting a new form of global democracy.

As a result of the diversity of its stakeholders, there is no shortage of expectations about what the institution of the IPCC should become. This is what the contributors to this book recognise as the ‘Swiss army knife’ problem.² A Swiss army knife is a unique handy tool that can be used in multiple ways and situations to perform multiple functions. While the IPCC might want its reports to be multifunctional and address a wide range of audiences across the world, in practice this is a difficult and problematic task. It might even be an impossible mission because it is difficult to imagine that the IPCC can simultaneously fulfil all the functions that different societal actors ascribe to it and satisfy all their needs. First, from a human resource perspective, it is complicated because the IPCC may not have the necessary capacity or resources – authors are volunteers for whom the assessment process is already very cumbersome and the volume of literature to assess keeps expanding. Second, from an epistemic perspective, as the contributions to this book have shown, the IPCC is already hardly all things for all people. It is an institution whose reports satisfy some scientific or knowledge communities, and some countries, more than others. Letting in new stakeholders would require substantial re-imagination of the rules and the intricately orchestrated process of assessment writing, and require the redistribution of power within the institution.

Finally, as several contributions suggest, the conflicts that arise in IPCC deliberations are becoming increasingly unresolvable, because they concern clashing worldviews, paradigms and values. While the IPCC might have overcome earlier controversies – for example about the attribution and detection of climate change – it is still struggling to use knowledge to reach a global consensus on how to tackle climate change, and how fast. Such a struggle might not even be necessary anymore, since the Paris Agreement and its Nationally Determined Contributions have in fact allowed for different tracks and different speeds. It might be time for the IPCC to recognise that the issue of climate change divides societies as much as it unites them, and that a rational and technical management of the climate crisis is unlikely to bring about major societal changes.

28.5 Looking Ahead

With the help of the three metaphors discussed, we now circle back to the argument that opened this conclusion – the IPCC is a complex knowledge institution that means a lot of different things to different people. Instead of making the IPCC ship bigger to satisfy all, it may be worth considering building smaller ships to acknowledge the multiple and sometimes contradictory ways of thinking about climate change and its solutions, and more generally about living on Earth. Similarly, instead of thinking of the IPCC and its WGs as the only ‘tool’ in town – a Swiss army knife – one could think of developing different knowledge and assessment tools fit for particular purposes. This is especially the case now in a world that is more epistemically fragmented and ontologically complex than ever and moving toward a polycentric and nationally oriented policy terrain on climate change.

This could mean moving away from comprehensive assessments to more topically and geographically focused and integrated evaluations. This could be pursued by the IPCC, or by other national and local institutions. For example, the last decade has witnessed the emergence of local IPCCs to guide the implementation of climate change policies ‘in the field’ – the New York City Panel on Climate Change established in 2009 is a precursor in that regard. If the IPCC is to be continued, it could also write reports with other knowledge institutions –specialised among others in food, biodiversity, energy, trace, finance, human rights – or establishing collaborations with a wider range of stakeholders at different levels of governance. For example, the IPCC/IPBES workshop organised in June 2021 brought much needed information on the synergies and trade-offs between biodiversity protection and climate change mitigation and adaptation, which was reflected in the WGII AR6 report. The IPCC could also move away from centring on global climate projections or proposing ready-made solutions, to instead offer a more careful examination of ‘inconvenient truths’ – such as historical responsibilities, social and political (in)feasibilities, the underlying drivers of inaction, or the new forms of capitalist domination that the climate transition is creating. As many contributions show, however, the IPCC, in its current intergovernmental form, is not fit for this task.

One could also argue, more provocatively, that we need to hear less about the IPCC and its ‘dire’ or ‘code red’ assessments. This does not mean that expertise is not needed anymore, but that it should not be expected – as it is still often the case – to be the primary driver for climate attention and action. It is now the time to move the focus of attention to the political leaders and decision-makers, with all their contradictions and inconsistencies, and request of them to assume the difficult choices that are needed, rather than lean, even if rhetorically, on ‘policy neutral’ global knowledge to instruct their paths. Climate change is now much less a scientific problem than it is a political and cultural predicament.

The knowledge and arguments contained in A Critical Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are partial, contingent and contextual. This is true of all knowledge, including that constructed by the IPCC. Yet this book is so far the broadest and most comprehensive assessment of the IPCC as an institution. It offers a ‘snapshot’ of what an international group of social science researchers understands about it, shaped by the available literature and by the contributors’ own situated experiences and judgements. It is a contribution to future debates about the IPCC – and about the role of science in society more generally – offered in good faith.