What is the IPCC and what are their goals? 

IPCC stands for The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Created in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organisation and the United Nations Environment Programme, the IPCC represents the boundary between science and policy.

The IPCC provides regular reports on our changing climate and the future impacts globally. The reports also provides and reviews adaption and mitigation methods to climate change.

Its goal is to “to provide governments at all levels with scientific information that they can use to develop climate policies”. To meet this goal, the IPCC packages the sum knowledge of relevant scientific disciplines into a consistent and accessible executive summaries upon which policymakers (i.e., governments) can base their climate change strategies.

The organisation is split into three “working groups”. The groups focus on either:

Working Group I: The Physical Science Basis of Climate Change,

Working Group II: Climate Change Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability

Working Group III: Mitigation of Climate Change. 

IPCC Achievements  

Nobel Prize:  

In 2007, the IPCC were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for “their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change”.  

As the IPCC itself does not dictate policy, it is difficult to measure how successful it has been in generating significant change. However, in the authors opinion, they have been instrumental in raising awareness and fostering global cooperation on climate change.  

Development of Greenhouse Gas Emission Scenarios:  

One of the major outcomes of the IPCC has been the creation of future greenhouse emissions scenarios. The scenarios help standardise models which look at the effects of climate change under different levels of emissions. These IPCC scenarios, referred to as a Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) are, in order of increasing greenhouse gas emissions, RCP 2.6, RCP 4.5, RCP 6.0, and RCP 8.5. Factors which are taken into account when predicting future global warming include developments in technology, changes in energy generation and land use, global and regional economic circumstances and population growth.  

It is important to note that the number associated with each RCP is not a temperature, it is instead a measure of “radiative forcing”, which is essentially a way of quantifying how much heat greenhouse gases will trap. An important area of uncertainty that remains in these scenarios is the exact relationship between greenhouse gas concentration and temperature increase. In other words, we know that increasing greenhouse concentrations in the atmosphere will increase the global average temperature, but we do not know how large this temperature increase will be.

Limitations

While the IPCC provides a necessary service, it is not without criticism. Published reports are subject to an approval process in which government delegations can push certain agendas, e.g., the adoption of speculative Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) technologies instead of rapid decarbonisation. Lobbying groups have also sought to influence IPCC reports, for example, leaked documents have exposed fossil fuel producers lobbying to remove or weaken conclusions regarding the need to rapidly phase out fossil fuels, and large beef producers have lobbied to remove promotion of ‘plant-based’ diets from reports. It is worth noting that the IPCC writers are under no obligation to take these comments into account, however, it does provide insight into the groups fighting against action on climate change.