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Johanna Alkan Olsson outdoors. Photo.

Johanna Alkan Olsson

Social environmental scientist

Johanna Alkan Olsson outdoors. Photo.

From climates multiple to climate singular : Maintaining policy-relevance in the IPCC synthesis report

Author

  • Jasmine E. Livingston
  • Eva Lövbrand
  • Johanna Alkan Olsson

Summary, in English

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has provided periodic assessments of the state of knowledge on climate change for 30 years. While these assessments have been central to the making of international climate policy, their relevance has been questioned in the post-Paris era. Can the IPCC's global kinds of knowledge match the demands of an increasingly decentralized and polycentric policy landscape? In this paper we respond to this question by analysing how the IPCC renders a multiple object such as climate change amenable to political intervention. We are particularly interested in the socio-material practices undertaken to translate a complex body of knowledge into a synthesis relevant to climate policy-making. To that end we trace the production of the Synthesis Report (SYR) to the IPCC's 5th Assessment Report (AR5), from scoping, to chapter crafting and final plenary approval, using author interviews, document analysis and observations. We argue that the writing of an IPCC synthesis is a constitutive process that rests upon numerous practices of standardization, aggregation and simplification. While these practices allow the authors to produce a coherent story of global climate change, they are less attuned to demands for geographically-sensitive representations of climate impacts, vulnerabilities and a diversity of response options. As the ways of responding to a changing climate multiply, we argue, so should the understanding and making of policy-relevant knowledge.

Department/s

  • Centre for Environmental and Climate Science (CEC)
  • BECC: Biodiversity and Ecosystem services in a Changing Climate
  • Environmental Science

Publishing year

2018

Language

English

Pages

83-90

Publication/Series

Environmental Science and Policy

Volume

90

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

Elsevier

Topic

  • Climate Research
  • Political Science (excluding Public Administration Studies and Globalization Studies)

Keywords

  • IPCC
  • Policy
  • Policy-relevance
  • Science
  • Synthesis report

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 1462-9011