Global climate protection policy: the limits of scientific advice: Part 1

Abstract

The close links between science, technology and politics in environmental policy are more often asserted than demonstrated empirically. This paper attempts to do this for climate change policy by analysing the role played by the international institutions of science and their advice in the preparation of the Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC). The emergence and nature of scientific advice are analysed in Part 1. Part 2 traces subsequent political impacts and argues that research institutions tend to produce ambiguous advice, while politics will use scientific uncertainty to advance other agendas. The scientific bodies set up in the 1980s to advise governments on climate change policy emerged from the globally coordinated research community which acted primarily as a lobby for its own research agendas dedicated to the modelling of planet Earth and the development of alternative energy sources. Reactions to the energy policy implications of early advice, as well as the political agendas which attached themselves to it, led to the demise of an independent advisory body of scientists and its replacement by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988. The paper offers a tentative explanation of the IPCC experience and discusses the implications of that experience for international environmental policy. IPCC advice was necessarily ambivalent and too weak, by itself, to Initiate an active global environmental policy. International negotiations resulted in a research-intensive international treaty reflecting scientific uncertainty rather than environmental precaution. The primary interest of research is the creation of concern in order to demonstrate policy relevance and attract funding. This policy relevance, and therefore the need for scientific advice, decline rapidly once a problem is actually dealt with by regulatory, technological or behavioural change.