Jasmine Livingston from the Centre for Environmental and Climate Research has written a thesis discussing the connection between policy and climate science. She has studied what takes place both on and behind the public scenes, covering nine years of work by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC.
“Researchers, including researchers writing for the IPCC, are raising their voices more and more, telling policy makers that climate change is an urgent problem. Climate change will affect ecosystems and societies all over the world. It is a problem which requires drastic and immediate changes to our way of life and the structures on which societies are built”, says Jasmine Livingston.
In her work Jasmine has observed a change in how the IPCC approaches its production of reports during the last few years. Science can be made more relevant for policy makers when it answers direct questions from them, such as the special report on global warming of 1.5 degrees. Policy makers of the world requested this report from the IPCC as part of the climate agreement in Paris. For the first time, the IPCC brought together all three of its working groups to create an interdisciplinary author team to write this report.
“This special report may prove to be formative in shaping the science-policy spaces of the future. As a scientist I think it is important to understand policy processes to see how your research can fit into the public agenda”, Jasmine Livingston concludes.
Jasmine Livingston is defending her thesis “Climate Science for Policy? The knowledge politics of the IPCC after Copenhagen” at 10 am on the 30th November in the Blue Hall, Ecology Building, Sölvegatan 37 in Lund.