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Communicating Climate Change Information for Decision-Making pp 49–63Cite as

Rethinking IPCC Expertise from a Multi-actor Perspective

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Abstract

Since the adoption of the United Nations Paris Agreement, scientists have been confronted with a difficult question. The needs for expertise have changed. The Paris Agreement is based on a bottom-up approach that, to be successful, requires extending and reinforcing the existing process for including expertise. Better understanding how the climate system works and its impact on societies remains a priority. However, the real challenge for effective implementation of programs that integrate mitigation and adaptation actions is to operationalize existing knowledge across temporal and spatial scales that take into consideration the realities of a range of actors, at the scale at which they operate. This raises the question of whether the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change can answer these new needs without rethinking part of its organization. That is the issue this chapter explores, based on the experience of the authors, who work together at the interface between science and policy in the framework of the French Association for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR French platform), as a researcher, engineer or public officer in the French administration.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The Paris Agreement entered into force on the 30th day after the date on which at least 55 Parties to the Convention (accounting in total for at least an estimated 55% of the total global greenhouse gas emissions) had deposited their instruments of ratification, acceptance, approval or accession with the Depositary. This was reached on 4 November 2016.

  2. 2.

    Vasileiadou et al. (2011) conducted a review of the citation rate of the four IPCC reports in the academic literature. Most citations come from the physical sciences (95%) and only 5% from the social sciences, including 2% from economics and 2% from sociopolitical science. This result directly echoes the under-representation of social sciences in the IPCC (Victor 2015); the few social scientists who at present belong to WGIII and focus on economics and CO2 emission scenarios (Hulme and Mahony 2010).

  3. 3.

    The long-standing international cooperation of research on climate has led to a progressive standardization of the WGI procedures, which has not been the case for WGII and WGIII. WGI also has a clear leadership of the expertise on climate change science, whereas WGII and WGIII have to share their field of expertise with other institutions (e.g. the World Bank or the International Energy Agency).

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the French Association for Disaster Risk Reduction, which facilitated interviews and seminars held during the preparation of this article (http://afpcn.org/). We are also thankful to those who agreed to be interviewed and/or to participate during AFPCN study days. We also thank the organizing committee fellows.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, CNRS UMR 7154 & Centre de recherche Psychanalyse Médecine et Société, CNRS EA 3522, Université Paris Diderot - Sorbonne Paris Cité, Paris, France

    Maud H. Devès

  2. Unité de recherche Hydrologie-Hydraulique, Irstea, Centre de Lyon-Villeurbanne, Villeurbanne, France

    Michel Lang

  3. Conseil Général de l’Economie, CNAM, LabEx ReFi, Paris, France

    François Valérian

  4. Association Française de Prévention des Catastrophes Naturelles (AFPCN), Scientific Committee, Paris, France

    Maud H. Devès, Michel Lang, Paul-Henri Bourrelier & François Valérian

Authors
  1. Maud H. Devès
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  2. Michel Lang
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  3. Paul-Henri Bourrelier
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  4. François Valérian
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Maud H. Devès .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Cities Research Institute, Griffith University, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

    Silvia Serrao-Neumann

  2. Unité de recherche ESPACE-DEV, IRD, Universités UM UR UG UA, Maison Teledetect, Montpellier, France

    Anne Coudrain

  3. Cities Research Institute, Griffith University, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

    Liese Coulter

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Devès, M.H., Lang, M., Bourrelier, PH., Valérian, F. (2018). Rethinking IPCC Expertise from a Multi-actor Perspective. In: Serrao-Neumann, S., Coudrain, A., Coulter, L. (eds) Communicating Climate Change Information for Decision-Making. Springer Climate. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74669-2_4

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