The InterAcademy Council (IAC), an organisation of the world’s science academies, has conducted an independent review of the procedures of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The report has found the process used by the 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. The report, CLIMATE CHANGE ASSESSMENTS: REVIEW OF THE PROCESSES AND PROCEDURES OF THE IPCC was delivered to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and IPCC Chair Rajendra Pachauri in New York City overnight.

A copy of the report is available here: http://reviewipcc.interacademycouncil.net/

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Professor Dave Griggs is the CEO of ClimateWorks Australia & Director of the Monash Sustainability Institute at Monash University

“The recommendations of the report of ways to strengthen IPCC procedures should be welcomed as all organisations, including IPCC, should always strive for continuous improvement in the way they carry out their business. However, it should be recognised that these recommendations build on an already extremely rigorous process. It also needs to be reinforced that IPCC reports are assessments of team of authors, they are not reviews or statements of fact, they are the best assessment of the authors based on the information they have at their disposal at the time and as knowledge advances so the assessment is revised in subsequent reports. It is also important to note that nothing in the report in any way undermines the fundamental scientific conclusions of successive IPCC reports.”

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Professor Steven Sherwood is in Physical Meteorology and Atmospheric Climate Dynamics at the Climate Change Research Centre, University of New South Wales

“The findings accord with my impressions. One interesting thing is that the review did not find serious systemic problems, but did recommend some bolstering of the structure to meet greater pressures now bearing on the IPCC. Also, there were no criticisms of the content of the first volume of the IPCC report, which discusses the basic science of climate change.

The second report volume (’Working Group II’) on climate-change impacts has always been more difficult to write because impacts are tough to measure and tough to model. This was the volume containing the well-publicised (but relatively minor) errors. The review sharply criticised vague language in the executive summary of this volume.  I suspect one reason for the vague language is the disagreements among scientists and others in wording the final draft; in my experience, when writing by consensus in such a situation, contested passages of text will sometimes come out vague or awkward because no clear statement could be found that satisfied everyone. I hope the Working Group II can find ways to overcome this problem next time around, since we need clear statements of what we know and don’t know.”

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Professor Colin Woodroffe is a coastal geomorphologist at the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Wollongong, and a lead author on the IPCC AR4 chapter on coastal systems

“The report should be welcome by both scientists and the broader public. Not only does it applaud the IPCC for its past assessments, but it also recognises that it has adapted its procedures over the course of successive reports, and that it has been successful overall and of great service to the public.

Scientists undertake scientific research to expand the frontiers of our knowledge about the things we do not know, or incompletely understand. The IPCC process was an innovative approach to collate scientific opinion in a focused way to inform policy-makers. It is often succinctly called a consensus, although, of course, science is targeted at discovering new knowledge, and deals with hypotheses and theories, rather than incontrovertible facts.

The InterAcademy report finds that the structure and directions of the IPCC have served its functions well, but it does identify a number of processes and procedures which it recommends strengthening. It advocates greater transparency and more rigorous review, although acknowledging the existing, well-documented review process, and tracking the review comments and responses about particular issues in the Fourth Assessment report.

Scientists and those who plan to use the science should welcome this greater rigour, despite the considerable additional workload it implies for future assessments. But it will also be important to recognise that the additional process will lead still further to what James Hansen has called ’scientific reticence’; whereby the projections and forecasts are likely to err on the conservative side. Perhaps the greatest strength of the IPCC and its approach is that it does undertake repeated assessments and so can continually update projections, and respond to the latest scientific findings.”

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Professor David Karoly is from the School of Earth Sciences, University of Melbourne, and is a lead author of the IPCC WG2 report

“This comprehensive independent review of IPCC processes and procedures concludes that ‘the IPCC assessment process has been successful overall and has served society well’.

It also provides more than 20 recommendations aimed at improving these processes, including on governance and management of the IPCC, on improving the multiple reviews prepared during the drafting of the assessment reports, on better characterising and communicating uncertainties in the assessments, and on improving the transparency of the IPCC procedures. Some of these recommendations involve better implementation of existing IPCC procedures, such as on the expert and government reviews of the draft reports to minimize errors, and on common approaches to communication of uncertainty between the different Working Groups. Others involve new procedures, such as the appointment of an Executive Director and the introduction of a formal conflict of interest policy.

I am confident that the IPCC will address these recommendations in time to ensure that its Fifth Assessment Report, due to be completed in 2014, will be even more useful than its earlier assessments.”

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