[I’ve posted on the election of Hoesung Lee, a Korean economist and I.P.C.C. vice chairman.]
The new chairman* of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is scheduled to be elected shortly at a large gathering of climate scientists and government representatives in Dubrovnik, Croatia.
Yet, after years of complaints from both inside and out, there’s a troubling opacity to the panel’s operations and there’s been no public view of the meeting so far. Via the panel’s Twitter feed, @IPCC_ch, a spokesperson said this morning that the YouTube channel will stream the press conference afterward.
That is not too dissimilar to the white smoke rising from a Vatican chimney.
I don’t see the communication issues as the fault of the panel’s underfunded communications office. It’s the fault of the governments that created the panel back in 1988 and provide the money to make it work. It’s almost as if they don’t want a full and open process.
Imagine that.
There have been some interesting machinations, with a late nomination from Sierra Leone adding uncertainty. (Click h ere to see how back-room pressures shaped the last change in panel leadership.)
In his statement opening the meeting on Monday, thankfully posted on the panel’s Facebook page, the I.P.C.C. acting chairman, Ismail El Gizouli of Sudan, expressed gratitude for some new financial support:
[I]n the last few years, the IPCC has conducted an unprecedented program of outreach, helped by the generous support of some of our members. It is not enough to produce excellent assessments; we must also communicate them in an accessible and effective manner, to policymakers, key stakeholders and the general public at large.
After a round of missteps and reviews, a new communication strategy was adopted in 2012, including this bullet point:
Timely and audience-appropriate.
In order to be effective, the IPCC communications approach and activities should be aimed at ensuring that timely and appropriate information enters the public domain – both proactively to communicate reports, and reactively in response to questions or criticism.
It’s clear that this remains an aspiration more than an achievable plan.
Several of the candidates for the chairmanship acknowledged the need for a new approach to communication in interviews in recent months. Explore this post and video collection from Carbon Brief: “IPCC chair election: how the views of the candidates compare.”
I hope that a campaign to reboot and adequately support the panel’s communication efforts is high on the to-do list of the incoming leadership. As an outside observer of the I.P.C.C. since its inception, I offered some ideas in “The New Communications Climate,” an article I wrote for the World Meteorological Organization Bulletin in 2011.
This passage is even more relevant now than when I wrote it:
One reason to pursue such steps is that the capacity of traditional journalism outlets to be the intermediary is declining. Overall resources are strained and the number of experienced professional science and environment reporters is shrinking. This doesn’t mean science journalism is dying. It is evolving. But it is doing so in ways that won’t benefit an agency, say, that sticks with the 20th century model of distributing a press release and waiting for journalists to call back to fill in the gaps. In some ways, in fact, science communication is expanding rapidly. The number of science blogs has grown tremendously, for example. But the number of such outlets that can be relied upon to provide accurate, or un-spun, information is tougher to track. As Nadia El-Wady, the president of the World Federation of Science Journalists, put it last year, there are “only a few pockets of excellence in an ocean of mediocrity.”
Diving into this arena requires time, some level of culture change and even courage, particularly given how the Web can be an amplifier for unfounded attacks and disinformation as much as knowledge. But hunkering down, as some institutions – including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – tried to do after recent controversies, is probably not a sustainable approach in the long haul. As the IPCC prepares its Fifth Assessment Report, it does so with what, to my eye, appears to be an utterly inadequate budget for communicating its findings and responding in an agile way to nonstop public scrutiny facilitated by the Internet. I would love to think that the countries that created the climate panel could also contribute to boosting the panel’s capacity for transparency, responsiveness and outreach….
…The alternative is to hunker down, as if waiting for a storm to pass. But the explosive changes afoot in how people share information and shape ideas are no stray storm.
Interpreting them that way would be like mixing up weather and climate.
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* The candidates are all men.