By This entry was posted on Thursday, August 5th, 2010 at 3:24 pm and is filed under Environmental Governance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) appears to have been left scrambling to defend itself against claims that it is enmeshed in a culture of secrecy.
In a letter sent to all 831 experts contributing to the panel’s fifth assessment report on climate change IPCC head, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, states that “[m]y sincere advice would be that you keep a distance from the media”. The timing of the letter, dated two days before the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was criticised in the Muir Report for lacking openness, was seen be some observers as, at best, personally embarrassing for Dr. Pachauri and, at worst, revealing that the attitudes by the scientific community and the IPCC to transparency including, and may be especially, to the media remain not fully clarified under his chairmanship.
In response to the letter being made public, a second letter sent by Dr. Pachauri apologised for the error and defended the IPCC’s commitment to transparency. In it, he offers a three-point ‘clarification’ with regards to his advice on how to deal with the media:
• “First of all, the IPCC does not seek in any way to discourage you from engaging in discussions with the media about your own work. To the contrary, we see such interaction as an important way of making your research more accessible to the public.
• Second, all of us at the IPCC are immensely proud of our author team and have no interest in micro-managing your interactions with the media. I only remind you that the AR5 process is in its beginning stages and our final report is several years away. No one, including me, can speak to the likely findings of the AR5.
• Lastly, we ask that you forward all media inquiries about official IPCC policies to the Working Group co-chairs or the IPCC Secretariat. This protocol is not an attempt to muzzle anyone. It is a standard procedure for large inter-governmental organizations and is intended to draw a distinction between the official work of the IPCC and your own work or that of your institution”
In the past nine months or so, debate in the press and the blogosphere has largely centred on the validity of scientific findings in climate research. Recent trends, rather poignantly highlighted by this latest episode, suggest issues of accountability and transparency in science (and indeed research in general) are where the focus of debate should rightfully lie. The original letter justifiably angered both scientists and journalists alike, and indeed caused a bit of a stir here at the One World Trust offices, given our commitment to improving accountability in research and climate change governance. Following on from the second letter and especially the issues raised in the first bullet point, it is to be hoped that the IPCC and its contributing experts heed the pledge to become more open.
Much of the recent furore surrounding the IPCC and the CRU could have been avoided if sound accountability mechanisms and a culture of openness were embraced at a much earlier date. If the research community – climate researchers in particular – do not begin to address these issues soon critical voices will continue to question the science and thus will impact on policymakers’ abilities to make informed decisions regarding the sustainability of humanity.
On the other end of the equation stands however also a necessary improvement of the understanding of the media and also the political sphere of how science works, in what way it validates its research results, and how science deals with uncertainty, a topic the One World Trust published analysis end of last year.
Tags: Access to knowledge, Accountability, APRO, Climate Change, global governance, governance, IPCC, knowledge Production, research accountability, science
