Researchers trained in USA and UK, main authors of the IPCC report
A new investigation published recently in the journal Nature Climate Change, involving researcher Esteve Corbera of the ICTA-UAB notes that most of the participating authors in the report got their training in the United States or the United Kingdom.
A large number of authors appear to have passed through an international organization including the World Bank, FAO, and the Environment Programme of the United Nations.
The social sciences, except economy, and humanities have a residual role in comparison with engineering and natural sciences.
An analysis of the social scientific networks informing Working Group III (WGIII) assessment of mitigation for the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) shows that despite historical improvements in the relative participation of scientist from the global South in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), participants from these countries were mostly trained in northern institutions, overwhelmingly in the USA and UK. The research, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, was conducted by an international team of researchers from Catalunya, Britain and Canada, among which is ICTA- UAB researcher Esteve Corbera, who was also author of the latest IPCC report on climate change mitigation.
The research also highlights the scholars from the humanities remain marginalized from the IPCC’s assessment of climate mitigation in comparison with economics, engineers and applied scientists. This situation determines the type of knowledge compiled by the report, and how the mitigate climate change is understood and addressed.
The study identifies clear patterns in the author’s network showing the importance of specific international organization in shaping the field of climate mitigation policy research as represented in the IPCC, and suggests the existence of a core network of researchers whose careers are centred on the IPCC and the research represented within it. These organizations are not universities or research institutes. The World Bank is the most connected institution in the network, followed by the University of California at Berkeley, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)
In addition, the researchers identified a group of authors who collaborate historically among them, who have participated in previous IPCC reports and have structured their careers around this international process. The research involves the 273 authors from IPCC WGIII.
Just a few weeks before the upcoming climate-change conference (COP21) in Paris, the paper's authors argue that the aim of the article is not to challenge the IPCC effort, the professionalism of the authors involved or the validity of the report’s message. They consider that it is important to understand who they were, and whose perspective they were missing in their analysis of the mitigation challenge and the available response options. They hope that the IPCC can develop in the future a more integrative knowledge approach, which incorporates the wider possible sources of knowledge on the mitigation challenge, and the imaginaries to deal with it. In the run up to the COP21 climate summit, they hope that their article provokes discussion towards that goal.