A New Role for IPCC: Balancing Science and Society
| Date | 01 November 2017 |
| Author | Bo Wang,Can Wang,Yuan Yang,Mukul Sanwal |
| Published date | 01 November 2017 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12470 |
A New Role for IPCC: Balancing Science and
Society
Mukul Sanwal and Can Wang
School of Environment, Tsinghua University, Beijing
Bo Wang
University of International Business and Economy, Beijing
Yuan Yang
Tsinghua University, Bejing
Abstract
There is a new role for global climate policy and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to support national
implementation. For keeping within global ecological limits, public debate has shifted from concerns about the reliability of
model-based climate projections to national legislators considering questions of when, where, and how to modify longer term
trends. However, modeling remains the essential scientific tool by which the climate problem is defined assuming that society
and the economy can be transformed, actually re-engineered, with relative ease. Inputs from the IPCC to the new governance
process, the global ‘stocktake’, suggesting solutions will now influence deliberations between stakeholders, national actions
and global cooperation. How best to shape a different science architecture and agenda linking science with both policy and
society requires, for example, giving as much importance to reports of multilateral bodies and business consultancies as to
peer-reviewed literature. This paper lays out some ideas how legitimacy can be maintained even as the IPCC recommends
policy options and not just advice that is policy relevant.
The Paris Agreement combines agreed global ecological lim-
its, a bottom-up approach to global climate policy with a
provision to review and strengthen national action through
enhanced common understanding of solutions. How
national decision-makers and stakeholders view the com-
plexities of the transition to a low carbon energy economy
and urban middle-class society is now more important than
monitoring, and has become the critical factor in the global
response to climate change; the shift will need to be sup-
ported by new norms, practices and how the Intergovern-
mental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) operates.
In 2018, there will be a ‘facilitative dialogue’to take stock
of the collective mitigation efforts of countries and it will
shape future national contributions. Countries which have
submitted targets for 2025 will then be urged to come back
in 2020 with a new target, while those with 2030 targets will
need to ‘communicate or update’them. These targets
should include both peaking dates and where emissions
have peaked dates for rapidly reaching zero-emission levels.
The assessment will be informed by the requested IPCC spe-
cial report on the impacts of warming and related green-
house gas emission pathways in the context of sustainable
development and eradication of poverty, information sub-
mitted by countries and Convention processes and the Pur-
pose of the Agreement.
The Paris Agreement recognizes this new requirement
and has established the institutional innovation of a ‘global
stocktake’of the collective effort to be held every five years
bringing together all stakeholders to assess the shortfall
between national goals and global targets, encourage differ-
entiated national actions and increase international coopera-
tion. The IPCC is to provide inputs to the ‘stocktake’as the
means to secure consensus in the new format for debate,
which has the involvement of cities and business in gover-
nance. For determining the path forward, the need is no
longer on a better understanding of ‘how climate works’,
better models and long-term observation (Nature Climate
Change, 2017), though improving basic climate research
remains important. Multilateral cooperation will now depend
to a large extent on the IPCC’s inputs to the new gover-
nance process suggesting solutions that will be widely
acceptable to national legislators, city administrators, busi-
ness and society.
The challenges and implications of multi-stakeholder mul-
tilateralism have been recognized by the United Nations.
General of the United Nations as giving an enhanced role to
the United Nations in global economic governance as it is
part of a major shift within the UN system in which country
groupings, international financial and trade institutions and
Global Policy (2017) 8:4 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12470 ©2017 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Global Policy Volume 8 . Issue 4 . November 2017 569
Policy Insights
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