This month's hard-hitting report from the UN climate science
panel sounded the alarm on the surging impacts of global warming — but its
authors and independent researchers said it did not provide enough insight on
threats in poorer parts of the world.
اضافة اعلان
Despite progress in recent years, the Intergovernmental
Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC) still relies primarily on lead authors and
research from Europe, North America, and Oceania, making its findings less
relevant to developing nations.
"It is by far the biggest and the best collaborative
global scientific enterprise that mankind has done — but it still has certain
blind spots," said Saleemul Huq, head of the Bangladesh-based
International Centre for Climate Change and Development.
One of those blind spots is reflected in the composition of
the latest report's 234 authors, who come from 66 countries but are mostly
based in rich nations including the United States, Britain, Germany, and
Australia.
Only 35 percent of the authors working on the sixth
assessment report — the current series that will culminate in a synthesis due
to be finalized in September next year — hail from developing countries,
according to a study published in the MDPI journal Climate, up from 31 percent
for the fifth assessment report.
Huq said that during his time working on the third and
fourth IPCC assessment reports, published in 2001 and 2007, the number of
scientists' nationalities increased — but countries in the Global South were
represented by just one or two authors.
"We are neglected. We are the most vulnerable countries
to climate change and we should be prioritized, which we aren't," he told
the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Research 'heavily skewed'
A second blind spot is in the research considered: The IPCC
does not conduct its own studies, but assesses thousands of climate-related
papers on which the IPCC authors base their findings, projections and
conclusions.
The most recent report was a review of more than 14,000
research papers produced over the eight years since the last one in 2013 — but
the authors themselves noted the data available to them “is unevenly
distributed across the world”.
Studies from developing countries "are often not
peer-reviewed, not available in English, and mainly limited to the country
level, thus making it difficult to compare the details of the climate
information across them", the IPCC report said.
Research tends to focus on regions that "attract the
attention of the Global North so that climate aspects relevant to other regions
may not receive sufficient attention", it added.
One key reason for this is funding, said Huq, with emerging
economies allocating far less to climate science.
And even when wealthy governments do back studies in or
about developing countries, the lead investigators are often from the Global
North, he added.
"That is one of the failings of the scientific
enterprise — it is based on research that is heavily skewed," he said.
A study published in March in the journal Conservation
Letters examined the backgrounds of the top-publishing authors in 13 leading
ecology, evolution and conservation journals between 1945 and 2019.
It found that the United States, Britain, Australia, Germany
and Canada made up more than 75 percent of those authors, while Global South
countries were "strikingly under-represented".
"This translates to international reports such as the
IPCC," said study co-author Bea Maas, a biologist at the University of
Vienna. "With no relevant research, relevant recommendations are left
out."
Africa outreach
The IPCC has made some progress on shifting the status quo.
The panel used the award money from its 2007 Nobel Peace
Prize to finance scholarships for doctoral students from developing countries
to work on climate change, including opportunities to advance emissions
reductions and adaptation.
For its most recent report, it began considering "grey
literature" — work that has not been published in academic journals — in
languages other than English.
The IPCC also developed an Africa-specific communications
strategy for the first time — something it hopes to roll out for other regions
in the future.
"This allowed us to speak to Africans about Africa, and
we could clearly say this is what the global assessment says about the place
you live," said Debra Roberts, who co-chairs the IPCC working group on
adaptation for the sixth assessment report.
Durban-based Roberts said the IPCC also offered diversity
training to its authors this year and was mindful of the challenges of
convening digitally for those in developing nations, such as patchy internet
connections and language barriers.
In the future, she said it would be crucial to draw in more
practitioners working on climate change in the Global South.
Maas recommended changes to how research is organized across
the board.
"We can directly influence how we set up our teams, how
we distribute opportunities, how much we urge politicians and decision-makers
to increase their investments in climate change mitigation," she said.
She urged efforts aimed at boosting research infrastructure
and capacity to adopt a regional or global approach instead of focusing on
individual countries.
"Climate is not stopping at any border," she added.
Read more
Opinion Analysis
.jpg)
.jpg)
