Climate policy: Rethink IPCC reports

Working on an assessment for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is utterly exhausting. Most authors are proud of their team’s achievement and enjoy the intense discussions involved in reaching common ground on contentious scientific issues. But there are also countless hours and late nights of ploughing through the latest research, analysing gigabytes of data and responding to thousands of comments by reviewers. Once elected by the IPCC, authors are engaged in a tightly scheduled three-year process that encompasses multiple rounds of draft production, revision and finalization. A long consensus-finding process is needed, from multistep, worldwide reviews of report drafts to the preparation of a carefully worded summary for policy-makers that requires government approval. Headline statements generated by this process have made it verbatim into the decision documents of the international climate negotiations. Yet scientists’ work for the IPCC is voluntary, unpaid and mostly unassisted. And the burden on the scientists has become heavier with each cycle, leading some to question whether they can afford to work on future assessments. This week, a task group on the future work of the IPCC will consider such issues at a meeting in Geneva, Switzerland (16–17 September). Before the panel starts to formulate the timeline and structure of working groups in early 2015, ahead of the sixth assessment, scientists and governments need to consider how the process can be made less burdensome for those involved. The second half of 2015 will see the election of the new IPCC leadership, who will then flesh out and implement the panel’s decisions. During our work for the IPCC, we collected many views and suggestions from colleagues on ways to improve the process. As the latest cycle ended, we surveyed the authors who report on the physical-science basis of climate change. Here we summarize their responses and outline two approaches Rethink IPCC reports