Every Saturday we decipher climate issues with François Gemenne, professor at HEC and member of the IPCC. Saturday January 20: the general assembly of the IPCC, which was held all week in parallel with Davos, questioned the effectiveness of their famous reports.
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All week, in parallel with the World Economic Forum in Davos, the general assembly of the IPCC was held in Istanbul. Discussions focused in particular on the format of the reports, often too long and illegible, which would perhaps gain in impact by being more concise.
franceinfo: This week was the Davos Forum. Have we talked about the climate yet?
François Gemenne : Eobviously. Of the ten main risks identified by participants for the next ten years, there are five risks linked to the environment, including climate change in 2nd position. But today I wanted to talk to you about another meeting that has been talked about much less: the general assembly of the IPCC, which was meeting this week in Istanbul.
“We sometimes forget it, but the IPCC is not only a scientific panel, it is also an intergovernmental organization.”
François Gemenneat franceinfo
The I in IPCC stands for “intergovernmental”. And so, the governments and the IPCC office met this week in a general assembly. And one of the essential points of their discussion was the format that the next evaluation report.
This is a big issue. Until now, the IPCC reports were published in three volumes. Each volume corresponds to one of the three working groups that make up the IPCC. The first group talks about the physics of climate, the second about the impacts of climate on societies and ecosystems, while the third deals with solutions to reduce our emissions. And all this results in very voluminous reports. If we add up the three volumes of the latest IPCC report, there are more than 10,000 pages.
But who reads this?
Sincerely, except perhaps Valérie Masson-Delmotte (research director at the CEA and member of the IPCC), I don’t know anyone who reads everything from A to Z. I myself must admit that there are undoubtedly technical passages that I would be unable to understand. In reality, these reports are above all like dictionaries or encyclopedias: works that we consult. We only read the summaries intended for decision-makers, which bring together the essential key messages in a more digestible format.
It must be said that there is not much suspense, we sometimes have a feeling of already reading…
It’s certain: each report builds on the previous one, so there are a lot of repetitions and confirmations from one report to another. Of course, each time there is progress, clarification, new elements, but we cannot say that the 6e report (2023) is fundamentally different from the 5e (2014), which itself already looked a lot like 4e (2007). So it seems quite beneficial to me to question the format of the reports. This work takes a lot of time and energy, it mobilizes hundreds of researchers, who must evaluate all scientific production on the climate. And as this scientific production increases every year, it takes more and more time.
Couldn’t artificial intelligence do that?
In a few years, or even perhaps a few months, it is very possible. At the rate things are going, we can surely hypothesize that artificial intelligence tools will provide valuable assistance in drafting reports. But more fundamentally, this week, the IPCC questioned the format of the reports: should we make a 7th report that resembles the 6th, or should we on the contrary make shorter reports? , or only special reports?
“We could produce reports that only deal with a particular subject, in order to highlight it. The next report will concern cities, for example.”
François Gemenneat franceinfo
Do you have a preference ?
I think that we should maintain the principle of permanent evaluation of our knowledge on climate change, but that this permanent evaluation should be carried out continuously, somewhat in the form of a large Wikipedia. We could, for example, set up artificial intelligence tools, which would scrutinize all of the literature, identify new developments and progress, and we would accompany this scanning with a validation process by human scientists.
And alongside this, we could have shorter reports, targeted on specific subjects, to inform public decision-making on essential aspects of the transition. “The reports could target subjects that generate controversy in public debate: electric cars, nuclear power, geoengineering, migrations, advertising…
The problem is that these are also topics that governments are often uncomfortable with. They often prefer that the IPCC does not address too much these political and social dimensions of climate change.
“It is these divisive dimensions which are precisely those for which we would greatly need scientific clarification.”
François Gemenneat franceinfo
This is also why the IPCC does not make any recommendations.
Yet we read everywhere that the IPCC recommends this or that…
Well that’s not true. By nature, the IPCC refrains from making policy recommendations, so as not to take sides. We can also consider that, given the situation, refraining from making recommendations is in itself a position, which obviously raises the question of the political commitment of researchers. But here we open another debate…