Abstract
This perspective critically assesses how the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) could facilitate a closer alignment of its activities and include lessons drawn from the policy and decision-making communities working on the ground at the regional/local levels. The objective is to facilitate practitioner input into the detailed choice of topics and priorities for IPCC review and in the conclusions drawn (we define practitioners as those engaged in the development and application of practical responses to climate change on the ground). By means of a series of workshops with academics, policy officials and decision-makers in the United Kingdom, the research reported here illuminates how the IPCC’s Working Group II (WGII) has been used in the past to inform decision-making and how practitioner responses to climate change could better inform the IPCC process in the future. In particular, we recommend three key actions. Firstly that IPCC WGII should incorporate more practitioners as authors to improve the awareness and understanding amongst the writing teams of the nature and detail of decisions being made in response to climate change; secondly a practitioner-led IPCC Special Report should be commissioned on good-practice responses to climate change; and thirdly a new body should be created, attached to the IPCC, to synthesise and report on good practice on climate response strategies in a timely manner. By adopting these recommendations, the IPCC could become more directly useful to decision-makers working on adaptation at the national, regional and local levels and enable more actionable decision-making.
Highlights
A linear approach to science-based decision makingDespite the best efforts of international global change coordination bodies such as the World Climate Research Programme, the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme and the International Human Dimensions Programme, the process by which knowledge on climate change is generated and disseminated is largely undirected
We propose that an approach that co-produces these reports across the three communities of academics, policy makers and practitioners, as defined above, could address these shortcomings and make the review process, especially of Working Group II (WGII) more relevant to the decision makers, funders and deliverers of adaptation and resilience solutions
In order to explore in more detail some of the challenges outlined in this paper, three workshops were conducted in June 2015 in London, United Kingdom (UK) to address the extent to which the incorporation of practitioner-based evidence in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports can enable better scientific advice for decision-making
Summary
A linear approach to science-based decision makingDespite the best efforts of international global change coordination bodies such as the World Climate Research Programme, the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme and the International Human Dimensions Programme, the process by which knowledge on climate change is generated and disseminated is largely undirected. (2014: 848): ‘‘a close look at the content, author lists and references shows that the ‘adaptation’ chapters [of the IPCC] lack practitioner experience, evidence and case studies that demonstrate how adaptation is being carried out on the ground. In other words, they provide an observational, top-down account rather than a practitioner-led evidence base.”. Multiple interfaces are created between scientists, policymakers and practitioners that are generally ad hoc, often superficial, and function in the ‘technocratic mode’ (Rapley et al, 2014)
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