學界報告建議 IPCC應徹底改革體制與程序

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change "needs to fundamentally reform its management structure and strengthen its procedures," finds a report issued today by the InterAcademy Council, an Amsterdam-based organization of the world's science academies.

While the process used by the Nobel Prize-winning IPCC to produce its climate science assessment reports has been "successful overall," the council recommends that the panel's chair, working group co-chairs and a newly proposed executive director all be limited to the term of one assessment - about seven years.

The part-time nature and fixed term of the IPCC chair's position has many advantages, the Council said in its report, but "the current limit of two six-year terms is too long."

"This recommendation is not in any way motivated by an evaluation of the current leadership of IPCC. Such an evaluation was beyond our charge. Rather, this recommendation has to do with ensuring a variety or (of) perspectives at the top as well as maintaining the overall vitality of the assessment process," said Harold Shapiro, president emeritus and professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University and chair of the committee that wrote the report.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri of India welcomed the council's report, which they jointly requested back in March.

At a news conference at UN Headquarters in New York today, Pachauri called the recommendations "forward-looking" and said that IPCC member governments will review them at the panel's October plenary meeting in Busan, South Korea.

Pachauri, who has served as IPCC chair since 2002, said he was elected to carry out the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report, due in 2013 and 2014, but said he will step down if the governments meeting in Busan request that he do so.

The council also recommended that "a rigorous conflict-of-interest policy be developed and applied to senior IPCC leadership and all authors, review editors, and staff responsible for report content," said Shapiro.

Robbert Dijkgraaf, co-chair of the InterAcademy Council and head of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Science, told reporters at UN Headquarters today, "The IPCC needs to strengthen its procedures to handle ever-larger and increasingly complex climate assessments as well as the more intense public scrutiny coming from a world grappling with how best to respond to climate change."

In its report, the council recommends that the IPCC should elect a small executive committee to act on its behalf in order to maintain a year-round, ongoing decision-making capability. "This committee should include members from outside IPCC or even outside the climate science community in order to give it more credibility and independence," Shapiro suggested today.

"A full-time chief executive serving alongside a part-time chair is a model of leadership employed at other organizations that we think would work well at the IPCC," Shapiro said. "Because the executive director would report to the chair and speak on behalf of IPCC, it should be someone in whom the chair can place high confidence."

In other recommendations, the council said the use of non-peer-reviewed sources has been controversial and blamed for some of the errors in IPCC reports. "However, we found that such material, which can include technical reports, conference proceedings, observational data or model results, often is relevant and appropriate for inclusion in the assessment reports," said the council as long as IPCC guidelines are clarified, enforced and the "non-peer-reviewed literature is adequately evaluated and appropriately flagged in the reports."