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IPCC reporting hiatus could imperil political action on climate change

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change isn't due to produce its next report until 2027, which could allow political focus to move away from global warming, campaigners have warned

By Madeleine Cuff

20 March 2023

Glacier

A gap in climate reporting could be a mistake

PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP/Getty Images

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) today issued its latest report on the state of global warming and, under current plans, will now begin a five-year hiatus before any further updates. But campaigners are calling on the scientific body to consider shifting to a system of annual reports, given the pressing need for climate change to remain at the forefront of the political and social agenda over the next decade.

“The IPCC’s impact on government decision-making cannot be overstated,” says Louise Burrows at climate think tank E3G. “The evidence it produces is invaluable to secure new policies, driving the scale and ambition of climate action.” 

Today’s IPCC report marks the end of its sixth assessment cycle, which, since 2018, has delivered regular, major papers on the impacts of warming beyond 1.5°C and the threat it poses to the world’s land and oceans. There have also been three major updates on the physical science of climate change, its impacts and strategies to address the problem.

Stephen Cornelius at conservation organisation WWF says the IPCC’s reporting has proved “hugely influential” in shifting government and public opinion around the world. Since the panel’s report on warming beyond 1.5°C was released in 2018, many countries have boosted their climate ambitions, with 80 per cent of the global economy now covered by net-zero targets. 

But under current IPCC timetables, the next reporting cycle won’t deliver fresh interventions until 2027 or 2028. This gap worries some campaigners, who warn it could allow political momentum for action to dissipate. Burrows, for example, warns that the hiatus will mark the “loss of a forcing mechanism to drive ambition”.

Some are calling for the IPCC to overhaul its reporting structure in response to this threat. “We need the IPCC to be relevant and out there, every single year from here on,” says Kaisa Kosonen at campaigning organisation Greenpeace International.

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The IPCC has previously warned that global emissions must fall by 45 per cent by 2030, compared with 2010 levels, if the world is to limit global temperature increases to 1.5°C. That makes the 2020s a vital decade, requiring regular interventions from the IPCC, says Kosonen.

“I certainly think that the IPCC should be open for bold reforms that will enable them to be more agile, preparing products and other activities on shorter timelines, responding to the emerging needs in the transition and keeping us focused on this critical decade at hand,” she says.

Mike Hulme at the University of Cambridge – the joint editor of A Critical Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – says a move to regular IPCC reporting could be a useful tool to “hold people’s attention to the issue” of climate change.

“Why do we have these huge exercises that take six or seven years and produce 5 million words, rather than just having an annual update on what has been discovered over the last 12 months?” he says.

The issue is a live debate among IPCC authors. It’s something that we discuss endlessly informally,” says Peter Thorne at Maynooth University, Ireland, a member of the core writing team for the synthesis report released today.

But Thorne worries that shifting to annual reporting would greatly increase the burden on the scientists who produce IPCC reports. He warns it would be an “enormous ask” for scientists, pulling experts away from primary research.

He is also concerned that IPCC reports would lose their impact if they were issued on an annual basis. “Part of the power of these is that they are looking at very large increments in knowledge. Over five to seven years, you get a sufficient volume of, literally, literature, new innovations,” he says. “There’s value in keeping the current model of [reporting] every five to seven years.”

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