What National Decision‐makers Need From The IPCC: Special Reports With New Insights
| Published date | 01 November 2019 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12717 |
| Author | Xinran Yang,Xinzhu Zheng,Mukul Sanwal,Can Wang |
| Date | 01 November 2019 |
What National Decision-makers Need From
The IPCC: Special Reports With New Insights
Mukul Sanwal and Can Wang
Tsinghua University
Xinzhu Zheng
China University of Petroleum
Xinran Yang
Huazhong University of Science and Technology
Abstract
What decision-makers in countries want to know from science is more than just an understanding of what is a good and envi-
ronmentally aware society, or the human dimensions of global change. They also want to know how to achieve comparable
levels of human wellbeing keeping within global ecological limits. In the absence of agreed criteria on who has to do what,
global cooperation as well as national action now needs new insights for potential policy choices and these could come from
Special Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
The Paris Agreement, 2015, combines agreed global temper-
ature limits with a bottom-up approach to global climate
policy and a provision to review and strengthen national
action through enhanced common understanding of solu-
tions. In implementing this political agreement how national
decision-makers view the complexities of the triple transition
to an urban middle-class society, low carbon energy econ-
omy and digital revolution impacting on both have now
become the critical factor in the global response to climate
change.
The Paris Agreement has been characterized by the Secre-
tary 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 institu-
tions and others have moved to align their work (UN,
2016a). The assertion underlines the nature and scope of
the greatest challenge of the 21st century and the timely
transformation to a low-carbon society and economy.
Addressing planetary problems now requires harnessing of
the power of the ‘major groups’with the international sys-
tem evolving into a networked world (Slaughter, 2016). The
UN-SAB (United Nation Secretary-General’s Scientific Advi-
sory Board) has stressed the importance of basing evidence
based policy making on an integrated scientific approach
and calls for a new global research architecture that sup-
ports interdisciplinary collaboration and links science with
both policy and society.
With the absence of political agreement on criteria to
assess national action, the language of the Agreement, to
secure consensus, allows a wide range of interpretation, and
differences continue in negotiations on the ‘rule book’
(Vi~
nuales et al. 2017). The Paris Agreement recognizes this
gap 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, encour-
age national actions and increased international coopera-
tion. How the IPCC will frame the direction of change has
been left unresolved.
The IPCC, as an intergovernmental body, has the scientific
expertise and legitimacy for enabling and supporting a
political consensus at both the global and national levels
that will be widely acceptable to national legislators, city
managers, business and society. Recognizing these develop-
ments, the Chair of the IPCC has stressed ‘that the task of
the IPCC in the post-Paris world is to be even more relevant
to policy makers (IPCC, 2016). What happens in cities will
determine wellbeing and the prospects of sustainable devel-
opment.
Convincing national populations to accept change
The need is to not only provide policy choices but also to
convince national populations to accept them. One way for-
ward is to initially focus on modifying longer term trends in
urban energy-use patterns, where most of the emissions of
carbon dioxide now come from, as it will enable keeping
within the global temperature goal with greater certainty
than reliance on futuristic technology, and could be the
©2019 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Global Policy (2019) 10:4 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12717
Global Policy Volume 10 . Issue 4 . November 2019
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