Independent review calls for IPCC reform

The process used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to produce its periodic assessment reports has been successful overall, but the IPCC needs to fundamentally reform its management structure and strengthen its procedures to handle ever larger and increasingly complex climate assessments as well as the more intense public scrutiny coming from a world grappling with how best to respond to climate change, says the report of an independent review of the processes and procedures of the IPCC.

Climate Change Assessments: Review of the Processes and the Procedures of the IPCC was released on 30 August 2010 by the Committee to Review the IPCC, assembled by the Amsterdam-based InterAcademy Council, at the request of the United Nations and the IPCC.

The Committee’s main recommendations relate to governance and management, the review process, characterizing and communicating uncertainty, communications, and transparency in the assessment process.

The Committee recommends that the IPCC establish an Executive Committee to act on its behalf between plenary sessions. The membership of the Committee should include the IPCC Chair, the Working Group Co-chairs, the senior member of the Secretariat, and three independent members, including some from outside of the climate community. It is also recommended that the IPCC elect an Executive Director to lead the Secretariat and handle day-to-day operations of the organization.

The Committee concludes that although the IPCC’s peer review process is elaborate, authors do not always consider the review comments carefully due to a tight schedule. It then recommends that the IPCC encourage Review Editors to fully exercise their authority to ensure that reviewers’ comments are adequately considered by the authors and genuine controversies are adequately reflected in the report.

The IPCC has been advised to adopt a more targeted and effective process for responding to reviewer comments. In such a process, Review Editors would prepare a written summary of the most significant issues raised by reviewers shortly after review comments have been received. Authors would be required to provide detailed written responses to the most significant review issues identified by the Review Editors, abbreviated responses to all non-editorial comments, and no written responses to editorial comments.

Whereas in the fourth assessment, each Working Group used a different variation on IPCC’s guidance to describe uncertainty, the Committee recommends that all the Working Groups use the qualitative level-of-understanding scale in their Summary for Policy Makers and Technical Summary, supplemented by a quantitative probability scale, if appropriate. The rationale is that the level-of-understanding scale is a convenient way of communicating the nature, number, and quality of studies on a particular topic, as well as the level of agreement among studies.

Another related recommendation is that quantitative probabilities should be used to describe the probability of well-defined outcomes only when there is sufficient evidence, and authors indicate the basis for assigning a probability to an outcome or event (e.g., based on measurement, expert judgment, and/or model runs).

Arguing that the communications challenge has taken on new urgency in the wake of recent criticisms regarding IPCC’s slow and inadequate responses to reports of errors in the Fourth Assessment Report, the Committee recommends that the IPCC complete and implement a communications strategy that emphasizes transparency, rapid and thoughtful responses, and relevance to stakeholders, and which includes guidelines about who can speak on behalf of the IPCC and how to represent the organization appropriately.

In order to increase the transparency of processes and procedures used to produce assessment reports, the Committee recommends that the IPCC establish criteria for selecting participants for the scoping meeting; for selecting the IPCC Chair, the Working Group co-chairs, and other members of the Bureau; and for selecting the authors of the assessment reports. The Committee also recommends that Lead Authors document that they have considered the full range of thoughtful views, even if these views do not appear in the assessment report (Adapted from http://reviewipcc.interacademycouncil.net).