Climate crisis | “Heavy” debates delay the IPCC report

Difficult discussions delayed the approval of the most recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) by 48 hours, the publication of which was consequently postponed in the middle of the day on Monday.

Jean-Thomas Léveillé
The Press

Gathered for two weeks, some 270 authors and representatives of the 195 Member States were initially due to finish on Friday approving, line by line, the content of the “summary for decision-makers” of the nearly 3,000-page report on solutions to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions into the atmosphere.

The debates, sometimes “heated” according to what was said to The Press a source who attended, but was not authorized to speak about it publicly, stretched the exercise until late Sunday evening Geneva time.

The release of the IPCC Working Group III document, originally scheduled for Monday morning, has been pushed back to 5:00 p.m. Geneva time (11:00 a.m. Montreal time), with the report to be adopted first. by a vote in plenary.

The “significant” amount of information contained in the report made disputes inevitable, told The Press a second source who attended the discussions, but who was also not authorized to speak about them publicly.

There have been clashes over issues of financing measures, the place of fossil fuels; on carbon capture and sequestration; or on “demand mitigation”, ie changes in consumption behavior.

Oil, gas and meat

Different countries have tried to give the text a tone less unfavorable to their national interests, illustrate the sources of The Press.

Saudi Arabia, for example, insisted that the text still leave room for the exploitation of fossil fuels, information also reported by the British daily The Guardian.

Brazil and Argentina, major beef producers, wanted the report to refer not to the need to adopt a “vegetable diet”, but rather a “balanced diet”, illustrates a source of The Press.

The United States has been picky on the question of funding, for the sake of not incurring responsibility at this stage.

Do the changes made risk watering down the report? Perhaps its summary, but it will be enough to go and see “in the chapters” to have the right hour, estimates one of the sources of The Presswhich reminds us that the authors of the report retain the final say on its content.

She also points out that many countries, including Canada, have worked to ensure that the summary for policymakers is as close as possible to the scientific conclusions.

“The majority of the interventions were useful”, considers the other source of The Presswhich refers among other things to India’s insistence on the fairness of the measures to be taken.

“The strong, and sometimes tense, discussions between the country delegates and the authors have a big advantage over a report that would be written by scientists alone, in their ivory tower: a common sense of ownership”, one of the authors of the report, Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, professor at the Catholic University of Louvain-la-Neuve, in Belgium, wrote on the social network Twitter on Sunday evening.

Hopeful report

Many of the report’s authors expressed their joy at seeing it approved, and their optimism, on social media.

“The IPCC report has just been approved! ! 16 days, crowned by a finale of around 40 hours of line-by-line negotiation and approval,” exclaimed Stephanie Roe, senior climate scientist at the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), calling the moment a watershed moment. culmination of many years of work.

“This report renews the sense of urgency, but it also offers (and evaluates) several avenues of solutions in a context of sustainable development”, added Professor van Ypersele, who spoke of the longest approval session in 34 years of organizational history.

Despite last-minute heartbreaks and the resulting delay, this new IPCC report will bring hope, according to sources who attended the discussions.

“He’s going to say ‘it’s possible, in eight years, to cut emissions in half’”, indicates one of them, adding that the solutions exist and are economically accessible, concluding that “what is missing is is the political will to adopt these solutions”.