Political Squabbles Slow Release of Newest UN Climate Report

(Bloomberg) -- A major new climate assessment from United Nations-backed scientists will miss its scheduled publication on Monday, as disagreements over the future of fossil fuels and the role of carbon-removal technologies in efforts to fight warming temperatures pushed back the process of finalizing the report.

Two weeks of virtual negotiations among nearly 200 countries and dozens of top climate scientists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reached consensus Sunday. But wrapping up the report, which dozens of co-authors had expected to do on Friday, turned into a 40-hour slog that lasted through the weekend.

The IPCC is charged with informing policymakers rather than recommending policies. That role is supposed to be reserved for the year-end conferences of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, attended by diplomats and political leaders like those who descended on Glasgow, Scotland, in November. But national interests inevitably leak into the IPCC process.

“Countries are bringing the ongoing battles of UNFCCC into this space,” said Doreen Stabinsky, a global environmental politics professor at the College of the Atlantic and a contributing IPCC author. “It is unavoidable, of course, and unfortunately could be really destructive to the credibility” of IPCC proceedings.

At the center of the dispute is the relatively short “summary for policymakers,” produced by consensus. These summaries, together with the gargantuan reports attached to them, have for over 30 years shaped climate debates at every level of government. What gives an IPCC summary report its authoritative power is the strength of the science combined with the fact that every nation owns it. But that process provides a strong incentive for negotiators to try to embed in final, unanimously approved language protections of their own national interests.

The finalized IPCC report is still expected to be released later on Monday. This will be the third of four parts in the IPCC's current cycle of reports, with the final installment expected this fall. Once completed, this will mark the sixth report by the UN-backed scientists since 1990.

The first report from the latest round, released in August 2021, concluded that societies can emit for a short while longer without pushing the climate into a danger zone. The second, which arrived days into Russia's invasion of Ukraine, documented what's happened to the world after just 1.1° Celsius of warming above pre-industrial levels, what's projected next and how to adapt. The third report will cover ways to cut or end emissions in every sector. A final summary document comes out last.

Ultimately, it's not arguments over IPCC reports by national representative but the actions of national leaders that will work to address the world's climate risks. The temperature limits enshrined in the 2015 Paris Agreement — holding to 1.5°C or no more than 2°C of warming — are in jeopardy as, year after year, emissions remain above the level needed to meet those goals.