There has been a lot of coverage of the latest report by the IPCC, which stressed the urgency of taking action to curb emissions and adapt to the climate change impacts, thus there is no point in repeating it here. However, it is interesting to peek into the process of drafting a summary report with policy recommendations that required approval and some intensive smoothening of the conclusions. Economist has recently published a sobering account of this process: "It works as follows. The authors write a draft summary. Each sentence of the draft is projected onto a big screen in a giant hall. Officials then propose changes to the text; authors decide whether the changes are justified according to the full thousand-page report. Eventually a consensus is supposed to be reached, the sentence is approved or rejected, the chairman bangs a gavel and moves on to the next sentence." Given that decisions are taken on unanimity basis, nearly three quarters of the initial text written by the academics involved was redrafted and watered down after a long and painstaking, and frankly ridiculous wrangling among the governments and then between them and the academics: "In the final day of discussions in Berlin, the delegates turned to a set of figures showing emissions by countries classified by income group (rich, middle-income, etc). A group of countries, led by Saudi Arabia, said the figures should be deleted. European countries objected. The authors suggested taking the figures out of the summary but putting in a reference instead to the underlying report where the figures remain (officials may not alter the main report). The Saudis said no. The Netherlands suggested adding a footnote saying: “The Netherlands objects to the deletion of the following figures [then a list of them].” No dice. Eventually, in the early hours of the morning, Saudi Arabia got its way." Against this background, the decisions by some cities and regions to go ahead with ambitious climate change policies, ignoring the lack of progress and meaningful decisions at the international level, seem particularly wise. The full article is available here.
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AuthorMarcin Dąbrowski, Researcher at TU Delft Categories |